A Cool Take On Pronouns
By: Jave Galt-Miller
Tags: Nonbinary, Grammar, Pronouns, Sex, Gender

I recently posted a funny anecdote to my Facebook feed about a home-schooling faux-pas. With school happening on Zoom this year, I’ve made an effort to hold class with my seven-year-old whenever I can — to teach things beyond what he’s learning in second grade. I’m not going to get into the details here, but let me assure you it was comedic gold — on par with Cosby’s Kids Say the Darndest Things. But the punch line resulted from my introduction of pronouns, and my use of the word “sex” rather than “gender”.

Anyway, I thought it was funny, and I shared it on Facebook. Full disclosure: my intent was two-fold. One was the hope to elicit a chuckle from some people I know; the other was to see if I’d receive blowback for using the s-word.

I should also mention that I’m not a big Facebook user. Back when my kid was born, I posted a baby picture every other day. But these days — apart from my comic posts — I throw up a link to an interesting article or podcast maybe every two weeks. And when I do, I receive little feedback. To be honest, I’m not popular on social media.

I’ll also mention that what I posted was a simple block of text — four or five paragraphs long. No fancy photo or meme. In fact, a reader would have to click “read more” to see the potentially inflammatory mention of sex.

Then something strange happened: people responded to my post! Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a deluge. But a good half dozen people I hadn’t had any communication with for five or ten years appeared and made comments. And the comments were fine, totally pleasant and polite. But make no mistake, they were not intended to share in my chuckle. Instead, their intention was to warn me that my behavior could warp the morality of my child.

We had some back and forth, and I assume we survived the exchange without hating each other. Still, I felt it was a conversation that I could have expanded on. I don’t believe the Facebook comment section would have been the most fruitful way to do it, so I wrote this essay instead.

WHEN DID GENDER SWALLOW UP SEX?

Let’s define some terms before we get ahead of ourselves.

I was at a family gathering a few months ago, and somehow the topic of job applications came up. I don’t remember the exact context. But this guy — a friend of the family — said something about checking off male or female on the application, and referred to it as “gender”. And I said, “I remember when applications used to call it sex.” And he nodded, uncomfortable, and replied, “Yeah, we can’t say that anymore.”

Though I didn’t pursue the conversation that day, I thought to myself, “Of course we can!”

Sex is a biological category: male or female. Gender is how sex engages with society, or how sex is expected to engage with society: masculine or feminine.

Before anyone decides that I’m Hitler reincarnate, let me expand a bit.

First, what is a biological category? It’s the same as any category: it is a mental filter that sifts individual things that share certain characteristics into groups. These categories — or concepts — help us traverse and engage with the world. Communication and thought would not be possible without concepts.

However, Nietzsche was right: concepts don’t actually exist. In reality, there is no such thing as an “elephant”. There exist only thousands of individual existents with long trunks, four legs, and big floppy ears that all share a similar genetic code — so similar that when one squirts some love juice into another, new similarly characteristicked “elephants” will be born into the world.

We know this to be true of elephants and any species, because of Darwin. Evolution by natural selection reveals to us that there was never a “first elephant”. Over time, one set of individual existents that share similar genetic codes reproduce to form later sets of individual existents with shifting genetic code adapting to a changing environment; and these genetic codes are now so dissimilar from the earlier group, that — had individuals from either set bumped into one another — they would not be able to reproduce.

And thus, even so solid a category as a “species” turns out to have fuzzy boundaries at a certain resolution.

That being said, it would be absurd to deny the existence of elephants. These individual things do exist in the world, and they do share many characteristics. To deny the existence of elephants would be to deny the existence of anything, apart from the chaos of atoms in the void. Or, another way to say it: to deny the existence of elephants for this reason, would be to gouge out one’s eyes like Oedipus, hampering one’s ability to move forward in, and engage with those who live in, the world.

The same is true of the sex categories: male and female. Will there be fuzzy boundaries? Yes. Apart from the evolutionary scale — after all, life did move from asexual to sexual reproduction at some point — there is the constant presence of variability and imperfect copying that is both the bug and feature that makes evolution possible in the first place.

But hold on a second — what are these shared characteristics that define the categories? There are plenty of geneticists and biologists out there who can give a high-resolution definition that talks about X- and Y-chromosomes, or the size of the respective gametes provided by either partner within a reproductive union. And those are important definitions. But for the everyday guy and gal on the street who are just looking to start a family or get laid, it comes down to a simple thing: you’ve either got a penis or a vagina.

Shocking, right?

Ok. So whether it’s chromosomes, gamete size, or a particular gonad, it’s a significant physical thing that has a lot to do with reproduction. As I wrote above: there are going to be rare individuals who do not fit within either category. Just as some people are born with three arms or twelve fingers, some very rare people can be born with a penis and a vagina, or maybe with neither. I totally believe there are other people — perhaps not quite as rare, but still exceedingly rare — who possess the tool of one sex, but who also have the inescapable feeling that they should be equipped with the tool of the other.

So what do we do for these people? We treat them with the respect and care we reserve for any other. To mock, or reject, or somehow physically separate these people for something over which they have no control would be horrible, and — apart from childish and brutish bullies — I don’t believe anyone would disagree.

But we can be respectful and kind without erasing a concept from our language.

WHAT NOT TO EXPECT WHEN SOCIETY IS EXPECTING

In America, there is a high statistical probability that when a person is born with a penis, he will grow up to watch professional sports and talk endlessly about them with other penis-equipped individuals. Such men have an encyclopedic knowledge of the names and statistics of famous players, and they will emit great displays of passion when a ball reaches the particular end of a particular field.

Most people would agree that the love of sports — and especially the love of watching others play them — is a rather gendered pastime.

More disclosure: I was born with a penis. Despite this fact, sports have never interested me. I mean, sure, I’ll play them if you twist my arm, and I value exercise for the sake of health and fitness, and I even collected baseball cards for a couple years in grade school because I thought I’d make a killing at the local flea market. But the thought of watching a bunch of grown men battle over a ball for a few hours on a Sunday is about as interesting to me as listening to a church sermon or watching paint dry.

Does this mean I lack masculinity? Allow me to double-down: I know nothing about car engines, I have a pretty bad sense of direction, I often cry at movies, and I habitually put the seat down after each time I use the toilet (though, in truth, I put the lid down as well, in order to encourage lifting equity between the sexes).

Admittedly, if the above deficits weigh against one’s masculinity, they’re likely low on the list. While there have been times in my life where I felt out of place because I couldn’t participate in the latest Lakers game conversation, it would never enter my mind that I was somehow “not a man”.

But let’s face it: there are few places in society where masculinity fears to tread. Gender expectations are often more restrictive on the feminine side of things. At least, that’s the way it was for much of history.

I grew up in the 80s, and back then there was still this idea — a kind of stereotype — called a “tomboy”. I don’t think the kids use the term anymore. But a tomboy would be a girl who liked to climb trees, get in fistfights, get dirty. She’d do the things that girls wouldn’t normally be expected to do. And I don’t know what the label meant in the 40s, but in the 80s, a tomboy was a cool girl. She was someone a boy would enjoy hanging out with.

But whether it was the 40s, the 80s, or even today, no one who categorized a person as a “tomboy” believed that the person in question had a penis or lacked a vagina. The term “tomboy” does not refer to sex, but to gender. A tomboy was a person with a vagina who rebelled against the expectations society held regarding people with vaginas.

Now look, I get it — most people don’t consciously define terms this way in their everyday lives. Most people use words without ever giving them a second thought. Worse, many people use words and phrases with a total lack of precision and consistency. The country elected the poster child for such sloppy speakers in 2016, but he’s just an extreme version of something that’s all too common.

But it’s exactly this lack of thought and consideration regarding words and phrases that leads to the runaway confusion between sex and gender that we appear to have today.

Feminists — at least insofar as the first couple waves — were fighting for the rights of people born with vaginas. But this fight had nothing to do with biology, and had everything to do with how society engaged with that biology. In other words, feminism is a kind of thinking that sought and seeks to modify gender rather than sex. It seeks to change how people are treated and perceived, rather than change what people are.

Because — duh — sex isn’t something that’s changeable, unless you get a sex-change operation.

Which brings us to the next topic of discussion…

GENDER SWALLOWS UP SEX, PART II — THE TRANS-FORMATION

It’s curious how or why this all happened. I’m not a historian that can pinpoint the time when it did, but there was a vague moment when people stopped using the word transsexual, and instead used the word transgender.

Here again, transsexual makes sense: someone is born with one sexual tool, but has the inescapable and agonizing feeling that he or she should have the opposite gonad.

Admittedly, I have no understanding of how this works. To highlight the point, I’ll make a comparison. I’m heterosexual. When I think about two guys having sex or making out, I get a similar feeling to the thought of eating fried grasshoppers. It’s not my thing.

But still — I can more or less understand it. I can imagine that some people were raised to eat fried grasshoppers, and that they may salivate at the thought of the crunchy snack. And I can imagine that dudes get turned on by other dudes. It doesn’t necessarily conflict with my basic understanding of the world, it’s just a shift in value. It’s aiming at a different target.

But the feeling that I should have a vagina rather than a penis — that’s a feeling I can’t connect to in any way. I can’t connect to it in large part because I don’t even have a feeling that I should have a penis. There’s no should about it. The fact that I have ten toes, two eyes, two testicles — they’re just facts that happen to be true, and I have no feeling about what should and shouldn’t be.

Now, let’s say I was born with nine toes. Ok. I can imagine that I would have an opinion that I should have ten toes. I’d see people around me in the gym locker or at the pool, all of them with ten toes. I’d learn that having ten toes is the norm. So, yeah, I might think to myself — shit, I’m a nine-toed freak. People are going to look at me funny.

But whatever that feeling of should would be for me, it would be a result of what I noticed about others, and what I believed they would therefore notice about me. It would not be an internal feeling in my very being that I have the “soul” of someone with ten toes, but the body that has only nine.

The trans- experience, from what I can tell, is an entirely different thing. And there’s no doubt that to have that experience in any society is hard as hell — an experience that cannot end, perhaps, until one gets one’s body to conform to one’s internal expectations of that body.

Clearly, this is a question of sex rather than gender.

So the question becomes: what is the reason for the conscious move away from the concept of “transsexual” to the word “transgender”? In one sense, dubbing a thing in the world a different name does nothing to change the thing in the world. Saying someone is “mentally handicapped” rather than [mentally] “retarded” does not change the fact in the world about this person’s learning ability, relative to the average. Though the new label may appear to be more polite, it’s just a euphemism arms race: retarded becomes handicapped becomes disabled becomes differently abled, etc.

But sex and gender are entirely different, if related, categories. Is the switch here just an accident resulting from imprecise language? Or is it a conscious effort to change perception? Personally, I think it’s a combination of the two, though there are some who insist that it’s all about the latter.

Whatever the reason, around the same time trans- moved from sex to gender, a revolution was forming around Twitter’s favorite genre of word: the pronoun.

ARE YOU PRONOUNS OR AGAINST THEM?

If I told you a story about my car, it’s likely that I would replace “my car” with “it” at some point in the telling. “It” is a pronoun. The point of pronouns is for people to be able to refer to people, places or things without constantly saying “my car,” “my car,” “my car…” A pronoun is a grammatical device meant to facilitate efficient communication.

It should not be surprising that people use a separate and more fine-grained set of pronouns to refer to people as opposed to inanimate objects. People are the most important things to people in the world. As far as I know, this is true in every language.

In English, pronouns that refer to people have three dimensions: 1) Perspective — am I speaking about myself or a group that I belong to? 2) Singularity vs Plurality — am I speaking about one person or more than one? 3) Gender — Is the person referred to male or female?

A quick aside: a careful reader may be asking him- or herself, “Didn’t this fucking guy say this whole thing started because he taught his kid about pronouns and used the word ‘sex’ rather than ‘gender’? What is this waffling?!”

You got me. Part of the funny irony of the whole anecdote was that I was wrong to even insist on that wording in that particular context. When talking about pronouns — or most nouns in languages like French and Spanish — “gender” has always been the correct descriptor. Why? Well, in French “la mer” means “the sea”, and the “la” tells you that the sea is considered a feminine word (as opposed to the masculine “le”). Presumably the sea does not have a vagina, so it would not make sense to think of it as referring to sex.

Why do the French categorize their nouns in this gendered way? I don’t know. Ask the Romans. Anyway, I think that general idea got pulled into a description of pronouns, and that’s where we are.

So, back to it: in English, pronouns that refer to people have three dimensions. When we’re speaking in first- and second-person, gender is not a relevant dimension. Why? Because if “I” am referring to me, my use of “I” directly points at only one person in the whole world — me. And if I use “you”, then you also know that I’m referring to only one person in the whole world — unless, perhaps, I’m talking to a group of you, which would be plural.

But once we move to the third-person perspective, it has long been customary to indicate the sex of the person with a gendered pronoun. (You see what I did there?) Is this helpful? In other words, does it facilitate more efficient communication?

Maybe. Using he vs. she when talking about several different people in a conversation might allow a listener to track better who is referring to whom. At the same time, I don’t believe it is necessary, and I know of several modern languages that provide a gender neuter singular pronoun, and they do fine.

I would be happy to live in such a culture. Unfortunately, English does not have a singular pronoun in common use that can do that job.

THE PROBLEM WITH THEY

That last sentence isn’t entirely true. Example: If one wishes to speak in the singular third-person about a theoretical person who could be either a man or a woman, one can use the 3rd-person singular pronoun “one”.

Let’s be honest — that’s an awkward sentence. It’s one thing to write a sentence like that, but now imagine someone saying it in casual conversation. Not bloody likely.

So what do we English speakers do? “They” long ago crept into informal use as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. Now, back when I was learning grammar in the 90s, this was a big no-no in English class. In the last few decades, that proscription seems to have changed.

But let’s be very clear about something: this informality had a very specific use case. People used it only in sentences that referred to a theoretical, generalized individual, i.e., “When someone feels hungry, they are likely to eat something.” At no point — at least in any part of the culture that I had access to — was anyone saying, “When Peter feels hungry, they are likely to eat something.” The “they” was a placeholder for the fairly rational acknowledgement that this generalized possible person could be either male or female.

Here again: does any 14-year-old freshman high schooler reach this conscious conclusion that she is using “they” for this reason? Of course not. But in a world where it was becoming less and less kosher to use “he” or “him” as a generalized 3rd-person singular pronoun without sounding sexist (or is that genderist?), it was only natural for language to evolve in that direction.

But nature is red in tooth and claw, and the fact that something is natural doesn’t make it right.

Here is my admittedly pedantic view of things: the use of “they” to refer to theoretical individuals of indeterminate sex as a tactic to fight sexism is itself unknowingly sexist. Why? Because “they” is first and foremost a pronoun that conveys plurality; and to replace one word that indicates information about sex, with a word that gives false information about plurality, tells me that you believe one’s sex is a more important and essential quality than one’s singularity or oneness.

If I have a penis, and you have a vagina, there are likely to be some specific differences between us that stem from this fact. Yet I believe that, as people, we are likely to have far more similarities than differences. But if I compare a singular consciousness — a she — to a group of singular consciousnesses — a they — the differences will far outweigh any similarities. In other words, I don’t see a vast gap of difference between the sexes; but I do see a chasm of difference separating a group from an individual.

The person who insists the opposite — that, no, the differences inherent in he vs. she are so great that he must disregard even so stark a distinguishing difference as one brain vs. many, well, this strikes me as the reaction of someone who believes himself to be sexist and wishes to hide from that fact.

That being said — I realize I’m a bit of an anomaly. Most people don’t think about words in this way. Certainly, most people who wish to use “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun do not believe they are doing it for sexist reasons.

However, whether I’m right on the implied sexism or not, it’s clear that the use of “they” can often make communication unclear. In the case of theoretical individuals, it’s pretty easy to follow along; but when I get an email from someone who is a court show aspirant talking about his friend Sam who was driving his car, and that “they” had crashed it — well, I have to ask myself: is this guy talking about “Sam”? Or has “Sam” suddenly morphed into a group of defendants?

If clarity is of value to communication, “they” is not the answer we’re looking for.

YOU’RE EITHER NON-BINARY OR YOU’RE A NAZI

So what do people who call themselves “non-binary” mean or want? What is their goal?

As the pages above should make clear, I am on the outside of this group looking in. I have no doubt that what being “non-binary” is to one person in the group, may be different to some other person in that same group. Such is the nature of individuals who happen to be categorized into groups, even when they self-sift.

But what are we talking about here? And why am I writing about it? In truth, I’ve never met anyone who called himself “non-binary”. It’s a pretty recent phenomenon, and it seems to mostly exist on Twitter.

Broadly speaking, I can only imagine three potential subgroups under that heading. The first is the trans- community. Again, if trans- means having a subjective perspective on the world that rebels against the physical body one is born with, the attraction to “non-binary” ideas regarding sex and gender makes a lot of sense. Such people have an experience and view of the world that few others have access to.

That being said, I don’t believe I hear many women who were born men wanting to be called “they”, nor many men being born women wanting to be called “they”. They want to be seen as the sex they feel like, which comes with their respective pronouns.

The second subgroup I perceive here is the group of well-meaning people who have no strong rebellious internal feelings about their own sex, but who see many societal expectations regarding sex as unfair or illegitimate. And I totally get this group of people — like I said, in another era they would have been called feminists, or better yet, equalitarians and individualists.

I think many of these people are mistaken about a number of things, some of which stem from the confusion between sex and gender which I tried to disentangle above. There is also confusion by many — whether it be non-binaries, racists, sexists, journalists, bloggers, etc — regarding statistics as it applies to groups and individuals.

Take the following: some women can do more pulls-ups than some men; some women can do more pull-ups than most men; some women can do more pull-ups than 99% of men — all three of the previous statements can be true, with it also being true that men, on average, have better upper body strength than women. The first three statements refer to a set of individuals; the latter statement is about averages between groups. There are times when one kind of statement will be more valuable than the other.

For instance: (let’s pretend this is an actual test, I don’t know) to be a firefighter in Los Angeles, you need to be able to do 20 pull-ups. If that’s the test, your sex (even your gender) will have nothing to do with the result. You either pass the test or you don’t, based on your individual ability. But if later someone wonders why so few women are firefighters in Los Angeles, then the statistical statement about sex and upper body strength has explanatory power.

Of course, the other difference I have with this subgroup is they seem to think any disagreement with their ideas is somehow malicious or evil, rather than being a simple disagreement about premises and ideas.

The third and final subgroup is harder for me to explain or understand. And really, the little I think I know about it comes from the Showtime TV series, Billions.

True story: as I was writing the previous sentence, I was trying to remember the character’s name in the show I wanted to write about. And the thought to myself was, “What the hell is her name?” And funny enough, this may help illustrate my point as we move forward.

In Billions, Taylor is a super smart upstart in the hedge fund world. Taylor is a math whiz, and potentially has some autistic traits. But the thing that really makes Taylor stand out is that when Taylor meets you, Taylor requests that when you refer to Taylor in the third person, you should use the pronoun “they”. And if you don’t, Taylor doesn’t work with you.

I haven’t seen the latest season of the series, but I thought they did some great work with the Taylor storyline. In many ways, I felt a lot of empathy for the character. Well, I felt empathy for the feelings of the character, but I never quite understood the reasons for the feelings of the character.

For real world people in this position, again, I have to imagine two possible subgroups. One is a person who legitimately feels confusion about what sex or gender he or she is. And even if that person defines this confusion as certainty about a lack of sex or gender, it’s still a confusion, if only due to the definitions of those terms. Whatever this person’s feelings or beliefs, they would seem to fit more with the trans- experience — that is, their feeling is not a choice, but a determined necessity.

The other subgroup I imagine is made up of people who have no real confusion about their sex, but who believe that people’s expectations and response to that sex will be unfair or irrational. They wish to escape these illegitimate expectations, and wish to be treated as individuals unfettered by erroneous labels and categorizations.

If that is a realistic description of this group’s desire and goal, it is one I can easily understand and relate to. I sure as hell don’t want people making unfair or untrue judgments about me based on the group they categorize me in. So I get it.

But here’s what I believe to be the reality: let’s say you were born with a vagina. You’re a girl and people have been referring to you as “she” your whole life. And one day we meet, say for professional reasons, and you ask that I call you “they” when I refer to you in the third person to others. Whatever negative expectations or assumptions I could possibly have held about you because you have a vagina, my negative assumptions and expectations are now likely to be far greater — as unfair or as untrue as those expectations may well be.

That’s not to say I’m going to laugh at you at that meeting, nor will I call you names or insult you. Nor will I even secretly want to do that. I’ll likely be as polite and pleasant as can be. In fact, I’ll want to ask you detailed questions about your reasons for the request, because I’ll be fascinated by the prospect. But I probably won’t, because I’ll be afraid you’re too fragile.

Anyway, that’s me. I like to think there are bigger assholes out there, so other reactions may vary. In other words, if you don’t want people to treat you as weak, or different, or whatever, then asking people to call you “they” does not serve your desired goal.

CONCLUSION

I think most anyone who calls herself “non-binary” would agree with this fundamental concept: people should be treated as individuals rather than as members of a group — especially when one has no choice in joining that group. And society’s expectations — apart from those written in law — should not bar individuals from seeking their own happiness and success. In this, we agree.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine that any group, political party, race, creed, sex or gender would disagree. And yet lately, every group, political party, race, creed, sex and gender seems to believe that every group, political party, race, creed, sex and gender that is different from them does NOT agree with it.

I too am an individual, and as an individual, I’m more analytical and pedantic than others. I’m interested in how others use words and concepts, mostly because I believe clarity is of value to communication and persuasion. I can only hope that this rather long essay was clear, and that it conveyed the meaning I intended.

And yes, I will continue to instruct my son to use the word “they” as a plural pronoun, especially when he’s writing anything where he wants to be taken seriously.