In the past two weeks, I’ve read two pieces in respected magazines that bothered me. Both involved the use of the pronoun ‘they’ in reference to a person of atypical gender identity.

The first encounter was within a short story in the New Yorker in which the narrator, a gay man, meets a trans taxi driver who prefers to be referred to as ‘they’; and the second was an article in the New York Times about a non-binary female movie director who also preferred to be identified as ‘they’.

Now these two sources are admittedly liberal publications in sentiment and editorial orientation. Nevertheless, being a little old school in my understanding and use of the English language, I find myself resistant to this expanded, unjustified and ill-suited use of our plural pronouns. 

I’m totally fine with the fact of differences in sexual orientation or identity or of sexual proclivities and appetites. But I’m not so fine with the appropriation and corruption of a common pronoun to identify such multiplicities. 

Things, ideas, and changes within our culture emerge all the time, and along with them come new terms and words to name them, which over time, usually make their way into our language and common usage. Think Ms for example.  When it became clear that women deserved a marriage-neutral term to address them (Mr. being marriage neutral), Ms arrived on the scene to join ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’, and it worked fine and still does. 

New terminology that fits easily into usage does so because it usually conforms to accepted usage norms and rules of grammar; ie. part of speech, tense, number, etc.  Such is not the case with this new use of ‘they/them’. To most English language users, ‘they’ is the plural of ‘he, she, or it’; just as ‘them’ is the plural of ‘him, her, or it’.  These plural pronouns denote multiple entities; not multiple internal identities and simultaneously the singular person containing them.

This emerging use of ‘they’ conflates interior multiplicity with physical singularity in ways confusing and difficult to meld with prevailing usage. If he and she and his and her don’t work for new gender permutations, then more suitable terms are called for.

I just prefer they would leave they alone and find themselves new words to do the job.

J. C. Newburn lives in Rockport