On Pronouns and Other Words

I’ve been thinking about pronouns recently, and how I use them, and how I wish for people to use mine. It may be useful to note that my name is Wednesday, and I use they/them pronouns.

In this article, I’m going to attempt to describe some of my personal thoughts, mostly in the abstract, grounding my reasoning with a few examples, while keeping the tone pretty lite and playful. I’m sure there’s much more rigorous literature out there, and I, unfortunately, am not that.

I think this will be mostly useful for folks who are open minded to the use of gender-neutral pronouns, but don’t have particular thoughts on the matter or to folks who have asked me about it in a moment where I may not have the energy or time to fully go into it. Though I do hope this is also useful for folks who are more polarized or who have less of an appreciation on the matter, and if you’re of that position and you make it to the end, good on you.

An Often Contradictory Understanding of Language

First off, language is wild. I mean that literally. It’s an old animal that has witnessed species long since extinct.

As a medium, it is the most collaborative art form, requiring people to make weird sounds with their mouths, with sibilants (s sounds), plosives (b’s, p’s and g’s,) fricatives (v’s and z’s) and all manner of  linguistic gabagool, so that we might be heard, and hopefully understood. I imagine a humorous scene with a neanderthal, perhaps with a broken leg, gesturing to a companion to pass the stone. Their companion is a bit thick and doesn’t get what the gesture means as a symbol. Typically the broken legged neanderthal would simply get up and get it, but having lost their individual agency, they must now use symbols, and since gestures alone don’t quite convey their meaning, perhaps pairing them with sounds will. Point to stone, gunk. Point to here, gob. Point to stone, gunk. Point to here, gob. Do this until understanding dawns on your hairy companion, or until you’ve created German or something.

This is just to illustrate, in a silly manner, that language is an invention and a convention. We made it, and we change it depending on what we need it for. What do we need to communicate to each other? How can we identify our constraints? When our bodies or our hearts hurt, what words do we use to locate the hurt? Language is pragmatic. Basically if it works, it works. And if it doesn’t, it changes. And if there’s a fundamental disagreement on the way language is used, this is difficult because then you have to reconcile two different systems of reality.

“You hurt me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Language is how we understand how everything relates to everything else. It gives things meaning and weight. It makes things sacred and profane. And what happens when these wires get crossed. What happens when someone takes an object and says this is mine? And you laugh at the obvious misunderstanding as you explain patiently that, no, this is in fact mine? You work your entire life to create a piece of work. Perhaps an elaborate wood carving or a decadent quilt. To you, it is objectively good. Someone sets it on fire because to them it was objectively bad. You enter into a village and say, sup, I’m part of the crew now, and they say, no you’re not, you’re an outsider.

How can we reconcile these differences and disagreements. Ideally, through dialogue. Historically, through violence. I hope to achieve the former as frequently as possible.

The Language of Adam and Prescriptive Grammar

Okay, this is nice. I feel like we’re laying down some good groundwork. I suppose this will entirely depend on who is reading and how they’re reading. To some readers, this may feel very basic and obvious. And to some, we’ve already reached a fundamental disagreement on the idea that language is invented. There are many people who believe that language wasn’t invented. Or if it was, it wasn’t by people.

Do you guys remember Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001,) a movie in which Milo Thatch translates the Shepard’s Journal and figures out through the worst linguistic deduction I’ve ever seen, that Atlantis is near Iceland not Ireland. Long story short, they get to Atlantis, and when they encounter the indigenous people, they don’t need a translator because the people speak the root language. The language where all other languages come from. This is the language of Adam. The language spoken before the fall of the tower of Babylon. It is also a story. A very compelling one. Enough so, to shape the Abrahamic world that occupies much of the globe today. The language of Adam that is, not Atlantis: The Lose Empire. Not yet, anyway.

Linguists used to scour the Earth searching for the language of Adam. Some wanted to find it out of academic curiosity, like our Disney protagonist above, while others wanted to prove that their language was the one that was most closely related. To the linguist, languages are clearly related and there are branching points that occur because of geographic separation, imperial conquest and other more subtle forces. Uttered words don’t leave behind physical fossils, but they do leave behind a record in writing and the speech of the day. The language investigators sought to create a family tree of the spoken word, with which they could graph the tree down to the root. The reason that this is important is because the language of Adam is the language of authority. God gave Adam the power to name the flora and the fauna to gain dominion over them. So, whoever speaks this language has authority over us all. They can to tell it how it is. Because what they say is how it is.

Remember grammar nazis?

When I was in school, if you excessively corrected someone because they used the wrong participle or a word incorrectly, you might be called a grammar nazi. I do feel a great sympathy for people who are passionate about grammar because what they tend to be passionate about is clarity and consistency. It makes me think of programmers who have to use incredibly precise binary language (robot grammar) to make computers function effectively, because they are notoriously bad at navigating language. Maybe we’re not so different after all.

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I think what really turns people off from grammar nazis is the authority, tone and confidence that they use to police the spoken word. And why shouldn’t they. They’re right after all. They can prove it. It’s in a book.

Grammar books, while being valuable for giving us really clear ways to communicate (if you notice any very distracting errors in this article, I probably would have benefited from reading another grammar book or two) are also riddled with historical baggage. Prescriptive grammar is an attempt to create a standard language, and everyone who falls outside of that language has some work to do. You can watch a movie like My Fair Lady (1964) to get a comical demonstration of this. It’s a movie in which a scholar of phonetics teaches a working class girl how to unlearn her strong Cockney accent and present herself as upperclass thus escaping her impoverished constraints and proving the scholar to be quite scholarly, all in musical fashion.

In the United States, the language spoken by ethnic groups are denigrated in comparison to these established standards and are categorized with condescending terms such as “ebonics,” “broken English,” or “urban slang.” This need to speak correctly is a need to be right. It’s a need to be authoritative. And in it’s most extreme, and it has been an extreme, a need to be absolutely supreme.

A most toxic embodiment of this can be found in examples of gaslighting. Gaslighting is a word that describes a form of manipulation in which one insidiously denies another’s reality by supplanting it with a different one that advantages the gaslighter. It was also Merriam Webster’s 2022 word of the year. On one end of the spectrum there are honest mistakes.

“I put the keys in the keyhook.”

“Then why did I find them in the freezer.”

“Oh… I don’t remember.”

And on the other end of the spectrum you get adulterous individuals reassuring their partners that they’re not doing the very act that they are indeed doing. And to magnify this by like a thousand, one could go so far as convincing a large group of people that, I don’t know, all the economic pressures of the day are because of a small marginalized group of people at the solution would be to expel them. Just as an example.

So there’s clearly an increasing awareness of this dynamic and a curiosity on how to describe, but are we creating ways that we can address and reconcile it. Or are we just going to end up in a situation where we have two or more parties, all evenly spaced, pointing at each other saying “You’re gaslighting me,” like some spider man meme.

Wait a second, I thought this was supposed to be an article on pronouns. I came here for the pronouns.

Right. Right. Thank you. Let us here state that singular they is grammatically correct, embodied concisely in the joke, These pronouns are stupid. If I can’t say “he” or “she,” what am I supposed to call them.

Singular “they” has been used since the 14th century. And you can find the usage constantly throughout the centuries.

"Every one must judge according to their own feelings." — Lord Byron, Werner (1823)

“It is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy.” — W. H. Auden

“Almost anyone under the circumstances would have doubted if [the letter] were theirs, or indeed if they were themself." -Emily Dickinson, Letter (1881)

I distinctly remember a moment in Highschool, long before I was aware of the discourse around pronouns and before I was ever aware of nonbinary identities. I was referring to a hypothetical person, when my friend stopped and corrected me. “They is plural,” they said.

Gender as a History and a Future

I can see why the original collaborators of some languages might have developed specific language identifying child-bearing and non-child-bearing bodies. It’s a pretty dramatic thing to witness I can imagine, especially without any language to contextualize what’s going on. Before we imagined a neanderthal communicating to pass a stone. Gunk. Gob. Now try to imagine contextualizing child birth to someone who just arrived to Earth.

New Guy: What do you mean you came out of another person? Like literally? But you’re huge. Oh, you used to be small. Weird. And all of you used to be small, but only some of you can make other small people. And then those small people turn big. And if I’m getting this right, only some of those people can then, in turn, make other people? Why?

Neanderthal: Oh wow, nobody’s ever asked me that before. Let me think about that.

I think this is where most contemporary people get hung-up. They’re stuck on this fundamental premise that, for some reason, there’s two types of people. Men and women. And these two different types of people do two different types of things, and they wear two different types of clothes, and they work two different types of jobs, and they talk certain ways, and they care about certain things, and they, for the most part, cannot begin to understand each other. They’re like two alien races. Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.

But get specific. Ask precisely how they’re different. What do they wear differently? What exactly do they care about? Please, tell me in detail.

If you ask these questions, what you’ll get are cultural histories. Case studies dependent on geography and time. And you can unravel any of these stories with observed changes over time, exceptions and outliers, and cross-cultural comparisons.

During the second world war, a huge population of France’s men left the country to go to war., and the gender line in France began to erode. The space that men occupied became a vacuum. Women began to do everything that men did. They worked men’s jobs and experimented with their sense of self. Some sported shorter haircuts. Some disguised themselves as men to fight in the war. Heck, one of France’s national icons, Joan of Arc, is a saint who was burned at the stake for wearing men’s clothes. But in this period, their identities needn’t be so strictly defined. This was a seismically traumatic time that still haunts us today, but it was also a time to try on different clothes. And when the men came back, much of that space that was filled was reclaimed. But not completely.

And of course following the second world war, much of the absurdity of the world and the violence it contained became so much the more apparent that it rocked people’s understanding of the cosmos. Is it possible that the way we organized everything… could it possibly be… arbitrary? Existentialism began to take root and the philosophers asked harder questions. Is life inherently meaningless? Are these languages just games we play to make sense of a vacuum? What does it mean to live a meaningful life? And while some writers such as Lovecraft tremble at the idea of being subjected to nihilistic Eldritch Gods outside of our ability to comprehend, other existentialists rejoice at the opportunity to operate more freely within this chaotic framework, in which one is free to understand.

So bringing it back to gender, economic and social forces are able to shift these gender lines. They become moving targets, that can ebb one way and then the other, like a shore line. But these changes are never completely out of our control. We are not simply subject to external forces, but also collaborators and agents within this living history. And we don’t need to intellectualize our contributions to this shared tapestry. We simply add onto it by existing. Our participation is being. So when we hear a story, the story only lives as we believe it. And when we read something, the meaning isn’t generated totally from the writer who attempts the communication, but also too, from the reader who interprets and makes sense of the communication. Does that make sense?

Since many people get so fixated on this idea of biological sex as being the inarguable precedent that necessitates two pronoun categories, let’s explore the category of intersex people and the precedent of third genders in other cultural contexts. There are plenty of people in the world who are born with different sets of genitals. A penis and a vagina. No genitals at all. These folks often have to choose which role they’re going to play. And I imagine since this is discovered at childbirth, this actually is more often the parents’ choice. And the parent usually chooses a path for this little cub of a person, because they’re terrified. Because they know how cruel children can be. And how scathing adults can be. And how difficult it is to carve out a life in this place we call Earth. Perhaps a surgery is done. Perhaps a secret is kept. Perhaps a life is deterred. All because there wasn’t another option.

There are of course attempts to justify these categories. Religion is an obvious mechanism. The origin story is pretty explicit early on about the power relation between Men and Women. Women endure the suffering of childbirth because Eve sinned and ate of the apple. Men are dominated because Adam was created first from the mud, and women are subservient because they were made from Adam’s rib.

Even if you’re operating in a secular world though, similar narratives are reproduced in the empirical language of science. Men are physically powerful because of their genes and women tend to supplicate because of hormones. Even in the most microscopic of narratives, the sperm cell traverses great harrowing distances and out competes all others to arrive, like Conan the Barbarian, to the egg awaiting like a princess in a tower for her knight in shining armor.

And this is what I mean by gender as destiny. It seems like you can accept either absolute truth and be left with similar conclusions. Survival of the fittest. Victory through conquest. Social Darwinism.

Science has produced undeniable innovations. Vaccines. Dishwashers. The Playstation 5. But it’s also been wrong. Science produced phrenology. Eugenics. The atom bomb.

And to suppose that evolution produced two biological sex and that these two types of people are bound to live two types of way, ignores the other evolutionary models that are available to us. Male sea horses that give birth. Komodo dragons that reproduce through parthenogenesis. The bi-directional hermaphroditism of clownfish.

Science is its most robust when it constantly questions its foundations. And if you develop a solid understanding of evolutionary analysis, and you look at humanity on a long enough timeline, you’ll realize that we will physically evolve. There will be a branching point. New destinies will emerge and they will be a result of the environment we create for ourselves. I will be so forward as to say we should rejoice in all the ways that we’re born. There’s so much to learn from and accept and love about the different ways people come into being. So while we won’t live to see our sci-fi descendants, let’s turn to what we can learn from our neighbors who exist in the here and now.

Dominant mythologies have always played around with the idea of gender bending. It was invented by writers of fanfiction in the past two decades. Greek myth imagines humans originating with four arms and four legs, split in two by Zeus to disempower them. Hermaphrodite is a god that is both man and woman. These imaginings play with the idea of hybrids, separate categories, balance, the composition of bodies and unique human behaviors. It creates space for alternatives with different thoughts and perspectives forming them, as well as I’m sure, disagreements, negotiations and further alternatives within those discourse communities themselves.

And these spaces aren’t restricted to myth and fiction. Hijra is a third gender category in the Urdu language in the Indian subcontinent. Two-spirit is a term that describes American Indians who fully cross or live on this gendered line. The southeast asian islands are full of third gender identities including the Filipino binabae and lakin-on.

Think about these categories. What is masculine? What is feminine? Look at the traits that you come up with. How dependent are these traits related to genitalia? Who drew this line? And how necessary is it? Why do you need it?

I don’t want to go into great depth into my personal relationship with gender here. I’ll save that for poetry as a medium, which I think can be far more evocative and can scare away those who don’t like poetry, which may very well be to my benefit.

I will say this though. That line everyone keeps talking about. That fundamental difference. It doesn’t mean much to me. To me, these are different acting roles. Different parts in an old play.

I’m interested in new plays. New characters. New parts. New stories. There’s always a place for the classics. But the canon cannot remain static.

Kindness, Respect Or at the Very Least Begrudging Tolerance

I make a request of you.

I ask you to alter your language when referring to me. I tell you that I don’t see myself as a man. Even before, I doubt I’d typically be referred to as masculine. I ask you to use a different set of pronouns.

Why should you?

I provide a rationale. I attempt to apply logic. I make an argument. And at the end I ask, who does it harm? What difference does it make to you? Is it really so laborious? Whose comfort is a priority? Will you do this for me? Will you do this for others?

I hope that answer is yes. And I hope this stems from kindness. From knowing this sleight effort creates joy in whatever unit you choose to measure with. That feels like such a good place for our choices to be rooted from. I love the idea of making choices that stem from joy. It’s so simple. And it isn’t transactional. It’s an organic gesture, like leaves reaching for the sky to feel warmth. Like different animals occupying the same space and full-bellied, so there’s no need for predation. So ideal.

But this ideal, to some, feels unrealistic. Or perhaps it’s not pragmatic. It’s not practical because we’ve already printed all the books. What do you want us to do? Reprint all the books? Undo Shakespeare? Teach it in schools? Woah, slow down there, cowpoke.

Even I myself hesitate when I contemplate pronoun categories outside of the he/she/they paradigm. Pronouns like xe or hir, feel more foreign to me. I am not in immediate circles that employ those pronouns. And I wonder to myself, isn’t it more marketable to rally behind a single change. Is it a more manageable move to make sleight alterations. And I become deeply disappointed with myself for thinking in these terms. Like I need to persuade the whole world of the proper course of action. And it feels like we’re coming back to this need to standardize. To author a new language and have authority over it.

So no, I will not say there is one proper course of action, or that other alternatives are incorrect. If you have a strong preference for how you would like to be referred to, tell me, and I’ll use it.

All of reality is a negotiation. Not only between two extremes, but a great deal many. And we’re somewhere in the middle. I remember pronouns like siya. I used to wonder why my mother always got my pronouns mixed up as a kid. In Tagalog, pronouns are gender neutral. There is no him or her to begin with. There isn’t three sets of pronouns. There’s just one. And I become much more comfortable in my inability to fully encapsulate or truly understand language. There isn’t just one approach to adopt.

Oh, so you’re suggesting a post-structural understanding of the universe in which nothing has inherent meaning, so I can just call you what I want and there’s no consequences.

Well, yes and no.

I’m not likely to police the way you use language in reference to myself. If I work with you, I may give gentle reminders. If we’re associates, I probably won’t put the energy into educating you. That’s kind of the whole point of writing this out. (I’ll just give you a QR code.) And I also have sympathy for folks of an older generation who feel a deep discomfort in having their understanding of their language turned upside down, or folks whose second language is English or comes from a more deeply gendered cultural context. Gaining cultural competence outside of your original environment takes time. I get it. But that’s my personal boundary that feels very clear to me. And for you to disregard this preference is almost a gift to me, in my mind. You’re giving me greater clarity about you. You’re allowing me to see you much more clearly. And for that I feel strangely grateful.

By the same token, I will always advocate for others who have different boundaries. Those who experience dysmorphia or distress when referred to incorrectly. Those who need safe spaces to be in. Those who simply have a strong preference. Why? Because they need a friend. They need an ally. They need solidarity.

People who cringe at the thought of discussing gendered language, they have all the stagnant cultural momentum they need. And they have many mechanisms to try and keep language very still. Community pressure and institutional power. Literature and popular discourse. Theory and rhetoric. Grammar books and slang.

As far as I’m concerned, all of these tools are on the table, and anyone creating structural change should be willing to use these. And if we can’t arrive at an understanding through sheer kindness, let us negotiate to find a place of respect. And if that struggle is unfruitful, alas let us live in begrudging tolerance of each other. What other choices are there?

Parting Thoughts

Well, I hope that this was a relatively concise way to sum up some thoughts on the matter of pronouns.

Just to briefly summarize, I’m not the cops. I’m not gonna tell you how to speak, though I may ask for clarification if only to understand you better.

Language is a living thing that resists crystallization. It is less like an old tree and more like an amoeba or a fruit fly. It has a very short generational span that allows it to mutate very very quickly within the span of a single lifetime.

Clarity and consistency are wonderful ideals and are useful, but so are innovation and novelty. Languages are games, and they are their most useful when its fun to play them.

There will be new propositions for how we use language, and we should anticipate and celebrate those upcoming movements because they will be inherently connected (hopefully) to movements for liberation, empowerment and nuanced understanding.

I’ve also been using the they singular throughout this article. I’m curious if it was very noticeable at first, and perhaps much more normal as you went on.

Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. I wonder who lives on Mercury, Pluto and the planets beyond.