They/Them Are All of Us

 Being a person of a certain age, my daughter calls me a product of the fifties no matter that she is a generation off.  My formative years were the 70’s,  You know the 70’s: fresh off of the civil rights fight of the 60’s, women’s lib.  Hippies and psychedelics, vietnam war protests and free love (thanks to the pill) and Roe v. Wade.  The ERA was fought for and lost.  Women burned their bras, blacks grew their Afros and sported jerry curls and raised their fists in black power. The era of green peace and the wave of ecology.  Farm workers organized under Cesar Chavez for which most cities had named a street after. Gays rushed out of the closet in a flurry of anti discrimination legislation.

I grew up in a time of radical change casting off oppression.  It was an exciting and heady time to be young.

But my street creds not withstanding, to my daughter, her mother, who was and still is considered a somewhat of a rebel, is a stodgy antique who can’t wrap her head around the more than a little syntactically awkward, if not erroneous, new use of ‘them’ and ‘they’, completely ripping the rules of grammar.  Not that I always adhere to proper grammar, but this is a big one for me.  

I was completely caught off guard, by the vehemence of my daughter’s reaction.

“Use ‘them’ or ‘they’ in a sentence”, I challenged her.

“Ok.” she says, “Someone leaves a hat in a restaurant.  We don’t know who left the hat or whether it was a man or a woman, so we say, “They left their hat”.

“Touche!  Now say it when you know who it is that you are talking about.”, I answer.

The conversation ended abruptly with an ageist slur about me being stuck in the 50’s.

I wonder, who is this woman? This child I raised? Shouldn’t she know me, having grown up with me as her mother?  I’m nonplussed that after years of hosting theater kids, which often are kids that color outside the lines of social norms, that she doesn’t understand me at all.  She knows my attitude about bigotry of any kind, doesn’t she? She knows that I don’t just “talk the talk” but I fervently “walk the walk”, doesn’t she?

Yet, as she announces that she has a old theater friend coming to live with her, someone I had known as a boy, and she informs me, is now a non-binary ‘they’, and   she, basically, tells me that she is providing a safe space for ‘them’ and if I can’t get the pronouns straight I am not welcome in her home.

Suddenly I am the enemy and if I don’t use ‘they/them’ properly (or improperly) I am a danger to the safety and wellbeing of her friend by making them defend their entire life choices.  Wow!  In my opinion, that is way too much power to place on the use of two little words.

I realized that I must check my attitudes about the breaking of the GOP pronoun-antecedent agreement and realize that these two words, ‘them’ and ‘they’, no longer have a meaningful definition and now are, by no official consensus, utterly non-specific.  What’s more maddening is that there has been no proposal for words to replace the plural meanings that ‘they’ and ‘them’ no longer have.  This is not a cultural thing with me, but a syntactical thing. But still… this isn’t about semantics. This is about labeling people correctly

So here I am, apparently in what my daughter calls my battle to normalize the use of ‘them’ and ‘they’ as singular pronouns, and need to call on my considerable experience of not quite overcoming the limitations of being a female in a society where you were told what you cannot be or wear or say. 

I feel judged, not on my attitudes, but on my knowledge and use of labels.  Labels are everything now.  You can be as woke as a code monkey strung out on Red Bull, but if you don’t have the lingo down, in my case, apparently that makes me an old racist, sexist, and every other negative “ist”  neocon from the 50’s (I swear, I only spent 2 1/2 years in the fifties!). A horribly oppressive person to be sure!

What I am is a throwback to a time where we shunned labels (except for labeling those who didn’t share our enlightenment).   The 70’s taught us that labels were a bad thing.  You needed to accept each individual as who they were, not some labeled entity.  Prejudice was relying on preconceived notions about assigned labels. Labels were just handles to grab us by and throw us in a box. And at a young age, I embraced this as a natural fact.  I still do.

Now you are supposed to figure out gender preference, sexual preferences and any other identifying label prior to opening a conversation. 

But in my battle with the ‘them/they’ construct, I have decided we need to take the next step; we can and must go forward without gender-based pronouns.  That way no mistakes are made and no one can feel judged or marginalized, and we needn’t be afraid to talk to each other.

We need to become an androgynous society full stop.  

The Man/Woman and Boy/Girl gender roles have always been the basis of oppression for those who do not fit the biases inherent in those roles. The only way to combat this oppression is to eradicate the notion of what is male or female.

No men or women, just adults

No boys or girls, just children  

No women’s health clinics, just female genitailia clinics.

No women’s or men’s or boy’s or girl’s clothing, just pants and shirts, dresses and skirts, bras and underpants.

No teams or organizations based on gender.  After all, didn’t this lend itself to the sexism that we’ve endured and fought against since the 70’s?

Considering all of this, ‘they’ and ‘them’ may actually be the first step to true label-less equality.  The use of ‘they’ and ‘them’ should actually be the default pronouns in our society.  No assumptions or precognition required.

However, we need some rules to keep from sounding illiterate.  

For example, instead of saying:

“She is over there.” or “He is over there” 

It would be:

“Them is over there” for a singular reference, an awkward switch of plurality, but it could work.

“They are over there” for a plural reference

“Their bag is over there.” for the possessive pronoun.

“Leave them to it.” could be plural or singular but doesn’t break the pronoun-antecedent agreement

I can just hear people say, but I like being a gender! Some have fought hard to be a man or a woman, and some people go through major surgery to become one or the other. I get it. I have been and still am happy to identify as a girl/woman. But what does it really mean to be a man or a woman? The question hit me head on when my neurologist informed me that ever since I hit menopause I am not a woman anymore.  I’m not sure if that makes me non-binary or nothing at all. Most of the time it feels like the latter.

So, to all of us theys and thems, here’s to reality where everyone can be accepted as themselves.