This is a text of an email I just sent to Laura Graham, Professor of Legal Writing and Director of Legal Analysis, Writing and Research at Wake Forest University School of Law. The North Carolina Lawyer is a monthly publication of the North Carolina Bar Association.
I am writing in response to your column in the November 2019
issue of the North Carolina Lawyer. I am a licensed attorney who has been practicing
law in North Carolina since 1982, and I have served as the Director of the
Career Development Office at the University of North Carolina School of Law
since 2005.
I was deeply (deeply!) disappointed to read your column on
the singular they. While you accept the use of the term for non-binary persons (tacitly
acknowledging that language changes and the formerly incorrect and
ungrammatical can become acceptable and correct), you resist its use when it
does not refer to a singular non-binary person (refusing to accept that language
changes and the formerly incorrect and ungrammatical can become acceptable and
correct). It is, to my mind, and the mind of many others, a plainly outmoded
and sexist construction, and defending its use is increasingly, well, indefensible.
As quoted in the NPR piece below “When
you utter ‘he,’ you always bring a male to mind.” It’s that simple.
For starters, the use of the singular they in English is not
new at all, but has been well-established in both spoken language, and yes, written
language too, for centuries. Merriam-Webster, in declaring “they” the word of
the year in 2019, noted that “English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to
correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.”
Although singular they has a long and venerable history both in spoken
and written language, as noted by this NPR piece from 2016: “It
shows up in Shakespeare, Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. Jane
Austen was always
saying things like ‘everybody has their failing,’ . . .the Victorian
grammarians made it a matter of schoolroom dogma that one could only say
"Everybody has his failing," with the understanding that ‘he’ stood
in for both sexes” – the masculine embracing the feminine, as it were. The NPR
piece has a link to a blog
posting which contains a detailed history of the use of the singular they and
the resistance thereto, which resistance really got serious during the second
wave of feminism – happily in my lifetime! – noting that the prohibition
against the generic they
wasn't really discredited until the 1970s, when the
second-wave feminists made the generic masculine the paradigm of sexism in
language. Male critics ridiculed their complaints as a "libspeak
tantrum" and accused them of suffering from "pronoun envy." But
most writers now realize that the so-called gender-neutral "he" is
anything but. Nobody would ever say, "Every candidate thanked his spouse,
including Hillary." When you utter "he," you always bring a male
to mind.
My early-morning research on a busy day (would that I had even more time
for this important subject) indicates that, as you say a fair number of
your colleagues have put it, “the train has left the station” when it comes to the use of
the singular they, not only in speech, but in an increasing acceptance in
formal writing and style guides. Yes, a
phrase or sentence can sometimes be recast (generally by using the plural) to
avoid the singular they, but the only reason to insist that every use of the
singular they be recast or rewritten is based upon the belief that the singular
they is “wrong” in some sort of immutable way. However, language is not
immutable and unchanging, but rather, as the Linguistic Society of America put
it in Is English Changing?, “Language is always changing, evolving, and adapting to the needs of its
users.”
Why is this so important? Language and words help form our beliefs and
images and concepts of the world. To go back to where I started, “When you utter ‘he,’ you always bring a
male to mind,” reinforcing the patriarchal belief that men are more
important than women. (As a 16th century grammarian so neatly put it, “the masculine gender is more worthy
than the feminine. . .“) I am proud to
say that I have done my small part to depict the world in a more egalitarian
way and have consistently used the generic singular they not only in speech,
but in my writing, both informal and formal – including all my legal writing – for
as long as I can remember.
Change happens because we make it happen. I urge you to rethink your
resistance to this issue and write in a way, and encourage your students to
write in a way, that sends the message that the feminine gender is, always, as
worthy as the masculine.
