They. Them. We. Us.

My initial reaction, now quite a while ago, to the use of they and them as singular pronouns for those who identify as both she and he—or neither–was as a grammar nerd. How could one word mean two different things? How could “they” refer to both a single human and a group of humans?

This bothered me the way the whole man/mankind argument had bothered me decades before. You know, the pushback from those who insisted that Peace on Earth, Good will to Men included all people. Because, they said, we understand “man” and “mankind” to be inclusive. Because, they said, there exists in our language something called the “generic man.” And those who don’t accept this generic thing are just playing the PC card. The generic man idea was simultaneously deeply sexist and just bad (and confusing) word use. One word cannot mean two different things: an individual male human and all humans.

An aside: To test the notion that there was understanding of the generic, inclusive “man,” researchers asked elementary school girls and boys to draw pictures to illustrate a hypothetical history book with supposedly gender-inclusive chapters titled “Colonial Man” and “Democratic Man.” All of the boys and just about all of the girls drew pictures of men only.

So, I have struggled, wondering why our language has gender-neutral plural pronouns while lacking gender-neutral singular pronouns. (Happily, at least, we don’t assign gender to inanimate objects like the Romance languages: la chaise, the feminine chair; le bureau, the masculine desk.)

I know and love that language is a living thing, which means it grows and changes. And I love that people can take control of language and use it in powerful and empowering ways. So, in every way other than grammatically, I embrace they and them as personal pronouns of choice.

Here is an alternative! Ursula LeGuinn contemplated it when she wrote The Left Hand of Darkness about a world inhabited by androgynous humans: The singular pronoun per. It stands for person. The whole person, the complete and complicated person: female, male, androgynous, non-binary, intersex, trans. Just us. The inclusive us.

How about it?

Lauren Kessler
My pronouns are per and pers