The Non-Binary Pronoun Wars

The grammatical phenomena of the English language mostly exist under the radar, invisible to the people who produce them. We use language completely unconscious of the intricacies involved. 

A startling recent exception has surfaced over the past decade. In America we are in the midst of a cultural upheaval in the use of language. The youth of our country have boldly pushed forth a conception of language, rupturing the traditions of their parents and grandparents. They have exercised agency over a normally completely inflexible grammatical system. It appears that they have taken control of English grammar! I am talking about how the young people of today choose the pronouns that they use to refer to themselves. 

The non-binary pronoun wars!

The purpose of this blog post is not to engage in any controversy. The purpose is rather to try to explain linguistic mechanisms involved in the use of non-binary pronoun choices. I try to explain as clearly and as simply as possible what I consider to be the linguistic innovation in the non-binary system.

Before getting to the nuts and bolts of the controversy, I will outline the English pronominal system a bit.

What are pronouns?

Very roughly, a pronoun is a word that is used to refer back to somebody or something that has been previously mentioned: 

        Look at that house! 

        It is beautiful, and it is being sold.

The pronoun it refers back to the house that has been mentioned previously. Pronouns are an extremely useful linguistic device. They allow us to abbreviate our speech without having to repeat whole phrases over and over. 

        Look at that house! 

        That house is beautiful, and that house is being sold.

Instead of repeating ‘that house’ over and over, we replace the expression with the much shorter pronoun ‘it’.

The English pronominal system is organized around the very general cognitive categories of person, number and gender. These categories reflect how we as humans break down the world into its component parts in order to be able to understand it. By looking into the use of pronouns, we can find out about the human mind works.

It is easier to give a few examples than to define the terms rigorously. Consider: I, me, my. These are the so-called ‘first-person’ pronouns. When I am speaking, and I want to say something about myself, I use a first-person pronoun. The fact that first-person pronouns exist shows that first-person reference is an important component of human thinking. We make a critical distinction between referring to ourselves (‘first-person’) and referring to others.

The difference between the three first-person pronouns I, me and my is related to the position in the sentence that they appear in. To a first approximation, the pronoun I appears in subject position, me appears in object position and my appears as a possessor in noun phrases. 

        Subject: I like ice cream. 

        Object: Mary loves me. 

        Possessor: My mother is calling.

Another important property of the English pronoun system is that it makes gender distinctions. Traditionally, the pronoun he is used to refer to biological males. The pronoun she is used to refer to biological females. 

But not all languages make this distinction. In Ewe, a West African language (spoken in Ghana, Togo and Benin), for example, there is a single pronoun e that is used to refer to both either males or females or even inanimate objects.

        e dzo

        he/she/it leave

        ‘He/she/it left.’

In Ewe, there is no way to tell if a man or a woman or an inanimate object is being referred to on the basis of the pronoun alone. Only context will make that clear. If you are talking about your mother, then the pronoun refers to a woman. If you are talking about your father, then the pronoun refers to a man. 

Do Ewe speakers not pay attention to the gender of people? Gender roles are very clearly defined amongst the Ewe. For example, girls from a very early age wear earrings, but boys never do. Girls and boys always have different day names. A man born Friday is called Kofi, but a woman born Friday is called Afi. Males and females have very different gender roles. In spite of these differences, gender distinctions play no role at all in the Ewe pronominal system. 

Definition of Third Person Singular Pronoun

Ewe: e refers to a person or thing

The difference between Ewe and English shows clearly that our minds allow different choices in how to define pronouns with respect to gender. Not all cognitive categories are equally represented in all languages.

Take-away: The use of gender in human language is not written in stone. There are different possibilities that the human language faculty allows for. 

Given this brief background on pronouns in English and Ewe, let’s return to the pronoun wars. It is common nowadays to list your pronoun choices on social media. The New York State court system recognizes non-binary pronoun choices. And in some classrooms in some universities in New York City, students are eager to start the semester by announcing their pronouns in class.

        “What is your name?”

        “What is your major?”

        “What are your pronouns?”

The choices people make can seem bewildering. A summary of the most common pronoun choices that people make, as reported to me by my students, is given below.

He/Him

She/Her

They/Them 

She/They

He/They

They/He

They/She

He/She/They

Any pronouns

The first two options above, He/Him and She/Her, are traditional choices. The real innovation in this system is the third option: the use of They/Them as a personal pronoun. All the other options are combinations of the first three options. 

In addition to these common options, there are some less-common options that people also use. We put these aside for the sake of brevity.

He/She

It/Its

No pronouns

Xe/Xer (so-called ‘neo-pronouns’, pronounced: zee/zer)

In the old-fashioned conception, there are biological males and biological females, and they each have their own pronouns. Men are referred to as He and Him, and women as She and her. But what if your view of the world is more nuanced than just male versus female, boy versus girl, man versus woman? What if you see the world not as a dichotomy between male and female, but as a gradient scale with male on the one side and female on the other? 

For some young people, the choice of pronouns reflects how a person feels about their gender identity, where gender is defined as a set of social roles, expectations and behaviors. A person may choose They/Them as their pronouns if they choose not to identify with traditional masculine or feminine roles. For example, I know of a professor whose first name is Kirby (a gender-neutral name) who does not display clear masculine or feminine gender identifiers, and who uses the pronouns They/Them. 

But what exactly is the linguistic innovation in this new system? What has the young generation actually done from a linguistic point of view? For English speakers, young or old, the following discourse is fine:

    A student entered the office. They wanted a copy of their registration.

In this example, the pronoun they is being used to refer back to a student. But in the example, the pronoun they does not indicate gender. Maybe the speaker does not know the gender identity of the student, and so does not want to use either pronouns he or she. Or maybe the speaker does know the gender identity, but does not think it is relevant to the message being conveyed. The example shows that the pronoun they is gender neutral (not indicating gender).

What is surprising about the example is that normally the pronoun they refers to a group of more than one person or more than one thing:

    I saw the students in front of the building. They were protesting.

In this example, they refers back to the students (a group of more than one student). Putting these two examples together, we conclude that the third person pronouns They/Them/Their can refer to either one person or more than one person. Or to put it in slightly more technical terminology:

Take-away: The third person pronouns They/Them/Their are number neutral.

Young people have simply exploited this already existing property of English pronouns towards their own ends. Since They/Them/Their are number neutral, they can be used to refer to a single individual. But They/Them/Their also do not indicate gender. So a person who does not want to be identified with either traditional masculine or feminine gender roles can elect to use the pronouns They/Them/Their instead of either He/Him/His or She/Her. 

To make the issue crystal clear, I give the actual linguistic definitions below. For the sake of brevity, I put aside uses of He/She which refer to things (e.g., boats) and animals (e.g., pets), and only focus on people below.

Traditional Definitions of English Third Person Pronouns:

He/Him refers to a person who is biological male

She/Her refers to a person who is biologically female

They/Them refers to one or more people (biological sex not specified)

New Definitions of English Third Person Pronouns:

He/Him: refers to a person whose socially male.

She/Her: refers to a person who is socially female

They/Them: refers to one or more people (social gender not specified)

In effect, nothing about the English pronominal system has been radically altered. Pronouns still refer back to people and things that have already been mentioned. Pronouns still encode the cognitive categories person, number and gender. The pronouns They/Them/There are still gender and number neutral. There is still a three-way distinction in third person pronouns: He versus She versus They. The nonbinary pronoun system just tweaks the English pronominal system a little bit, a minor adjustment.

The toolkit available is English grammar. The toolkit has not changed at all, but the way the tools are used has been creatively modified. The existence of a gender and number neutral pronoun They/Them has remained constant. But young people have started using that ‘tool’ toward their own ends.

Nothing about the conception of the world has radically altered either. Long before the pronoun wars, it was easy for me personally to see that people fell along a gradient gender scale. Some people are androgenous, some biological females are more masculine (‘butch’) and some biological males are more feminine. Perhaps the new generation has a more intricate and complete picture of the gradient gender scale, but it is definitely not a completely new conception for the general population.

What has happened instead is a subtle shift in in the definitions of the pronouns, making reference to social gender instead of biological sex. As a consequence, the use of pronouns itself becomes a gender identifier, telling people how you perceive your own gender identity. When you announce your pronouns at the beginning of the semester, you are saying ‘This is my gender identity.’

What happens in more complicated cases? 

A person may choose both the pronouns She and They if they accept either a female designation or a gender-neutral designation. There is nothing in the system above that disallows such a choice. Biological sex is binary: one is either male or female, with a very small set of possible exceptions. But social gender does not have this logical binarity property. Being socially male is not the logical negation of being socially female, or vice versa.

The actual reasons for having multiple pronoun possibilities might be quite complex, and are definitely beyond the scope of this short post. For example, I know of a person who is biologically female, and choses the pronouns They/Them. However, they worked at a bar where people kept using She/Her. So to avoid conflict with coworkers and clients they allowed both They and She as pronouns. Once they stopped working at the bar, they just went back to their preferred choice: They/Them. In very different kind of case, I have heard about a person who is biological female and choses He/They because they are the non-She choices. Any pronoun is acceptable to them other than She. The calculus of pronoun choice in these cases is highly complex.

In effect, the dissociation of pronouns from biological sex gives people a choice of which pronouns to use. In the traditional system, a biological male would be obliged to use the pronouns He/Him. There was no choice. But the concept of social gender is much more fluid (changing) and gradient (non-binary) than the concept of biological sex.  So people are able to choose pronouns to fit their own conception of their gender identity.