Pronouns, as many of you know, are what enable us to avoid sentences like, “Alice left Alice’s gloves in Alice’s office, so Alice left to go get Alice’s gloves.” Instead, we can say, “Alice left her gloves in her office, so she left to go get them.”
Many of us learned that people use either “he” or “she”, and for years, I assumed those were the only two options. I had heard of “they” used in singular form for someone whose gender was unknown (“somebody left their gloves”), but assumed it was wrong, because I grew up hearing that it was grammatically incorrect. Later, I heard about people who used it for themselves, but I resisted this idea, as well—after all, didn’t we learn in elementary school that it was wrong to do that?
Why did I change my mind for both a person of unknown gender and a person for whom neither “he” nor “she” is appropriate? I have a lot of reasons!
- Not everything we learned in elementary school is true—I realized this early on in mathematics, so you’d think I’d have applied it to pronouns, as well!
- Grammatical rules should follow usage. As our world evolves, the language we use needs to match that.
- For a person of unknown gender, “his/her” and “he/she” and “s/he” are all awkward, plus they assume that this person doesn’t use “they” or another non-standard pronoun to begin with.
- If someone tells me what their pronouns are, I should respect them and use those pronouns, whether they are “he”, “she”, “they”, “ze”, “sie”, “e”, not using pronouns at all, or anything else! As of now, I’m the only non-binary person I know, which makes it easy on me in that sense… because honestly, I do think I’d struggle to remember other pronouns and conventions, at least at first. But I owe it to others I may meet to work at it!
- The last is a selfish reason: I realized that the choice between “he” and “she” isn’t as right for me as I once thought it was. While I still use “she” in many contexts, and most people use “she” for me, I at least theoretically prefer “they”. That said, there are times when I don’t feel like explaining the use of “they”, and so I would use “she” for myself. It’s complicated!
One final thought: Why do we have gendered pronouns at all? It’s useful when talking about two people of different genders who use different pronouns, to keep them straight—“he looked at her paper” makes it clear that it’s one person looking at another’s paper. “He looked at his paper” isn’t clear without context. However, since there are situations where we discuss two people who use the same pronouns, and we can manage that, why not replace all gendered pronouns with a single third-person pronoun? (Yes, I realize that “he” and “she” are so ingrained in our society that this will likely never happen… but I think it’s an interesting thought experiment!)