Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school
English, Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer
in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest book, Don’t
Throw Out Your Bible, from which the essay below is
excerpted, should be availalbe by the end of the year (2023).
His monograph, A Christmas You Can Believe In,
can be requested as a PDF file from graphikos@gto.net.
A
young woman asks me to refer to her as “They”.
“I
won’t do that,” I say. “’They’
is a plural pronoun, and there’s only one of you. You’re
a ‘she’.”
“You
don’t understand,” she says. “’They’
is my preferred pronoun. ‘They’ is my pronoun.”
“No,”
I reply. “It’s not your pronoun. It’s not
anybody’s private pronoun. It’s the community’s
pronoun, and community usage determines how it should be used.”
Language
is a community enterprise. Meanings are determined by common
usage. That’s how a community is able to communicate.
If you hijack a word to make it mean something else, what
you create is not a new meaning but confusion, maybe even
offence.
Consider
this exchange in a UBC classroom between Dean Walter Gage
and a student named Gillette.
Gillette
takes his seat just as the bell stops ringing. The Dean says,
“That was a close shave, Gillette!”
Gillette
replies: “Yes, sir. I gauged it just right!”
Gage
retorts: “You’re a gay blade today, Gillette.”
In 1960, the final pun got groans and giggles. Today it would
get gasps and a harassment complaint. Because in the intervening
years the word “gay” got hijacked.
Of
course, the story illustrates the fact that within a language
community meanings do in fact shift. But those shifts are
not individual; they occur within the broader community and
come to be generally understood. So we have come to accept
the use of “they” when gender is uncertain, but
that has become a community convention, not a private use.
Individuals
within a language community are expected to communicate in
the language of that community. Sign language for the deaf
is a reasonable exception, but even that accommodation involves
an identifiable community. But as for the young woman in question,
her gender was not in doubt – to me, at least, if not
to her.
