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I am by no means an expert in the vast world of grammar rules.
While I’ll never ask if you “seen the Pirates game last night,” or to “pass me them chips,” I do have my struggles. I fight a daily battle with “affect” and “effect” and semicolons, quite frankly, throw me for a loop.
But this week editors here at City Paper were confronted with an issue that comes up from time to time. In our music section, you’ll find a feature on Bean Kaloni Tupou’s band Try the Pie. Tupou is gender-fluid and prefers to use the pronoun “they.” Covering gender-identity issues is nothing new for this publication. We have a designated reporter who covers issues facing the LGBT community, and we assign such material an extremely high level of importance.
Take the recent Caitlyn Jenner situation. Even though some journalists were appalled by her desire to be referred to by her chosen gender, it was a no-brainer for us. And we gladly took to task those who had a problem with it. In fact, we’ve been calling out this kind of gender insensitivity for years.
But Toupou’s is a different situation. “They” is a plural pronoun and using it to refer to one person is, technically, grammatically incorrect. The Associated Press style — to which we subscribe (although we do have specific CP-only style rules) — doesn’t allow for this practice. Under its rules, editors are to use the person’s preferred pronoun, but the only acceptable choices are “he” or “she.” If no preference is given, AP says to “use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly.”
This brings us to the dilemma at hand. Toupou’s preferred pronoun flies in the face of that rule. When this has come up before, our solution had always been to write around it when possible, often by eliminating any pronoun use. But that is difficult to do and ignores the greater issue at hand: Who am I to write around someone’s identity just because it’s tough to write in a news story?
That’s why I made the decision last week that going forward City Paper will use the pronoun they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. We’re not the first paper to do this, and we’re not the only ones having this discussion. The Baltimore Sun, for example, has been doing it for the past year.
And according to an April Wall Street Journal column by Ben Zimmer, the issue was a hot topic of conversation at the annual convention of the American Copy Editors Society (which was, coincidentally, held in Pittsburgh). Zimmer writes, “I found growing acceptance of a usage that has long been disparaged as downright ungrammatical: treating ‘they’ as a singular pronoun.” Zimmer also writes that “they” was used as a singular pronoun up until the 19th century and that current gender issues were reigniting the conversation.
So what’s holding the word back from wider use? Zimmer relates this reasoning from Emily Brewster, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster: “Copy editors who take it upon themselves to edit out the usage.”
Translation: The ball is in our court. The change won’t happen until we actually step up and decide to make it. And the decision becomes easier when you stop and realize it isn’t about words, it’s about people.
Earlier this year, New York Times writer Julie Scelfo told the story of Rocko Gieselman, a gender-neutral university student. The paper decided to eliminate all pronouns for the story. Scelfo shared this response from Gieselman: “Writing about genderqueer-identified people can seem grammatically challenging; it is much more challenging to live as a genderqueer-identified person and try to fit into a world that does not seem to make room for you.”
In this business, pronouns aren’t just words; they represent an individual who has the right to represent their gender as they see fit. Is it grammatically incorrect? Yes. Is it a bit awkward to read initially? Absolutely. But there is something more important at stake here.
As a professional journalist for nearly 25 years, I have a deep respect for words. But I have a deeper, greater respect for people. For people who struggle with gender identity and for people who have finally figured out who they are and are comfortable with it, forcing them into a he-or-she-only box robs them of their identity and strips them of their dignity.
For me, if it comes down to that or breaking a rule of grammar, there really isn’t a choice at all.
This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2015.
The Telegraph (UK), 2012: “If someone tells you singular ‘they’ is wrong, please do tell them to get stuffed.” http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchive…
“The backlash against it, it seems, is one of those things, like the war on split infinitives, sentence-ending prepositions and using “hopefully” to modify a sentence, that aroused the ire of some self-appointed 18th-century grammar guardians who didn’t really know what they were talking about, and their ill-informed pettiness has poisoned the well for the rest of us.”
I understand the problem and sympathize with those affected by it. However, political correctness can go only so far, or else we won’t know anymore what we are saying or why. I’ve always been leery of the singular “they,” not because it’s ungrammatical but because its illogical and in certain contexts simply grotesque. And yes, Jane Austen used it and Shakespeare used it — but always with great restraint and in contexts that made the meaning clear.
If someone is known to identify as female, then I see no problem referring to that person as “she.” If the person prefers to be identified as both genders then that is his/her problem, not ours. (See how I did that?)
In the great majority of cases the problem can be avoided by pluralizing it — as in:
“In this business, pronouns aren’t just words; they represent individuals who have the right to represent their gender as they see fit.” Now was that so hard?
Why his/her rather than her/his?
You write “Tupou…prefers to use the pronoun ‘they'”, but in the article, Tupou’s self-references use the first-person singular pronouns that the rest of us do when referring to ourselves, contrary to your claim. I think what you meant to say is that Tupou prefers (insists?) that everyone else use third-person plural pronouns to refer to Tupou.
We’ll see how things turn out for personal prounouns–“hir”, “ze”, etc. don’t seem to have caught on–but I would hope that we keep the singular/plural distinction; it’s useful. The article itself shows the confusion that results, to wit: “Tupou became active in that scene as a member of bands like Sourpatch, Plume and Salt Flat. With Sourpatch, they helped found Think and Die Thinking…”, which induces a double take–the plural pronoun would seem to want a plural antecedent, i.e. “bands like Sourpatch, Plume, and Salt Flat”. Only after considering that “with Sourpatch” would indicate that Sourpatch itself probably isn’t part of “they”, so yeah, “they” in this case probably refers to Tupou. That defeats the purpose of writing, i.e. the clear communication of ideas.
Thank you for doing this. It’s really not that hard. I appreciate you quoting Emily Brewster. Nice touch. As long as a person pays attention to their writing, lack of clarity can be diminished or eliminated. It’s worth the effort. I second your statement: ” I have a deep respect for words. But I have a deeper, greater respect for people.”
Sorry to see this in the City Paper. So many elegant ways to deal with slippery pronouns and situations, including the use of plural nouns and pronouns. Accepting “they” as plural is lazy, even if defensible in narrow circumstances, leads to to un-sharp writing. Period. I don’t say this as a traditionalist, but as someone who thinks hard about editing options and narrative voice. See Sin and Syntax for more of *my* thoughts on this…
Thank you, Charlie Deitch. I appreciate your forward thinking. Keep pressing the boundaries.