A Word About "Them"

[to say nothing of "they"]

A few days ago I was asked, at some length, a question that try as I might I could not ultimately read as other than “I get that nonbinary people want to use their pronouns of choice, but do the rest of us have to honor that?”

Short answer:

Yes. The rest of us do.

Long answer:

Yes, the use of they/them/their for one specific person at a time poses a challenge: to the ear and the mind and their propensity for habitual habits, and quite possibly to how some of us may regard a world that increasingly feels different, perhaps uneasily or even jarringly so, from the one we grew up in (or at least the one we were, growing up, aware of).

It’s also, unsurprisingly, a writerly/copyeditorial challenge, and as my beat is indeed writing and copyediting and not weltanschauung,¹ let me start there.

Pronouns in prose are always challenging. If you doubt me, try copyediting a sex scene between two men² and finding yourself querying in the margin:

AU: Not sure whose penis “his penis” is here. Can you clarify?

And even if the fellows in question aren’t making the tried-and-true beast with two³ backs, pronoun pile-up can be a problem for writers as well as readers.⁴ So yes, it’s a challenge. And yes, you have to rise to it, as you have to rise to the myriad other challenges of communication, on the page and, as the young folk say, IRL.

Before we move on, a flashback.

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THE FLASHBACK:

When I started copyediting, back in the early 1990s, writers, and thus copy editors, were wrestling with the widespread—I might safely, I think, say universal—and increasingly distasteful use of the so-called genderless, or epicene, “he” in sentences in which an unspecified person of no known or relevant gender is being discussed, as in “A student should be able to study whatever he wants.”

And thus arose the era of “he or she” (which is exhausting after a short while), s/he (which is unsightly), and, occasionally, full-out use of a provocatively good-for-the-g.d.-gander allegedly genderless “she” (which, yes, made a pointed point back then) or, as I recall encountering from time to time, switching from “he” to “she” paragraph by paragraph or anecdote by anecdote (which as solutions go is a namby-pamby solution).

Now, the wise and helpful copy editor of the 1990s might offer other workarounds, the most obvious being to, when that copy editor could, pluralize the subject in question so that you’d end up with “Students should be able to study whatever they want.” And when that workaround wasn’t going to, for various reasons, work, I—that wise or at least helpfully well-meaning copy editor—found myself playing around with a sentence to eliminate its pronoun(s) altogether, which (a) often is not hard, and (b) often, or so I told myself, results in a tighter, clearer, cleaner sentence.

What no one ever seemed to think to do—and possibly from your 2024 perspective, particularly if you are a younger person, you find this improbable or even shockingly unbelievable, but trust me here—was to make use of the so-called singular “they,” as in “A student should be able to study whatever they want.”

So proscribed was the singular “they”—I mean, there it sat in the Don’t Even Think About It pile with “ain’t” and the disjunct “hopefully”⁵—that it was absolutely pronoun non grata. As I was working on Dreyer’s English and wrestling with how best to discuss this point, I went voyaging through a lot of twentieth-century prose in search of singular “they”s and came up, as I recall, empty-handed.⁶ Even female⁷ writers, from Anna Freud to, of all people, my beloved Peg “I Hate to Cook” Bracken, stuck with the epicene “he” unless they were speaking of someone who might explicitly be regarded as female.⁸

And yet—I hope you’re sitting down for this—by the 1990s the idea that a default human being—any old human being, a normal human being, even—might be referred to as “he” (because what, after all, is a default, normal human being if not a man?) was simply not flying anymore.

To make an increasingly long story short, the era of the epicene “he”⁹ did in fact give way to the era of “he or she” and its siblings—an era that has, happily and largely, passed—and now we find ourselves in the era of the singular “they,” celebrating that anonymous, nonspecified student who should indeed be able to study whatever they want.

I’d note that there came a time in my copy chief career when we (not the royal we, I mean my Random House departmental cohort and I) hashed this out and made it clear to our army of freelance copy editors that though they might query a manuscript’s use of the singular “they” for inconsistency or lack of clarity, they were no longer to regard it as a Problem That Needs to Be Solved. Amen, over and out.¹⁰

I think it’s important to note that for a lot of old copyeditorial dogs this has been an especially tricky trick, and if it’s tricky for you, whether you’re a copy editor or just a nice, thoughtful person for whom the idea of the singular “they” is as forbidding and forbidden as wearing white after Labor Day, I get it. I do. But the singular “they” is not the wave of the future, it’s the wave of the present. And I would, with some combination of respect, courtesy, and firmness, urge you to . . . let’s just say: give it a good, hard think.¹¹

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Meanwhile, back at the nonbinary “they”:

There’s much more to this saga than I have the time to (or, frankly, am qualified to) narrate here, but ultimately I’m not surprised that as the nonbinary “they” jockeyed for supremacy with a number of sets of what I would call well-meaningly concocted pronouns, the nonbinary “they” has come to prevail. I think that people will naturally reach for an extant word they know rather than something that sounds, well, concocted.¹²

And yes, as I noted above, it’s merely—if not always simply—a challenge insofar as clarity is concerned, but it’s a challenge to which one should, I think, happily and proudly rise, because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that respect for how people wish to be known and referred to supersedes copyeditorial punctiliousness.

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Department of TCB:

This is my twentieth Substack piece since I began this series back in late March. I’m having a grand time, and I hope that you are too. I decided when I began this work—particularly after consultation with my friend the excellent journalist and all-round openhearted person Connie Schultz—not to tuck anything away behind a paywall, and I’m glad I made that decision and I have no intention of changing my mind.¹³ I’m grateful to everyone who has, to date, contributed financially in larger or smaller ways to this endeavor, and if there’s a part of you that’s thinking “You know what? I like this guy” and you want to join that contributing crew, I will be, of course, eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.

Benjamin

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P.S.

Oh, a question that came up as I was chatting about this whole subject the other day:

Q. Do you think that we will ever find ourselves using constructions like “they is going to the store” in references to individual nonbinary people?

A. Noting my practical inability to foretell the future, I’m going to go with: No, we will not find ourselves doing that. We can check in on this point in a few decades, I suppose. But as my friend and colleague Jonathon Owen noted: If it hasn’t happened with the singular “you” in the last few centuries, it’s unlikely to happen with the singular “they” either.

1. I am of course aware that the Germans will capitalize everything that’s not nailed down, but I do think that if a German noun has been domesticated into English, as this one has been, there’s no need to capitalize it. YM, as they say, MV.

2. Or more, I suppose. I don’t know your life.

3. Ibid.

4. My basic rule on this point: Never use the same pronoun for two different people in the same sentence. Also: Strenuously avoid using the same pronoun for two different people over the course of a full paragraph. Readers mind names less than I think you think.

[Postpublication addendum: This subject, I’ve found in the last couple of days, has evoked a number of mentions of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a novel, I must confess, that I gave up on after not too many pages because of the author’s relentless use of an untethered “he” for her protagonist, Thomas Cromwell. I do know, yes, her thought process behind this: that Cromwell is “he” and only other people, including the novel’s twenty-seven other Thomases, have to be identified more explicitly. My cursory response to that is that it sounds like the sort of thing that sounds sound in theory but may not actually play out successfully on the page or in the reader’s brain. (Clearly, it wasn’t working for me.) But as I’m opposed on principle to opining at length about books I haven’t read in full, I’m going to save this topic for another day—which means, to be sure, that I’m going to take another shot at reading Wolf Hall. We’ll see how that goes.]

5. Y’know, the “Hopefully the weather will be fine tomorrow” kind of “hopefully.” About which there is absolutely nothing wrong, especially if you think that “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” is not only a classic movie line but a grammatically correct classic movie line.

6. Or nearly so—maybe I found one or two somewhere. Absolutes are easier than nuance sometimes, otherwise we’d be hunkered down in this footnote for the rest of our lives.

7. Separate point entirely, but nonetheless: I find that many writers, particularly female writers, shy away nowadays from using “female” as an adjective, preferring to refer, when reference is necessary, as it still often is, particularly in discussion of the past, to “a woman writer” (or “woman judge” or “woman doctor,” etc.). I guess I get that: There’s something perhaps oddly biological-sounding about “a female writer,” as if the writer in question is writing with her uterus and not with a pen. “But you wouldn’t say ‘man writer,’ would you?” someone, I’m sure, is leaping to respond. No, you wouldn’t, would you. As I do like to note: This is not math, it’s English.

And I suppose it goes without saying (so much so that I nearly forgot to say it), but for the love of all that’s holy, never refer to a woman as “a female.”

When Clare Boothe Luce wrote

Sylvia: Why should I be jealous of Mary?

Nancy: Because she’s contented. Contented to be what she is.

Sylvia: Which is what?

Nancy: A woman.

Edith: And what, in the name of my revolting condition, am I?

Nancy: A female.

she wasn’t being complimentary.

(Edith’s “revolting condition,” if you were wondering, is pregnancy.)

8. I’m always amused to note that in my prized 1924 copy of Vogue’s Book of Etiquette—if you’ve ever wondered how many servants it takes to run a respectable urban apartment, this is your go-to volume—the pronoun of choice for a nonspecific infant or toddler of no relevant-in-the-moment gender is . . .

it.

Also, by the way, the only member of your household staff who’s allowed to have a mustache is the chauffeur. I’m sure there are worthy, crucial reasons for this, none of them to be discussed in polite company.

9. The last time I can recall seeing an epicene “he,” it was in the work of a writer perhaps best known for calling for the execution of people who have abortions. Maybe not great company to keep.

10. [Postpublication addendum: A fairly obvious point, I suppose, and thus it never occurred to me to note it in this piece: Issues of written English aside, we all speak in the singular “they,” as in “Someone left their galoshes behind” or “When you hire a copy editor to work on this manuscript, will you please ask them to…” But spoken English and written English, those deeply entwined twins, remain unidentical.]

11. What I am happy to bury in a footnote, because I find the whole thing so irritating, is that the crew who will howl and hector “The singular ‘they’ has been in use since the twelfth century, what is your problem?” are not being helpful at all. They just like to howl and hector. I do not like to howl and hector. Also, I wasn’t alive in the twelfth century, and neither were you.

[Postpublication addendum: I’m slipping back in here to underline a point that seems to have, from where I sit, eluded some early readers of this piece: One cannot reasonably expect people who have been trained never, ever, ever to do something—the present something being to use the singular “they”—to suddenly throw up their hands, chucklingly exclaim “Fine, to hell with it!,” and turn on a dime. Well, maybe you can, but I can’t. And I would add that neither as copy editor nor copy chief have I ever had the luxury of responding to an author with a concern, a question, a doubt, or an outright objection with “Do it my way.” God bless you if you have that kind of luxury and life.]

12. Or as a nonbinary online acquaintance bemusedly put it: “We did come up with gender-neutral pronouns. You people just refused to use them.”

One other, and in the grand scheme of things minor, benefit of the rise of the nonbinary “they” is that it’s pretty much killed that galumphing “he or she” stone dead.

13. This isn’t me promising not to raise your taxes while I’m preparing to raise your taxes. I mean it.