The Guardian Weekly

The quiet revolution over pronouns

… she/her, he/him – the quiet revolution over pronouns

By Claire Armitstead

The way we address people is changing, and behind it lies a surprising linguistic, social and political history …

JAMIE FORSSTREOM IS EXCITED. TOMORROW THEY MAKE THEIR debut flight with Virgin Atlantic as part of the cabin crew on a plane to San Francisco. Forsstreom will be wearing a burgundy trouser suit designed by Vivienne Westwood, with their pronouns – “They/ them” – on a lapel badge. Forsstreom comes from Finland, a country where gendered pronouns don’t exist in the language. “I’ve learned English since I was nine years old, so I’ve always known about them, but in terms of using them to define my own gender identity, I was quite late to the game,” they say. It wasn’t until Forsstreom moved to London six years ago in their mid-20s, and started to work exclusively in English, that they decided to make the change and honour a nonbinary identity that they have been clear about since early childhood.

In September, Virgin Atlantic became the latest company to throw

itself into a quiet revolution sweeping through the institutional world. The airline’s announcement that it would be possible for staff and customers to travel under the gender of their choice caused little media furore but a big run on its elegant pronoun badges. Within a month, the 10,000 printed out for distribution on planes and in its travel shops had been snapped up. A second batch is currently on order.

It was all different from the fuss that erupted last year when Marks & Spencer, that bastion of no-nonsense British values, announced that it was giving staff the option of adding personal pronouns to their name badges. A couple of months later the story rolled on to the British Library, with reports that the library ignored internal warnings that a similar initiative could make it seem too “woke”. In the event, more than 100 British Library staff took up the option of pronoun badges.

In the case of Virgin Atlantic and the British Library, the badges are optional. Some firms – such as the energy company Ovo – have taken a more proactive line, prompting colleagues to include pronouns when introducing themselves at meetings, and introducing a signoff on emails that allows employees to choose their own combination. “It might be she/them. They could leave it blank if they choose, but I’ve not come across anyone who’s done that. We encourage everyone to use and share their pronouns,” says Louise Bailey, who is responsible for the company’s inclusion and diversity policy.

While some see such initiatives as a victory in the fight for gender recognition, others roll their eyes at the onward march of “wokeness”. A third group decry the corporatisation of personal identity, and warn about the pressures to

conform. In June, it was the turn of the Halifax bank to unleash a social media storm. Its first offence was to tweet “Pronouns matter. #ItsAPeopleThing” below a photo of a staff member wearing a name tag “Gemma” followed by “she/her/hers” (grammarians generally add the possessive to pronoun groups, though most badges use only two). Its second was to double down on the message, replying to one critic: “We strive for inclusion, equality and, quite simply, in doing what’s right. If you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account.”

AS A WRITER, READER AND FEMINIST WHO IS ALSO THE PARENT OF A transgender child, I come at this subject from several directions. Like many journalists, I’ve struggled to wrestle the singular pronouns “they/them” into a sentence. As a mother, I sometimes feel like an explorer who has wandered off the edge of the map. The leg from “her” to “him” lost me some longstanding feminist friends, who have found the whole subject too hard to broach face to face, but was otherwise relatively straightforward. My “she” was now “he”: those hard, binary pronouns signalled an altered reality and gave me the chance to avoid the subject if I didn’t want to explain it to anyone unfamiliar with my family setup. The next leg, to “they/them”, was more exposing, and I still sometimes find myself floundering.

Just look at the complexities of the conversation: to avoid using either their birth name or “her” – both legally obsolete – or “him”, which is sometimes chronologically inaccurate, given that “he” may have been “she” at the time that we’re talking about, I fall back on “my child” to refer to someone who is now 29 years old. Using “they” smooths the whole thing out.

My child is relaxed about being addressed as he or they, and the construction “as-was” has evolved as a hinge for me in conversations with friends about their childhood. It’s a DIY fix I’ve stumbled upon, to honour a complex history, though I’m well aware that many trans people reject any reference to their previous gender identity.

Why does this matter? Because personal pronouns not only give people a sense of their place in the world but also, in the English language at least, have for centuries been used to keep them in their place, socially and politically. This is why feelings run so high. So how are well-meaning people supposed to navigate this confusing new world? Should we all be declaring our preferred pronouns? When does doing so become virtue signalling – or even a coded attack on those who reject the idea of gender, as they are legally entitled to do?

THOUGH THE ROWS THAT BREAK OUT OVER PRONOUNS MIGHT SEEM LIKE a big rupture over the rights of a small group of people, for activists on both sides they trigger a deeply personal sense of oppression and injury. “The frontline now is trans rights,” said the singer-songwriter Billy Bragg after he was challenged for changing the lyrics of his song Sexuality from “And just because you’re gay / I won’t turn you away” to “And just because you’re they / I won’t turn you away”.

Sexuality was released in 1991, when the gay community was being persecuted in the UK on the streets and in the courts. But times have changed, Bragg wrote on Twitter. “Anyone born since the song was released would wonder why it’s a big deal to find common ground with a gay man.”

“I was trying to get my rather blokey audiences to think about it,” Bragg tells me. “I met my first out gay people through Rock Against Racism in the 1980s, when Tom Robinson and the Clash were on the bill, and I often wonder how I’d have reacted if I’d just been down the pub with my mates,” he says. “Music can make a difference like that. I’m not saying a couple of lyrics will do a lot, but my audiences can be rather sentimental about the 1980s as a time when the issues were clear, and I’m constantly trying to challenge this. That isn’t to say it’s not immensely complicated – it is – but you can’t shy away from it.”

Bragg introduced the new lyrics in 2019, but they didn’t hit the headlines until he linked the song to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions campaign. This encourages firms to sign up to protocols showing solidarity with trans people through measures such as name badges and encouraging staff to adopt personal pronouns on email signoffs.

Stonewall’s campaign has become a flashpoint for those who regard personal pronouns as part of a bigger issue about the distinction between sex, which is based on biology, and gender, which is socially constructed. Though more than 900 firms are still signed up, Diversity Champions has suffered a slew of resignations over the past couple of years, including a succession of government departments and the BBC, which ruled in November 2021 that membership compromised its duty of impartiality in the reporting of transgender issues.

Comedian turned business consultant Simon Fanshawe, a founder of Stonewall who is now one of its critics, picks this up in his latest book, The Power of Difference, suggesting that “the idea of ‘preferred pronouns’ flows directly not from a desire to be ‘nice’ to trans people, as it’s so often characterised, but from a theoretical and campaigning perspective that everyone has an ‘innate gender’ and therefore there is a need to state your pronouns as separate from your physical sex. This is not widely accepted. In fact, it is highly controversial.” The irony, Fanshawe adds, “is that the progressive thinking and actions that have supported diversity and inclusion at work have now become tools of conformity, with HR acting as the enforcer and managers and staff walking on eggshells, frightened about being penalised for saying the ‘wrong thing’”.

Flying start

WITHIN THE FAMILY, ESPECIALLY WHERE YOUNG CHILDREN ARE involved, pronouns can be a deeply painful subject, with both sides feeling they are being denied a voice. Sam (not his real name) speaks for many, as the father of a child who has adopted they/them pronouns. “Milly resents me enormously as someone they suspect doesn’t ‘get it’. They are wonderfully fierce and clear, but those words are emerging from the mouth of a neurodivergent 13-year-old. Intellectually, I think there are likely to be many things at play and so I resist, for myself, just accepting that Milly’s claimed gender identity is a biological fact when I suspect it is evolving and certainly not yet fixed and final.”

Sam is bisexual and his devotion to his child is not in question. He knows how important it is for Milly to feel safe and accepted at home, and dutifully puts money into a “naughty jar” every time he accidentally misgenders them. But he worries about articulating his doubts. “I know that many prominent people have suffered enormously from expressing any such thoughts,” he says. “Where is the space where one can wonder aloud what is going on that isn’t an expunging of identity?”

As a reader, in such situations, I tend to look to great writers for help. “Their change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity,” wrote Virginia Woolf of gender change aristocrat Orlando, as he morphs into a woman, “… but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’.”

What if Lewis Carroll had written this in the first chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by their sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice they had peeped into the book their sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’”

The Rev Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll, wouldn’t have recognised the concept of “woke” unless it involved Lazarus or a

choir of angels on judgment day, but he would merely have been following Jane Austen, Charles Dickens – or the translator of a French poem, William and the Werewolf, in 1375 (the earliest example of the singular “they” in the Oxford English Dictionary). I take comfort from the fact that the chapter of Alice was titled “down the rabbit-hole”, because that is where the pronoun debate takes us all, and it’s indeed a place devoid of pictures or (sensible) conversation. To make sense of it I have to burrow further underground.

To return to basics, what exactly are pronouns and why are they so contentious? The Oxford linguistics professor Deborah Cameron tells me that in classic linguistic grammatical theory, they are simply placeholders – “a piece of language that allows you to retrieve something that hasn’t been said or that has previously been said, or that will be said”. In other words, they’re a shorthand that prevents the need to refer to people by name again and again.

Old English used variations of the same word – “he” and “heo” for “he” and “she”, and “hi” for third-person plurals of all genders. But in day-to-day life these could be confusing. When Viking settlers brought the old Norse “they/them” with them to the north-east of England, it offered a handy solution, and gradually spread across the country. Over the centuries both second- and third-person pronouns became a marker of power and social status. The second-person “you” became superior to “thou” (as “vous” is to “tu” in French) – a distinction that, Cameron says, disappeared in standard English only with the growth of cities in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Meanwhile, in legal documents and definitions, a patriarchal establishment seized on “he/him” as the third-person default – ostensibly for convenience, but also as a way of keeping women in their place – with the result, Cameron says, that pronouns have been a battleground for English-speaking feminists since the earliest organised campaigns for women’s legal and civil rights.

The Reform Act of 1832 transformed the rights of men, but excluded women by limiting the definition of universal suffrage – the right to vote – to “every male person of full age”. In 1851, in partnership with his new suffragist wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, the English philosopher and MP John Stuart Mill neutralised the language in his most influential books, replacing “men” and “mankind” with “person” and “people”, and complaining in a footnote that “the pronoun he is the only one available to express all human beings … This is more than a defect in language, tending greatly to prolong the almost universal habit of thinking and speaking of one half of the human species as the whole.”

The history of oppression by pronoun is wittily investigated by the linguistics professor Dennis Baron in his book What’s Your Pronoun?. He quotes an American newspaper correspondent who declared in 1892 that there was a word missing from the English language. “What is wanted is a personal pronoun, common gender; the singular of they.” In fact, many alternatives had already been invented. Baron lists 200 of them from both sides of the Atlantic.

IN 1932 THE GUARDIAN MADE ITS OWN CONTRIBUTION, WHEN IT awarded second prize of a guinea to Arthur L Dakyns, of Didsbury in Manchester, in a competition to suggest the 10 most needed additions to the English vocabulary. His offer included three “personal pronouns of indefinite gender”: ha, ham and shas. Dakyns’s list also included “Bronk: to raise and lower one eyebrow while keeping the other steady (indispensable to actors aspiring to film work)”, suggesting he was not perhaps being entirely serious.

Despite centuries of ridicule, however, the search for genderneutral pronouns continues. A recent children’s picture book, out in the US and the UK, lists 14 different alternatives, including ey/em/ eir, fae/fae/faers and xe/xem/xyr. “They can seem confusing at first,” chirrups The Pronoun Book, “but you use them just like you would any other pronoun. For example, ‘Xe brushed xyr hair’.” The problem with this – and the reason so many suggestions have failed to catch on – is that a pronoun is only a pronoun if it comes from a limited set. If everyone is free to adopt one that is not part of a socially agreed range, you might as well use their name again.

None of the three groups I’ve cited from The Pronoun Book exist in the Oxford English Dictionary. That’s not surprising, given that words usually have to be in circulation for 10 years before they’re considered, but neither does it necessarily mean that none will ever be included, says senior editor Jonathan Dent. The OED updated what Dent calls “th- pronouns” in October 2019, to include the use of “They: them” for “someone whose sense of personal identity does not correspond to conventional sex and gender distinctions”. But he points out that language is constantly evolving, and the OED only updated the entry for “pronoun” itself in September 2021 to cover “specific use of third-person pronouns to reflect gender identity”.

The Pronoun Book is aimed at readers aged five and over. “Some people ask if children of that age need to know about this stuff, but children themselves don’t have a problem with it and there’s a huge demand for this sort of book, from schools and from LGBTQ+ families,” says its British editor Andrew James, who bought it as an unsolicited submission from American author Cassandra Jules Corrigan.

The book’s assumption that children should be free to make up their own minds is supported by Claudia, a consultant clinical psychologist specialising in young people with gender dysphoria, who says: “Misgendering young people with an intense trans- or cross-gender identification can cause them pain and sometimes results in them not even recognising themselves. Language is a social construction which brings things into being, and pronouns are a part of that.”

Terri Apter, a Cambridge sociology professor whose research specialism is family dynamics, identity and relationships, believes an evolving acceptance of they/them may play a part in addressing this problem. “I had a grammarian’s bias that ‘thou should not use they as a singular’,” she admits. But that changed when she started work on her latest book, The Teen Interpreter, and she realised how freeing it could be as a way of avoiding gender stereotypes.

This isn’t just an issue of literary convenience, Apter says.

For activists on both sides, rows over pronouns trigger a sense of oppression and injury

Inside

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