In Defense of the Singular They

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.