“To mess with our pronouns is to mess with our sense of the order of things, what’s up and what’s down — life itself,” the Columbia University linguist, prolific author, columnist, and podcaster John McWhorter emphasizes in his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. “Pronouns are used so frequently, so below the level of consciousness, and correspond to categories so fundamental to human experience that they are all deeply resistant to change by fiat.”
Most any language’s limited number of pronouns, so ubiquitous and indispensable for shorthand communication as to be used more or less subconsciously, are particularly resistant to abrupt transmogrification even as they may gradually streamline or grow more complicated depending on context and perhaps, the author suggests, a certain degree of chaos theory. Unapologetically named after a bit in an old Daffy Duck cartoon, and replete with pop cultural touchstones, McWhorter’s volume affectionately showcases an array of vernacular innovation around the world and throughout the ages, from the Americas to the Shetland Islands to Japan, and the ways in which languages and patois almost always organically evolve to fit generation upon generation of real people’s needs, experiences, and pronunciations.
The contrasting details of different language(s) over time, culminating for now in today’s pronoun controversies, could make for an arduous read. But with the flair of a veteran professor bringing linguistics alive year after year to bleary-eyed undergraduate students and preoccupied podcast listeners alike, McWhorter manages to make an intimidating topic zestier, more accessible, and more provocative than might reasonably be expected.
And it is, mind you, about as touchy a subject as exists, especially for a man employed by Columbia University and the New York Times. It was sometime in 2005, in a library at Brown University, that I first realized gender theory was likely to become the next great front in America’s culture wars. I was studying alone, but nearby, a transgender woman began holding court on postmodern gender gnosticism before a couple of enraptured white girls who nodded along, enthralled. Gender was purely arbitrary and entirely socially constructed, they preached, an oppressive stricture imposed by the hateful patriarchy for domination and control. True social justice would entail abandoning the barbaric practice of assigning gender at birth and dispensing once and for all with the pernicious fiction that there were any meaningful differences across the obsolete gender binary.
I’d heard variations on that sort of line before, and it didn’t usually bother me. I’m generally a live-and-let-live kind of guy, and even though the theory captured precisely none of my experience as a garden-variety heterosexual male, I could believe that it was the authentic sensibility of a small subset of the population. But what troubled me was that this particular evangelist had left no room for living and letting live: theirs was a crusading faith, seeking to replace rather than supplement the conversation. And a time would come when infidels would need to be reeducated, or worse. The dogma wasn’t going to play well in Peoria, that was for sure, and a confrontation down the line seemed inevitable.
Having triumphed in the fight for gay marriage, and with fantasies of a permanent Democratic majority in the wake of former President Barack Obama’s reelection, it was not so surprising to see the LGBT “movement,” really better described as an industry by the 2010s, pivot to another, more expansive cause. What was more surprising was that, in addition to elevating transgenderism, the amorphous label of “queer” became increasingly emphasized as an identity category despite not necessarily involving any sexual activity or alteration.
There were some tangible signs of the new gender regime, including celebrities brandishing nonbinary children, tampons in boys’ bathrooms, and the ever-unpopular phenomenon of transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports. But more of the change took place through the unfamiliar words and customs polite company was suddenly expected to adopt, from terms including “cisgender” and “two-spirit” to specifying one’s preferred pronouns in professional communications. It was a substantially symbolic revolution enacted primarily through the top-down imposition of new vocabularies and protocols.
Today, that gender revolution lies mortally wounded in terms of federal policy, at least, if not rates of self-identification. The campaign to use newfangled lingo and taboos to strong-arm society into beliefs and practices the vast majority fundamentally never accepted spurred a massive backlash as the movement got further out over its skis. Indeed, as McWhorter traces, language has historically had a way of frustrating the ambitions of pedants and politicos straining to either freeze it in place or engineer it in prescribed directions.
Yet, for all the cultural backlash against fluorescent-haired bullies ranting their gospel on TikTok, the bulk of transgender and nonbinary people are just folks getting through another day — friends, neighbors, colleagues, fellow shlubs stuck in traffic — who deserve the same baseline dignity afforded anyone else. What exactly that means in terms of navigating pronoun practices and gender-exclusive spaces or might mean in another few decades is up in the air as etiquette evolves organically in all the millions of day-to-day interactions among various and sundry human beings. Time will tell, rather than edicts from human resources executives.
Contrived gender-neutral neologisms such as “ze” and “fae” seem unlikely to ever gain much traction, McWhorter suggests, being alien and unintuitive enough to feel like an imposition to most people. But the good old faithful standard “they” has long since become the default pronoun for groups of mixed or unspecified gender, and an easy reflexive gender-neutral singular well before contemporary pronoun controversies had entered the public consciousness. Squarer and greyer demographics still chafe against the ambiguous grammar of “they” in singular versus plural, but it’s rather seamlessly become a new norm for most under 40 or 50.
“Using a new pronoun would be like trying not to ever touch anything with your middle fingers,” McWhorter writes. “It just couldn’t be. So we must work with what we already have.”
Jesse Adams is the writer, editor, and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.