It was a shocking revelation, even if it’s unclear how seriously it should be taken.
Case in point: a new Newsweek poll on misgendering. In the poll—given to 1,500 eligible voters in the U.S. in early July by Redfield & Wilton Strategies—people were asked whether “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense.”
A shocking percentage of younger survey respondents said that it should.
The numbers are stunning. For the 25 to 34 cohort, 44% believe it should be a crime to use the wrong pronoun, while only 33% think it should not. For older and younger, the stats aren’t much better.
- Some 38 percent of 35- to 44-year-old respondents said it should be a crime, while 35 percent disagreed.
- Some 33 percent of 18- to 24-year-old respondents said it should be a crime, while 48 percent disagreed.
While it’s unclear whether the answers would be the same if put to the test of distinguishing criminal punishment from social approbation, what it does show is how deeply ingrained this infantile narcissistic affectation has become. But then, the putative grownups in the room aren’t helping much.
Gender-neutral pronouns are a thorny topic in English. In Finnish, for example, “hän” is a genderless pronoun. Legions of languages have words like that. But in English, a truly accepted gender-neutral pronoun has been a holy grail for generations. Past attempts have included kludges like “heesh” (popularized by A.A. Milne), and modern proposals such as “ze.” These deliberately invented pronouns typically only catch on in limited circles, however. This is because people are especially conservative about pronouns, which are used so frequently that they are especially deep-seated in our linguistic consciousness. To accept a new pronoun is to change the way we roll, as it were. One prefers not to.
Do you know anyone who considered adopting the Finnish “hän” as a genderless pronoun? Me neither. But then, I’m not writing a book about pronouns, so I’m not compelled to take the subject seriously so as to make my book appear serious. John McWhorter, on the other hand, has a horse in this race.
This is why the most successful gender-neutral pronoun has always been “they.” Its generic usage, as in, “Each student knows what they must do,” has been criticized as incorrect for centuries — while simultaneously being used freely by even the most prestigious writers since the Middle Ages. And of late there is the usage of a gender-neutral “they” to refer to a specific, rather than generic, person: “Ariella got straight A’s, and they’re so proud.”
As practical as this use of “they” is in giving a pronoun to those disinclined to the gender binary — I wrote about it here — it challenges many beyond a certain age. My guess (and hope) is that it will become ever more entrenched as the decades pass, especially as tweens and teens often use it effortlessly. However, I also suspect that we are in for at least a few decades of fruitless resistance against the new “they,” with many insisting that it is somehow logic incarnate that “they” must be plural. This, despite the fact that in German, “sie” means both “she” and “they,” and no one bats an eye. But I digress!
First, it’s nice to see that McWhorter reads SJ. Second, I’m beyond a certain age, whatever that age may be. Third, the improper but common use of “they” for the generic singular may be wrong, but it’s not confusing. Rewrite his example as “John failed the test, while Ariel got an A, and they are so proud.” But I digest!
McWhorter has seized upon another novel linguistic flex which combines his scholarly interests in making African American Vernacular English a dialect and non-binary pronouns serious beyond teeny boppers (in age or mind).
In the Black English of younger Black people in Baltimore, for instance, a new gender-neutral pronoun arose in the 2000s, as reported in an article by Elaine Stotko and Margaret Troyer. Of all things, the pronoun is “yo.”
Not “you,” but “yo.”
Oh?
This “yo” is a straightforward, gender-neutral third-person pronoun — basically “heesh,” but not as ridiculous sounding. “Yo was tuckin’ in his shirt!” is an example Stotko and Troyer documented. This “yo” did not mean “you,” because the reference was certainly not to someone tucking in someone else’s shirt. A female teacher was handing out papers, and someone remarked — not to the teacher herself — “Yo handin’ out papers.” Someone else used “Yo is a clown” to describe a third party.
Some, like me for instance, might read this “yo” as the word “you” combined with the inability to properly conjugate a verb or express a clear thought. McWhorter, on the other hand, sees “yo” as the gender neutral pronoun of the future, yo.
Wrap your head around it, and you can see this pronoun is pretty awesome. The interjection “Yo!” has been retooled, so that what started as a way of calling someone has become a way of calling out — i.e., pointing out — someone. The new “yo” means, in its way, “the one whom one ‘yo’s.” And it applies to no gender in particular. Baltimore Black English achieved what mainstream English never has: a gender-neutral pronoun that doesn’t force some other pronoun to moonlight in a new role.
Lest you think I’m making fun of McWhorter’s “awesome” solution to this critically vexing social problem, so important that young people would have police enforce it with guns drawn and the occasional dead body of a misgendering miscreant, his effort to come up with an alternative gender neutral pronoun for those who would feel “raped”* if the wrong pronoun was used in discussion about them by people in a far off land, I appreciate his efforts to overcome the perpetually confusing singular “they,” which Chaucer may have borrowed from Beowulf before anyone invented editors.
*”Rape” is among the many words that have become untethered from any cognizable definition.
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“It” is a gender neutral singular pronoun in English. I can’t speak for Finnish, but there seem to me some good reasons it has not caught on, and on first blush they relate to a correlation between gender neutrality and impersonality. I think I am beyond a certain age (aren’t we all?), and my reticence to use “they” as a singular has to do with the genuine linguistic confusion its use has caused when I have been asked to do so. That genuine confusion seems to be purposefully ignored by those who promote its use as a panacea. If its future use is inevitable, then it is because politics trumps clarity.
“It” and “they” are hobbled by their normative and ubiquitous use for objects/plurals, and the baggage of deviating from “proper” form.
Maybe Bob Marley and Cincinnati have already solved this problem.
“We no know how we and dem a-go work it out.”
“Who dey think gonna beat dem Bengals?”
Mi corazón te olvidó pa’ siempre.
Fuiste en mi vida un sentimiento
Que destrozó toditita mi alma.
We are in the thick of thin things here.
Yo is crazy.
I have thought of adopting the Finnish pronoun “hän,” but only to annoy the people who want to criminalize using the wrong pronoun.
Finnish pronouns (and nouns) decline into 16 cases. That is, they change into 16 different forms depending on how they are used grammatically. “Hän” would be the translation of “he” as in “he reads,” but “hänettä” would be the translation of “him” as in “without him,” (the abessive case), and “hänheen” would be used for “into him” (illative case).
Faced with criminal prosecution for confusing the adessive case with the abessive case might convince at least a few people to give up the pronoun game.
The optimal natural trend in language practices would be if people collectively rejected the orientation of language (along with the rest of society) around gender norms, and consistently used pronouns in alignment with sex instead. Instead of mollifying narcissists who complain when they don’t like how other people (accurately) assess them to others, people should follow their natural tendency to roll their eyes as is done with other irrational controlling behavior. Just collectively reject this whole program.
A neutral pronoun that feels natural with both singular and plural verbs may gain natural usage, but until then the damage from sex-based errors is nothing next to the dysfunction from displacing sex with gender norms – which invite even greater errors.
And if mistakes are made, the prevailing attitude is casual correction as if we had the wrong day for their birthday. There’s no reason for society to clutch pearls over “misgendering” and people should feel free to let that fall away, similar to how the concerns of organized religion have lost their hold. If somebody purposely misgenders a gender critical person (imagine thinking being critical of gender is bad) in an attempt to troll them, the response would be “lol who cares” not “omg I had no idea what it feels like you should be arrested!”
With all due deference to McWhorter, whom I read and usually find intriguing, “yo” is already doing a great job as a non-binary interjection. Let us not burden it further.
“Yo was tucking in his shirt” is not gender neutral — you know he’s male from the “his”! And “yo was tucking in yo’s shirt” is ambiguous, because we don’t know if yo was tucking in yo’s own shirt or someone else’s. I like McWhorter a lot but he’s a bit off the rails here. On the other hand, “they” serves as an adequate substitute for “one” when referring to a generic person, even if it is ungrammatical. And using “they” to refer to a particular “non-binary” person will fade as the trendiness of identifying as non-binary also fades.
Fruitless? I think he meant to say “futile.”
So in the midst of fighting against systematic incarceration and prosecution of “low-level crimes” because they unfairly affect certain races, we’re supposed to make a new low-level law to incarcerate and prosecute people with?
Yeah, that will end well.
…what a wonderful world it will be…(barf, yo.)
I guess that since we managed to walk upright and communicate there has always been a preponderance of noisy idiots who want to impose their ideas on others. Even as there is less and less excuse for this, still they come. What a time to be alive.
Oh, they think it should be a crime, right up until the point where THEY (yes, the plural) find out that THEY could be held liable. Like many other advocates for furthering the reach of the criminal justice system, I suspect they only expect to apply it to “others.” Thems. Yos.
It’d give whole new meaning to the Group W Bench, though. “Yeah, man, I caught 10 days actual for he-ing a she with a beard.”
And they all moved away.
I don’t suppose the Chinese “ta” has any better chance of catching on.* I went digging around and did not find too many languages that don’t distinguish with pronouns. Maybe English can find yet another grammatical minority** niche to fit into. Though I’m not sure Chinese would be considered “minority.”
*holding out for “xit,” myself.
**supposedly the third-person singular verb ending of “s” is shared only with Frisian.
I could go with ta. Just think of talking about a crowd of ta-ta’s.
I like McWorter and I hate to argue language with a linguist but I think he is being deliberately misleading. There is a clear difference in the use of “they” in the sentences:
“Each student knows what they must do,”
“Ariella got straight A’s, and they’re so proud.”
It is absolutely clear that “they” refers to a group of students in the first sentence but it is unclear whether “they” refers to Ariella or Ariella and someone previously mentioned. Every time I hear this, I have to stop and figure this out. Language is meant to communicate seamlessly and this kind of singular “they” causes a hitch in mental processing.
“They” has always had a group in mind not an individual. If “they” can be singular, there is no longer a plural pronoun. Your “John and Ariella” sentence will always be unclear because there is no way to know if they refers to John, Ariella or both.
Use “hun”, “ze” or “yo” but, for the sake of communication, “they” should only be used when there is group of people.
In your second sentence “they” obviously – or at least grammatically – refers to the “A’s”:
“Ariella got straight A’s, and they’re so proud.”
And they have reason to be proud, since they are straight.
As someone with a gender neutral name, I look forward to dispatching the police to arrest half of those who email me without having met me in person.
No love for the French “son”? Note that when you translate “his cousin” to “son cousine”, you lose the gender of the adjectival pronoun, and pick up the gender of the noun.
I think that in a decade or two (and hopefully sooner) this will no longer be an issue, because “non-binary” will be a trend of the past. The non-binary kids at the school where I teach are the goth kids, but under a new name that gets them more social clout. Most of them will grow up, it will pass, and then we won’t have to argue with linguists about it anymore.
I hope you’re right, but I fear it’s too late.