Peter Smagorinsky is an emeritus professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Education. He is the 2023 recipient of the American Educational Research Association Lifetime Contribution to Cultural-Historical Research Award.
In this guest column, Smagorinsky discusses the increasingly terse debate about pronouns, fueled by an increase in young people preferring to identify as “they” in school and life.
By Peter Smagorinsky
“My pronouns are U! S! A!” (Eagle scream!) – Olivia Dunne, LSU gymnast and TikTok influencer, at a patriotic-military-themed NASCAR event.
Who knew that a part of speech would become one of the most contentious political issues of the decade and serve as the leading edge of the culture wars?
The problem is not the innocuous pronouns themselves. It’s how people have begun using them. Pronouns have been recruited to challenge the long-standing gender binary in which only men and women exist. This assertion has been met with blowback from those who accept Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s insistence that “There are two genders. Male and female. Trust the science.”
The English language is gendered in many, but not all ways. Languages derived from Latin and Greek have a peculiarity that somehow was dodged in the formation of English: the assignment of gender to inanimate objects. “Table” is feminine in Spanish (la mesa) and French (la table), but is masculine in German (der Tisch). Imagine the trouble we’d be in if the parts of speech known as “articles” (the, a) were gendered in English.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
The structure of language reflects what a culture needs to know and do, and, in turn, shapes what people end up knowing and doing. Linguists have used the hypothesis of linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis) to describe how a language’s structure shapes our worldview and ways of thinking.
My Mexican colleagues are adamant, for instance, that gendered parts of speech embody a worldview. They argue that “el sol” (the sun) and “la luna” (the moon) provide an ideology that Mexican people internalize subconsciously. The masculine sun is at the center of the galaxy, the feminine moon is a satellite to the Earth. Both have power. But the masculine sun lights the worlds that orbit around it, while the feminine moon is subordinate to earthly gravity. Not coincidentally, Mexico is a nation saturated with machismo.
Unpacking the ideology behind articles like “the” is fortunately not an issue in 2020s USA. But those pronouns. My oh my.
When I grew up, there were boys and men, girls and women and what people called “queers” and other pejorative names. Pronouns were limited to he and she, but not “they” for a singular reference (at least in grammar books). Further, masculine pronouns were the default option for a group of people, making it proper to say, “A teacher should care for his students,” even as most teachers were (and still are) women. The world revolved around the gravity of men, even when the referents were women.
Pronouns can matter beyond their gendered status. I’m now reading “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi biologist who seeks to find a synthesis between Western science and Indigenous wisdom. Her attention to pronouns is less concerned with he and she, and more with the “grammar of animacy.”
Taking the Indigenous perspective that plants, animals, and rocks have souls, she makes the case that referring to them as “it” denies their spirituality and helps people degrade the natural environment through disrespect and abuse. Abandoning this convention, she believes, would alter how people view and engage with the natural world. “It’s all in the pronouns,” she says.
The culture wars have focused on gendered pronouns, rather than those that objectify and diminish nature. Many in academia take the view that those who refuse to change their pronoun usage to accommodate nonbinary people are antediluvian knuckle-draggers who must be blasted into a higher state of consciousness. I’ll confess now that I do understand the resistance to change, because early in life, I accepted virtually all of the beliefs and biases held by those who share Greene’s male and female perspective.
In my first few decades, I internalized every assumption about nonbinary people that my environment made available, which was the only perspective available. I was as bigoted as everyone around me in the 1950s and 1960s. Only in the 1970s did I realize that gay and lesbian people were among my friends and relatives.
That recognition helped to change my mind, as it has done for many. Even so, I would wince when people said, “Does everyone have their book?” because “everyone” is a singular term that needs singular pronouns. Properly, one would say, “Does everyone have his or her book?” albeit in ways that marginalize roughly 5% of the population.
Accepting trans people took a lot longer, and again, it was getting to know people that initiated a change of heart and mind. Some were trans, and among them, some were admirable and some less so. I also got to know heterosexual people who were awful, forcing me to consider that sexuality wasn’t what I should foreground in my appreciation of others. It was integrity.
My intention here is not to signal my own virtue or suggest I’ve been on a path to enlightenment. I’ve had to reject my childhood socialization to gender and sexuality to appreciate the humanity of people different from myself. That process was neither short nor easy.
I have met many good people who roll their eyes at the current pronoun debate, even as they generally are socially liberal and inclusive. It’s ungrammatical, they say, to use “they” as singular, and thus verboten. Others wonder why people single out their gender identity for emphasis in their email signatures (he, him, his), and not other salient traits, such as vegetarian, Dawg fan, tall. Even among people who are on board with social harmony and respect for people different from themselves, the pronoun issue can invite resistance.
And so pronouns, a humble part of speech, have become ideologically loaded, even for those who call themselves liberal. Language is always under construction. I’ve resisted many changes, such as the ways in which “literally” — that is, what actually happened — is now available to describe its opposite, the figurative, as in “My head literally exploded!” After initially rejecting the use of “they” to describe an individual, I have accepted that its political usage has enough value that I’ve begun to use it, if reluctantly.
What should you do? That’s up to you. But I do hope you think about the implications of language choices and how they shape perceptions of people. And while you’re at it, consider speaking respectfully of plants, animals, and inanimate objects. It’s getting hot out there.
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