Why “they/them” pronouns are unlikely to catch on
Language changes by evolution, not coercion.
For all the demands of activists that “they” and “them” should be normalised as singular pronouns, very few members of the public have adapted their speech patterns accordingly. Even when the print media started following this odd new craze after Sam Smith declared himself to be “non-binary” in September 2019, the trend simply didn’t catch on.
This is hardly surprising. For one thing, most of the articles that adhere to this creed end up being both syntactically and stylistically incoherent. Take the following excerpt from a review of Judith Butler’s latest book in The Atlantic:
“In essence, Butler accuses gender-crits of ‘phantasmatic’ anxieties. They dismiss, with that invocation of a ‘phantasm,’ apprehension about the presence of trans women in women’s single-sex spaces…”
At first glance, “they” could appear to be referring to the “gender-crits”, but in this case it refers to Butler. A reader unfamiliar with the subject will inevitably find this confusing. Throughout the article, one is forced to reset one’s reading instincts – cultivated through a lifetime of universally-shared linguistic conventions – and even though the meaning eventually becomes clear, the prose is irredeemably maladroit. In other words, those who accept these new rules must first surrender their capacity to write well.
Of course, we all know that “they” is commonly used in the singular sense in cases of unknown identity. So we might say “Someone has left their car keys here” because we cannot be sure of the sex of the stranger in question. This causes no confusion at all because the sentence automatically conveys the uncertainty. Such colloquial exceptions aside, “they” is simply not used as a singular pronoun among the general population.
While identitarian activists love to dismiss Shakespeare as an irrelevant dead white male, they are happy to invoke him to support their attempts to impose their own modifications to the English language. In almost all articles on the singular “they”, one will find a reference somewhere to Shakespeare. “For decades, transgender rights advocates have noted that literary giants Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and Geoffrey Chaucer all used singular they in their writing”, states one writer. “Shakespeare used the singular they, and so should you”, claims another. In the Washington Post, a professor of English writes that “Shakespeare and Austen both used singular “they”… just as many English speakers do now”.
It’s difficult to see how this argument is in any way compelling. Nobody is claiming that language does not evolve. The point is rather that the singular “they” has not caught on in modern usage, in spite of activists’ demands that it should. Are gender identity ideologues really urging us to adopt sixteenth-century language in the name of progress? I have yet to see any of them favouring “thou” as a familiar form of address. They tend to prefer “y’all”, and if this was ever used by Shakespeare I must have missed it.
In any case, this common claim simply isn’t true. “Authors including Shakespeare often have used the singular ‘they’,” asserts the author of a typical article. But where exactly? If it is true that Shakespeare “often” referred to individuals by a plural pronoun, why are there so few examples? A cursory scan of the innumerable articles on the subject reveals that only one instance is generally cited. As the Los Angeles Times puts it:
“In ‘Hamlet,’ Shakespeare used “them” in reference to the word mother: ‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother – Since nature makes them partial – should o’erhear the speech’.”
This is an instance of synesis, or notional agreement, where the strict grammatical rules are suspended for semantic clarity. It is simply not the case that Polonius (the speaker of this line) is here referring to one individual as “they”, as he is clearly talking about all mothers and their inherent bias towards their offspring.
And having trawled the various articles on this subject, the only examples that are ever actually provided of Shakespeare using the singular “they” are similar cases of notional agreement. For instance: “God send every one their heart’s desire!” from Much Ado About Nothing, or “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend” from The Comedy of Errors. Shakespeare is referring to multiple hearts and multiple men, and it is quite the stretch to assert that he is here promoting the validity of non-binary identities.
One might as well quote Cardinal Wolsey’s lines from Henry VIII for a further example: “The Spaniard, tied by blood and favour to her, / Must now confess, if they have any goodness, / The trial just and noble”. Here, Wolsey is referring to the Spanish people, not an individual Spaniard. Only the most literal of minds would take this poetic device as proof that “they” is being deployed as a singular pronoun. (Incidentally, this very quotation was cited by Samuel Johnson in his definition of “they” for his original dictionary of 1755.)
Those who take umbrage at the natural evolution of language are wasting their energy. Yet in the case of “they” and “them” as singular, there has been no such evolution at all, only an attempt to impose by coercion a new set of rules. Even those who gleefully refer to individuals as “they” soon trip themselves up, because there is a good reason why the English language has developed with readily differentiated singular and plural terms. Gender ideologues and their elitist cheerleaders are free to speak the language as they see fit, but they have little chance of imposing their habits on the rest of us.
People ‘have’ pronouns in the same way that they ‘have’ adjectives, i.e. they don’t have them. These pronoun punters are tiresome children and must be mocked relentlessly.
I was talking to my son and some of his friends about this the other day. They disagreed with them about it. They said it was OK, but they said it was a bad idea. I told them they should think about it and they agreed with me and encouraged them to do so. Anyway they were going out so I said goodbye to them, except for them, who stayed at home.