“Mitchell Robertson” sounds like a man’s name, doesn’t it? Sure does to me. But in a story about homelessness this month on Colorado Public Radio, you’d never know it.
As in, "Up until recently, Mitchell Robertson parked their white Ford E250 van in any public lot they could find at night that didn’t have signs prohibiting it. They just secured a spot in the church lot.”
That’s just the second paragraph but throughout the story, although its chief character is this one homeless person sleeping in a car, Robertson never is referred to by the traditionally male “he.” Or “him.” Or “his.” Nor does the word “man” ever appear in place of his name. Instead, the words used to describe Robertson all are some form of the plural and gender-neutral pronouns “they,” or “their.”
The thing is, in a traditional sense anyway, there is no “they” in the story because evidently Robertson doesn’t sleep in the car with anyone else. It’s just Robertson. And yet every reference is plural because, if you’re going to be “gender-neutral,” there is no singular pronoun in the English language that does the trick. Thus, it’s some iteration of “they” or “their.” Sixteen times.
I’ve been vaguely aware of this trend, and trying to understand it myself. In its most benign form, the copy editor of The Washington Post six years ago put out this email to the staff: “It is usually possible, and preferable, to recast sentences as plural to avoid both the sexist and antiquated universal default to male pronouns and the awkward use of ‘he’ or ‘she,’ ‘him’ or ‘her’ and the like.” Then he gave an example: “All students must complete ‘their' homework, not Each student must complete ‘his or her' homework.”
Been there, done that. Thanks for the simple go-around.
But it’s not just about grammatical simplicity, for as the Post editor went on to write, “The singular ‘they’ is also useful in references to people who identify as neither male nor female.”
Although not long ago many of us wouldn’t even have understood what that means (and still might not), today, that’s what the trend’s about, and whether we understand it or not, it’s catching on. A friend of mine has an email signature where following his name it reads, “(he/his/him).” I know that this guy is neither confused nor conflicted about his gender, but because of where he works, apparently he’s going with it.
I saw the same kind of “he/his/him” next to a nephew’s name on a family Zoom call. I wrote asking why, and here’s how he explained it: “The idea is to allow people to define themselves and their genders (rather than society defining/categorizing them), and that gender exists along a non-binary spectrum.”
In fact some institutions, especially but not only in education, are beginning to suggest if not actually require this kind of definition.
According to the BBC, students at the University of Vermont choose their pronoun preferences. The university’s registrar— carefully staying gender-neutral with his own explanation— says, “It maximizes the student’s ability to control their identity.” About half the students registered in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences have specified their preferred pronouns, some choosing neither "she" nor “he.”
A woman I know teaches at a university in Denver where the trend is taking off and she accepts it as a sensitive evolution in how we think: “I think we are living in an age where freedom of identity is crucial to the mental health of many young (and old for that matter) people and this concept has helped bring an awareness to me that I should absolutely not assume everyone identifies as a female or male.”
On the other side of the ledger though, a transgender teacher in Florida was disciplined for asking kids in class to use a gender-neutral pronoun. It is instructive to see how this was reported grammatically by none less than the Oxford English Dictionary: “Last Fall, a transgender Florida school teacher was removed from their fifth-grade classroom for asking their students to refer to them with the gender-neutral singular they.”
And here’s where it gets more controversial. In Women’s Health magazine, a Minnesota therapist named Jackie Golob is quoted saying, “Gender is a term that relates to how we feel about ourselves, the way we choose to express our gender through makeup, dresses, high heels, athletic shorts, sneakers, and more. Our society has convinced us that there are just two options for gender identity, ‘male’ and ‘female,’ based on biological sex. But in reality, there's more fluidity.”
Fluidity. A concept many of us never had to understand before. Let alone deal with.
The Anti-Defamation League, also advocating gender-neutral pronouns, says on its website, “As our society has progressed in understanding gender identity, our language must also be updated. It should be accurate and convey understanding and respect for all people, especially for those who are transgender, gender non-conforming and non-binary.”
I don’t even understand all those terms, so I went online and found that Wikipedia has a “Gender-neutral pronouns” page and it lists fourteen “non-traditional pronouns.” Looking deeper, I found an astonishing seventy different descriptions of gender. Even the initialism LGBT, which was created in the 1990s as an umbrella for sexual identities that don’t fit the traditional mold, is outdated. It has grown to LGBTQIA (which I looked up so you don’t have to. It means “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual or Ally,” and that’s not even the end of it. Now, “2S” sometimes is added to represent “Two-Spirited," which is used by Indigenous people).
Whether LGBTQIA2S will cover everything remains to be seen.
But one thing is obvious to me: although I was born male, I “identify” as male, and I’ll die a male— and the same presumably can be said for a plurality of people on the planet if you substitute “female” for “male”— not everyone feels this way. I get that. I want to be sensitive about words that offend or obscure people, even if the words are just pronouns. There’s no reason not to be.
But it’s not easy.
Adam and Eve, in the less ambiguous world of the Old Testament, didn’t have to deal with this. If you believe the Bible, he was the first man, she was the first woman, end of story.
Not for long though. From Alexander the Great to Leonardo da Vinci to the author James Baldwin to the astronaut Sally Ride, alternative sexual identities, albeit sometimes hidden only for history to reveal, have been a part of our world. Gold Medal Olympian Bruce Jenner, who went through surgical, chemical, and cosmetic changes to become Caitlyn Jenner, turned from he into she. No ambiguity there either.
These days, mankind has been turned into gender-neutral humankind, Latina and Latino are combined as Latinx, and Mr., Miss, Mrs., and Ms. are folded into Mx.
But in the case of the story on Colorado Public Radio about homelessness, does the use of gender-neutral pronouns to identify Mitchell Robertson clarify, or confuse? I asked the news director to explain it. “It's CPR's policy to ask sources what pronouns they use,” she told me. “In this case, the source in the story indicated that they use ‘they/their’ pronouns.”
So the answer to the question about clarify or confuse is, it depends on who you talk to.
This trend is not about grammar, it’s not about linguistics. And it’s not strictly about sexual orientation. It’s about identity. Even if we don’t understand it, even if we don’t agree with it, even if we don’t convert to gender-neutral pronouns ourselves, we won’t slow the trend.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
You have helped clarify an ongoing, expanding aspect of our "Now". I hereby identify as INDIFFERENT to those (they?) who continue to try to tell me what to think, to say, or to do.
Amen! And California has just passed a law requiring larger companies to manufacture gender neutral dolls. This just adds food to the fodder of right wing pundits; a law of unintended consequences.