Bill Walsh is still ambivalent about ‘they’ as a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun, and spends most of this article griping about ‘mic’ as in ‘short for microphone’ instead of talking about ‘they’.
For many years, I’ve been rooting for — but stopping short of employing — what is known as the singular they as the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun. (Everyone has theirown opinion about this.) He once filled that role, but a male default hasn’t been palatable for decades. Using she in a sort of linguistic affirmative action strikes me as patronizing. Alternating he and she is silly, as are he/she, (s)heand attempts at made-up pronouns. The only thing standing in the way ofthey has been the appearance of incorrectness — the lack of acceptance among educated readers.
What finally pushed me from acceptance to action on gender-neutral pronouns was the increasing visibility of gender-neutral people. The Post has run at least one profile of a person who identifies as neither male nor female and specifically requests they and the like instead of he or she. Trans and genderqueer awareness will raise difficult questions down the road, with some people requesting newly invented or even individually made-up pronouns. The New York Times, which unlike The Post routinely uses the honorifics Mr., Mrs., Miss and Ms., recently used the gender-neutral Mx. at one subject’s request. But simply allowing they for a gender-nonconforming person is a no-brainer. And once we’ve done that, why not allow it for the most awkward of those he or she situations that have troubled us for so many years?
I was a little surprised that the singular they has drawn stronger online reaction, both positive and negative, than the other style changes, especially because we are approaching it pretty cautiously. The stylebook entry retains the old advice to try to write around the problem, perhaps by changing singulars to plurals, before using the singular they as a last resort.
Even as we switch from distracting “normal people” (as Washingtonian magazine put it) with e-mail to distracting freaks like me with email, I suspect that the singular they will go largely unnoticed even by those who oppose it on principle. We’ve used it before, if inadvertently, and I’ve never heard a complaint.
So why they hell should we ‘write around’ the use of ‘they’? Why is it cast as a ‘problem’? Walsh should just adopt the convention and move on, as should we all. So when a writer is confronted with the he/she question, they should do the obvious.
The one use case that still throws me is when someone requests to be referred to as ‘they’ in the first-person, as in ‘Bette Boop was born in Baltimore, where they lived for thirty years before moving to New York.’
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/135773867987
