“Hey, someone’s calling you.”
“Tell them I’ll call them back later.”
“Uh, okay, they just wanted me to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“They say that everyone has a right to their opinion.”
“I make videos and post them on the Internet. I’m well aware that people have opinions. Now hang up the phone – my family’s coming to visit, and I have to get ready before they get here.”
Did that sound like a natural conversation to you? Did you understand what was being said?
Great, then you have no problem using they as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun. There were six singular they, them, or theirs in that little dialogue, and every one of them sounds perfectly natural. You can go back and count if you don’t believe me.
You don’t know the gender of the person on the phone, so you call them they. “Everyone” is a singular noun, but when you refer back to it, you say “they” – the same goes for family. We could try the dialogue again while making an effort to avoid the singular they.
“Hey, someone’s calling you.”
“Tell him or her I’ll call him or her back later.”
“Uh, okay, he or she just wanted me to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“He or she says that everyone has a right to his or her opinion.”
“I make videos and post them on the Internet. I’m well aware that people have opinions. Now hang up the phone – my family’s coming to visit, and I have to get ready before… my family gets here.”
That sounds so much more awkward. Saying “his or her” or “he or she” just doesn’t work well, and nobody is going to legitimately speak like that in their day-to-day lives – plus, it runs into some issues with gender, which we’ll come back to.
On top of that, “everyone” and “family” are both singular.
“Everyone is here.”
“My family is here.”
But when you refer back to them, it only makes sense to say they, their, them, or themselves.
“Everyone is here, but are they ready?”
“My family is gone, but they are coming back soon.”
These are the kinds of sentences that native English speakers use regularly. Singular they isn’t new or abnormal in this regard. In fact, it’s been used by Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Jane Austen, and tons more authors who are generally regarded as having written in very formal, “proper” English. There’s a whole argument here about why we revere all these old white writers as being the pinnacle of language and literature, but that’s for another video.
We also need to acknowledge that some people aren’t comfortable using he or she and prefer being referred to as they. Our world isn’t only men and women. People can be gender non-conforming, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, bigender, or any other number of identities. And oftentimes, these people choose to identify with they/them pronouns – and we need to respect that.
This is the usage that trips people up most often – when you think you know someone’s gender and continue talking about them. For example: “That’s my friend, Alex. They’re really excited to meet you,” or “Ah, I think Sam left their phone here.”
I know this can be hard to adjust to and can sound clunky. I still mess it up all the time myself with my non-binary friends. But we have to try. Refusing to respect someone’s gender identity by continually misgendering them honestly just perpetuates the hatred against gender non-binary people and delegitimizes their existence.
And if you’re still on the side of never using they as a singular pronoun, you’re going to be on the wrong side of history. The American Dialect Society chose singular they as their Word of the Year in 2015, and the Washington Post added it to their style guide in the same year. Language is changing, as it always does. Actually, I’ve done an entire video about how language changes over time, which I’ll link to in the description, and you can see just how pointless it is to enforce arbitrary language rules.
The best part about all of this, though, is that this has already happened. When we speak in the second person, we use you for the singular. Actually, we don’t really have a great second-person plural. Lots of people say “you guys” or “you all,” and some people say “y’all” or “yous,” but it’s generally agreed upon that you is for one person.
Except, go back and few hundred years and you was only plural or formal. Thou was the familiar or singular form. If you’ve ever studied French, it’s like the difference between tu for familiar/singular and vous for formal/plural. Only in English, we dropped thou completely and started using you as a singular.
Yeah, we’ve actually already taken a word that was almost exclusively plural and turned it into an almost exclusively singular word. And I don’t run into many language purists who are still walking around using thou nowadays.
This is a change that can happen. It’s a change that has already happened. And to be honest, I think it’s inevitable. The best thing you can do is get on board with it as soon as possible, and if you meet anyone who asks you to use they/them pronouns, just do it. It may take you a little while to adjust, but you’ll get there.
This video is a part of a series I’m doing for Everyday Feminism, a website dedicated to helping you stand up to and break down everyday oppression. I’ll leave a link down below so you can check out my previous videos in the series.
Please don’t forget to subscribe and thumbs-up this video if you liked it! Thanks so much for watching, I hope you have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you next week. Bye!
