Today, Oct. 17, is International Pronouns Day. You can follow my earlier pronoun posts on singular they here, on Winnie the Pooh and gender-neutral heesh, here, on the violence of pronouns, here, on some of the first invented pronouns here, and on the politics of generic he, here.
In this post I want to look at the backlash against gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns.
Singular they and invented pronouns like ze, hir, E, and per highlight the need for respect and inclusion, so it’s not surprising that they generate backlash from the enemies of respect and inclusion. The objections to the pronouns are unconvincing, occasionally bizarre, and totally wrong.
Backlash argument no. 1: nonbinary pronouns violate the religious tenet that there are only two genders, male and female. Or, if you prefer science to religion, the pronouns violate the biological truth that there are only two sexes, XY and XX. Finally, if grammar is your science or your religion, they violate the linguistic truth that there are only two genders, masculine and feminine.
Backlash argument no. 2: mandating nonbinary and gender-neutral pronouns violates free speech. In plain English, that’s, “I will never, ever use that pronoun and you can’t make me.” The argument is stronger if you stomp your feet while you say the words.
Here’s how these arguments play out. In 2015, the state of Tennessee, which tried to ban the teaching of evolution ninety years earlier, tried to ban linguistic evolution by forbidding the use of taxpayer dollars for gender-neutral pronouns. The state’s legislators seemed to think that gender-neutral pronouns lead to same-sex marriage. They don’t. The lawmakers also seemed to think that gender-neutral pronouns are a drain on the public purse. They aren’t. In fact, no one knows how much a pronoun actually costs, if anything.
The religious objection to pronouns is easy to counter: not all sacred texts must be read literally, and not all religions take a rigid view of sex, sexuality, and gender expression. As for science, the expression of sexual characteristics turns out to be more complicated than just arranging X’s and Y’s. And psychologists know that gender identity is a complex continuum rather than a simple binary. As for grammarians, it’s complicated. Yes, lots of them are content with masculine, feminine, and neuter, but many early grammarians talked as well about the fourth gender, the common gender (the one requiring gender-neutral pronouns), which was different from the neuter (the one that uses it). And some went even further. The eighteenth-century grammar guru James Anderson identified thirteen different genders and wanted a separate pronoun for each. Lucky for us, no one listened to him.
The free-speech argument is more direct: I can say whatever I want; you can’t make me say what I don’t want to say. Behind that libertarian veneer lurks hate. The Univ. of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson became a darling of the far right by announcing on his popular YouTube channel that no one can make him use gender-neutral pronouns—he’d risk jail or a fine or losing his job rather than violate the sacred rule that a pronoun must agree with its referent in gender and number. Jordan Peterson’s hill-to-die-on is a part of speech. As my great uncle Harry used to say, “He’s entitled.”
Abigail Shrier recently argued in the Wall Street Journal that forcing someone to use singular they could violate their deeply-held grammatical belief that a plural pronoun can’t be singular. And that, she insisted, runs afoul of the First-Amendment protection against compelled speech. Shrier forgets that you is a plural pronoun that's also singular.
As Shrier notes, that protection against compelled speech appears in a 1943 Supreme Court ruling that students may not be forced to salute the flag in violation of their religious convictions (West Virginia v. Barnette). In its conclusion, the Court broadened the First Amendment’s protection against compelled speech to include much public discourse:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
That paragraph concludes, “If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.” That may be true for political and religious speech, both of which enjoy strong First Amendment protection, but it is hard to imagine even a highly-partisan Supreme Court applying the protection against compelled speech to pronouns.
Shrier and Peterson are using nonbinary pronouns as a diversion: what they really oppose are regulations seeking fair treatment for nonbinary persons. But it’s always more acceptable to stand up for “good grammar” than to attack the rights of a group of people to dignity and inclusion in public life. (And anyway, singular they is perfectly acceptable English). And so conservatives claim they’re defending the English language against the barbaric progressivism that lets people pick their own pronouns as well as their own partners.
In the end, neither laws nor grammarians determine pronoun usage. Instead, what counts as standard are the pronouns that people use because they want to use them. If enough people adopt nonbinary pronouns like hir and ze, those words will become normal and unremarkable. If not, they’ll remain historical curiosities like thon and ip and heer. Setting aside an International Pronouns Day helps to highlight a class of pronouns and the people they stand for. But raising consciousness one day a year isn’t going to change how most people use language any more than attacks on pronouns on YouTube or in the Wall Street Journal will stop people from saying, “Hello, my pronoun is . . .” or asking you, “What’s your pronoun?”
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For the whole story on gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns, click to order your copy of my new book, What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond ‘he’ and ‘she.’
