The highlights of summer, for me, include quiet nights at a family cottage, a swim in the pond and watching my 82-year-old, very traditional Eastern European father struggle with my son’s pronouns. I love the way my dad slaps his forehead, promising he will get it right next time. It’s a rite of passage and more people should get on board.
Not long ago, I suffered the same affliction, regularly misgendering my trans son who uses the pronouns he/him. I blamed my love of language and grammar. But then I took a long, hard look at myself, and wondered if my persistent mistakes cloaked a deeper bias. I could blame grammar, but to quote Taylor Swift, “It’s me, hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.”
Now, when I encounter someone who says they struggle with pronouns, I wonder how much of it is grammatical habit and how much is unconscious (or deliberate) bias. Unfortunately, the answer is often a bit of both.
When does The Globe use ‘they/their/them’ as a singular pronoun?
Let’s start with grammar, the easier half to tackle. English has always had a pronoun problem, long before anyone put them into an e-mail signature. When speaking generally, can he refer to everyone, not just men? That fell out of favour as sexist in the 1970s. So did the trend of calling babies it when you don’t know if it is a boy or a girl. But these examples touch on a deeper problem: There’s no pronoun for third person singular that does not refer to gender.
This void irritated grammarians for so long they dubbed it “the missing word,” said Dennis Baron, author of What’s Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She.
There are plenty of times when you don’t know a person’s gender, or it’s irrelevant. For example, says Baron, you shouldn’t have to say, “The student forgot his or her book.” We once had an obvious fix for that, in use since the 14th century: singular they.
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It wasn’t until the 19th century that it fell out of use, when critics started to complain that the singular they didn’t agree with its noun in number, based on a grammatical “zombie rule,” said Baron.
Since then, he has collected over 200 instances of gender-neutral pronouns invented to fill the gap, including thon, which was coined in 1858 and included in the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 1934 only to be dropped in 1961. Heer, himer and hiser were coined in 1911 by an insurance executive. Not long after, a D. Smith in Iowa floated the idea of pham and phem.
Add to that list the proliferation of neo-pronouns, such as ze and zir, and the options quickly become overwhelming. To people offended by the idea of making new words to address the pronoun issue, Baron offers the reminder that all words are invented. It’s only what sticks that becomes language.
In this sense, creating or changing words has always been political and this unwavering belief that a vocabulary is a solid thing usually masks a conservative agenda. Baron points out that there was some debate in the 19th century about whether a woman could not become an American president because the U.S. Constitution refers to the president as he. That argument was resurrected in op-eds in 2015, when Hillary Clinton was being discussed as a presidential candidate, reminding us that grammar is still brandished as a respectable way to endorse people’s discriminatory beliefs.
Kirby Conrod, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, observed that many cisgender people now introduce themselves with pronouns, or include them in their e-mail signatures because they, too, get misgendered.
“This is especially common among women, who’ve said that their colleagues will just assume they’re a man due to casual workplace sexism. I think there’s lots of reasons people want some say in how they’re addressed and spoken about, and the very minor move of sticking pronouns in one’s e-mail signature is a great way to accomplish that,” said Conrod.
As a bonus, it signals to your trans colleagues that you are not a raging transphobe, they added.
If you regularly misgender people and think grammatical habit is your issue, Conrod suggested approaching it the same way you would when learning another language. Aim for repetition and reinforcement, and if you make a mistake, use the correct pronoun several times. “I always recommend that if you mess up a pronoun, say the entire sentence again to make it stick in your brain,” they said.
You don’t need to go as far as Rosie O’Donnell, who tattooed “they” on her wrist after misgendering her child too many times – but that would probably work too.
While Conrod observed that anyone born in the 1980s or later struggle less with the language part, bias is unfortunately ageless.
Confronting our internal biases is the harder task. I began to examine my reaction when I stumbled. Did part of me want to revolt every time I was corrected? Yes. Did I appreciate being policed by my kid? No. Did I want to cause emotional injury to my son who was already struggling – absolutely not. In my best moments, I understand how devastating it would be to not be accepted for who you are.
In our current political moment, using proper pronouns – or not – is inextricably tied to punishing policies. Hours after Trump’s return to office on January 20, 2025, the U.S. government issued an order recognizing only the two “sexes” that are assigned at birth. And in Kansas, a law passed this year forcing trans people to use washrooms matching their biological sex at birth. (The latter led to a group of self-described “bearded” and “burly” trans men protesting the law – by obeying it.) You don’t like trans men? Make sure they have zero bathrooms available to them.
To push back against the hate, you don’t have to be perfect. Take a cue from my dad, who immediately got on board with his grandson’s pronouns but still falters, slapping his forehead in frustration.
“I’ll get it right,” he tells the both of us. “I just need to practise.”
Leah Eichler, a self-proclaimed word nerd, writes regularly about our evolving use of language.