I decided to change my pronouns in my biography to he/him. And it felt wonderful!

She believes a wider adoption of they/them might even allow some children and adolescents to explore and resolve their confusions around gender without rushing into potentially life-changing decisions. “The problem is that, at the moment, a request to be addressed as ‘they’ is sometimes used to mark exceptional status; to say, ‘Look at me, I need special treatment.’ But it’s so useful to have a non-gendered third-person pronoun, because there are some people who feel acutely ‘not me’ when addressed as he or she.”

In April this year, the US became the 17th country in the world to introduce gender-neutral passports, offering the option of “X” alongside “M” (male) and “F” (female). We live in a globalised world where many languages don’t have gendered personal pronouns. The Dutch author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld first started to explore pronouns after being shortlisted for the International Booker prize. “I had an interview with The New York Times and was asked what I wanted to be called. I remember being a little surprised. I hadn’t actually thought about my pronouns and it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a choice. In Dutch interviews, you are rarely asked,” says Rijneveld, who went on to win the prize. “But when I started doing more interviews abroad, people often asked me, and since a good neutral solution already existed in English – they/them – I chose that.”

Soon Rijneveld began to feel that this didn’t represent the true picture. “I’m being billed as non-binary everywhere, but actually it is becoming increasingly clear to me: I feel like a boy. Not a man or a woman or non-binary, but a boy.” Finally, one night earlier this year, Rijneveld made a decision: “For the past year I’ve been digging into myself like a vole and looking for what I am. I don’t have a definite answer to that yet, but that night I decided to change my pronouns in my biography to he/him. And it felt wonderful!”

There are many reasons why people might not want to declare their gender. Claudia, the child psychologist, is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, but doesn’t mention them to the families they work with, “because I work in such a sensitive area, where I wish to maintain some manoeuvrability in my clinical interactions”.

Alex, who identifies as they/them, was working at a Tesco store in Scotland when the supermarket rolled out pronoun badges in November 2020, and decided against wearing one. “I thought: that’s cool, but it would take away the choice to disclose my pronouns, and I’m aware that there have been homophobic attacks in my area.”

But it’s quite another matter to deny other people the right to their preferred pronouns. Kate, whose child uses they/them pronouns, is outraged by friends who refuse to use “they”. “Mates of a certain age all think they are being so valid when they say, ‘I can’t do it – it’s plural! It just doesn’t make sense to me.’ It pisses me off totally. It’s lazy.”

“There’s a sense in which dead-naming and misgendering me is trivial,” says the trans writer Roz Kaveney, “but it’s also a very economical way of erasing and sneering about everything I’ve done as an artist, critic and human rights activist in the four decades since I transitioned.”

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT SOCIAL MEDIA HAS PLAYED A KEY PART IN the firestorm. Since announcing his revised pronouns on Twitter, Rijneveld says: “I received a tremendous amount of good messages, but also a lot of misunderstanding and hate reactions.” Yet Aoife Martin, an online columnist and IT professional who works in Dublin and lives in a small town near the Irish border, has had no problems since transitioning four years ago. “My pronouns came with me. My employers and my landlord have been very supportive,” she says.

At PwC, an accountancy firm that has diversified into a wide range of services, the option to display gender pronouns makes business sense. “We’re a professional services firm, so all we have is our people: we sell their brains and expertise to our clients, and that expertise doesn’t come in a standard form,” says Sarah Churchman, chief inclusion, community and wellbeing officer. “We’re a global business and 22% of our staff are generation Z, so we want to reflect their values. Pronouns are part of that.”

In my own lifetime, identity conventions have changed radically and for the better. My father was appalled in 1983 when I designated myself Ms on getting married. Yet it was a statement of self-belief that has helped me to negotiate the complexities of life as a working mother, and it’s an option on every official form today.

One of my school friends, who recently adopted they/them pronouns, wonders how different their life would have been if the option had existed when they were young. Angie McLachlan, who is now a bishop in a church that ministers to the LGBTQ+ community, was a tomboy at school and had crushes on girls as a teenager, but says: “There was no way to talk about being gay. The only way to express those feelings was by refusing to wear girls’ clothes, so all through school I wore jeans.”

They had been married for several years before coming out as lesbian and falling in love with the woman who is now their wife, with whom they live in the south-west of England. It was only after they had a hysterectomy in their late 50s that they finally understood that they were non-binary, and changed their pronouns. “I was very lost for a long time,” they say. “It feels like coming home.” McLachlan’s story is one of personal growth and self-respect, which they carry with them into the institution in which they work, rather than the institution pushing it on them. They were out there, shimmering in their episcopal purple, at a demonstration this spring against conversion practices for trans people.

Pronouns are a grammatical convenience, which has been pushed around by accidents of history and geography, but they are also so much more than that. Forsstreom will wear their suit and badge only on flights to destinations where it is safe to do so; there are many places in the world where it is still dangerous to be gender non-conforming. If declaring one’s pronouns, and accepting that “they/them” doesn’t ruin a sentence, can help to raise awareness and enable an embattled minority to live happier lives, then bring them on •