THEY - Female Fire

My first year of teaching English in a New York City high school, my pruney department chairperson was walking past my open classroom door, and heard me ask my class, “Has everyone finished their essay?” She pulled me out into the hallway so she could chastise me on my usage of the word, “they.”

“The word ‘everyone’ is singular, as I certainly hope you know, therefore it is not qualified by the pronoun, ‘they.’ When you use ‘everyone’ in a sentence, the correct pronoun is ‘he’. ‘Has everyone finished ‘his’ essay?’ is what you should have said.”

As this lecture between us took place centuries ago, she was right, as it happens. Back then, the proper pronoun to use with single nouns such ‘everyone’ or ‘child’—nouns that did not identify male or female or implied both, was something called “the editorial he.” A ‘correct’ English sentence using one of these nouns looked like this:

“Please be sure your child has his textbooks covered by the second week of school. He must also bring two pencils and an eraser.”

That’s right: the masculine ‘he’ was the fallback, and it made me twitchy even then. My compromise was, “Has everyone finished his or her essay?” Some daring feminists of the day got rid of the either/or altogether, and would use what they called “the editorial she”, as in, “Has everyone finished her essay?”

Ironically, ten years or so later, when I moved to Greece and taught English there, Europe learned British-English, and guess what? The British used, “Has everyone finished their essay?”

Because duh.

You can debate this all you like, but the point is, language is FLUID. And those who are flipping their toupees and dropping their reading glasses over the word “they” being used for what they consider a singular person, sorry, you’re either living in an enclave where everyone is a clone of everyone else, or you’re showing that you’ve grown rigid in your old age.

Yes. I said it. I made an ageist comment. But to temper that, I’ll also include those young or old, who only consider the people in their own group ‘people’, and think the rest of us should be slaughtered.

But guess what? “They” has been used as a determiner for a single noun for eons, and by some pretty great writers: Geoffrey Chaucer used it in The Canterbury Tales. William Shakespeare was a fan of the usage, writing it into several of his plays, and two hundred years later, Jane Austen used “they” to describe a single entity in Mansfield Park. The reinvention of the traditionally plural pronoun may seem like it just happened, but “they” has appeared as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun in English literature for centuries.

Today, using “they” to describe individuals who are not gender-specific, or nonbinary people was accepted as correct by the AP Stylebook in 2017. Merriam-Webster made the singular “they” its Word of the Year in 2019.

Let me repeat that: The AP Stylebook and Merriam-Webster say “they” is okay, so get ready to see these two books on a banned list soon.

What’s been forgotten, ignored, or worse, never noticed in the first place, by some of those who’ve designated themselves, (pompously so), as experts in the English language, is that the function of “they” was accepted grammatically until the 18th century, when grammarians decided that the singular “they” was bad—very, very bad. Their reasoning was, as stated by my former department chairperson, that a plural pronoun can’t take a singular referent. They ignored the fact that “you”, which used to be exclusively plural, had undergone this exact change.

They ignored that, one can argue, because their edict was based in fear and bigotry. I’m referring to the “they” term translated into modern-day English as “Two-spirits.”

The following is excerpted from Mary Kate Brogan’s article about history professor Gregory Smithers’ book, RECLAIMING TWO SPIRITS Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America:

“The Two-Spirit community in Native culture has a centuries-long history. ‘Two-Spirit’ is a modern umbrella term, an English translation of the Ojibwe ‘niizh manidoowag,’ which refers to a person who embodies both masculine and feminine spirits. The knowledge and roles associated with it go back centuries. Today, Two-Spirit people use the term to describe fluid gender identities and sexual orientation, but their ancestors also took on important social and spiritual roles in their respective Indigenous communities prior to European colonization of North America in 1492.”

The book centers the narrative of Two-Spirits in their role as keepers of knowledge.

“Europeans targeted Two-Spirit people almost immediately. Starting with the Spanish in the early 16th century, Two-Spirit people were targeted with labels like ‘sodomite,’ hermaphrodite,’ ‘berdache’ — a term with Arabic roots that described a ‘slave’ or a boy kept for pederastic purposes — and more. That language was itself a form of violence because it shaped the written archival records that scholars used to write their histories, and it distorted how non-Native people interpreted Indigenous sexual expression and gender fluidity.

Physical violence was also a feature of European encounters with Two-Spirit people. That violence often rose to the level of genocide. In fact, genocidal violence that targeted Two-Spirit people from the early 1500s was no accident. Europeans recognized that Two-Spirit people played important roles as trusted elders in their respective communities, served as medicine people, educators and storytellers, and took on myriad other roles. In other words, Two-Spirit people were, and are today, knowledge keepers.

So, when Europeans targeted Two-Spirit people with violence, they were actively working to destroy a vital link in the cultural, social and linguistic knowledge of nearly 200 Native American communities.”

It’s funny, in a not-funny way, how some who perceive themselves to be our ‘leaders’, be they in the education, literary, or political realm, are outraged by the use of “they” when used to describe a singular someone who doesn’t fit into their idea of what the world should look like, act like, and feel like. But they have no problem using pejoratives to describe women, people of color, and people in the LGBTQIA+.

I wonder if we will always be a species that seeks to debase, erase, or violently destroy anything that we don’t identify with or understand?