They/them
A few years ago, I was surprised to find out that there was a debate–grammatically speaking–about the validity of using “they/them” pronouns in reference to an individual person whose gender identity was nonbinary; surprised, because while my knowledge of English grammar was in itself modest, I had what I considered to be a good ear, and my ear told me that singular they, them, and their sounded natural and were therefore grammatically correct. Which they were.
“I admire the student who stood up to their teacher. They were very brave.” The pronouns here are used not to indicate that the student is nonbinary, necessarily, but that their gender is irrelevant to the point being made.
I will refer to this kind of usage as gender-neutral, to distinguish it from the nonbinary usage of they/them. I'll also refer to cases that indicate uncertainty as gender-neutral: “Someone broke into my car and stole my laptop. I hope the police catch them.”
A lot of people had been familiar with those gender-neutral usages long before the discourse surrounding nonbinary they/them. What I recently discovered was that this wasn't always the case; the singular and gender-neutral they wasn’t always accepted as it is today. There was, among grammarians at least, a lively debate on the topic. Here’s a quick breakdown of it, using the example sentence “Everyone can think for himself/herself/themself/themselves”:
1— Apparently, for many years, “Everyone can think for himself” was the only accepted variant by grammarians–chief among whom was a woman, incidentally–who argued that the masculine pronoun inherently includes the feminine.
2– The feminist critique to that variant doesn’t need explanation, so the variant “Everyone can think for herself” was proposed: The feminine, instead, includes the masculine.
3– When people freely alternated between the above variants, it didn’t come out fifty-fifty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the masculine variant dominated the feminine in frequency by a large margin, so the second variant could not achieve its intended purpose.
(An anecdotal aside: In a manuscript I wrote during my PhD, there was a passage about a hypothetical pig farmer. I chose to write it as such: “A farmer can group the heaviest third of her herd into... Similarly, she places...etc.” When I sent the draft to my supervisor, he took note of my choice of pronouns, did not object to it, but wrote to me that he considered it curious that when I thought of a pig farmer, I imagined a woman. That wasn’t the case. Rather, it was a deliberate debiasing and restoration of some kind of imagined fair balance, which I think is the essence and perhaps flaw of variant 2, and its eventual outcome, highlighted in point 3. People will alternate the first two forms, or write things like "he or she" or he/she, agonizing over their order, then statistics reveal an unwanted outcome anyway.)
4- The side that eventually won out was the currently accepted one: the singular, gender-neutral variant: “Everyone can think for themself (not themselves, by the way, because everyone is singular)”.
All of this is to say that the naturalness of gender-neutral they is not something that has always existed; it came through the dynamic evolution of language. Which brings me to a minor difficulty that I've been having with the nonbinary they/them; a difficulty which I think only time will resolve.
There are four cases for using the singular pronoun they (as defined by Merriam-Webster, who actually named they as their word of the year in 2019):
A— used with a singular indefinite pronoun antecedent: “No one has to go if they don't want to”.
B— used with a singular antecedent to refer to an unknown or unspecified person: “An employee with a grievance can file a complaint if they need to”.
C— used to refer to a single person whose gender is intentionally not revealed. “A student was found with a knife in their backpack Monday, district spokeswoman Renee Murphy confirmed. The student, whose name has not been released, ...”.
D— used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary: “Shelley, who calls themself intersex, claims that they feel liberated by the new nomenclature”.
Considering my complete comfort with usages A to C— these fall under the gender-neutral category–I had thought that I would have zero friction adopting usage D; that is, until I actually started using it routinely. If you happen to know nonbinary people and know people in common with them, these third-person pronouns come into speech quite frequently.
I listed those dictionary definitions of they, and omitted its plural definitions, to explain the precise nature of my quibble. It isn’t about the singular/plural ambiguities that some people might claim to experience. Singular they has been around for a long time, alongside the plural, so an objection to nonbinary pronouns on that basis is either unfounded or cynical, because in the vast majority of cases, ambiguities are resolved by context. (Although it’s worth noting that ambiguities are still possible, and if anything, they’re intellectually amusing: “A person is guilty of conspiracy if, together with one or more others, they ... “).
The difficulty I have is that usage D (nonbinary) is somewhat at odds with usages A-C (gender-neutral). They are not logically at odds, but their rationales are almost opposite.
If I tell you, “I admire the student who stood up to their teacher. They were very brave,” my intention is to either hide the student’s gender or bring less attention to it. Essentially, I’m degendering the sentence. Moreover, in this usage the gender-neutral pronoun often refers to a person that we mention in passing. I’m sparing you the detail of the student's gender because you either don’t know them, their gender is immaterial to the anecdote, or both. If I were telling you their life story, I would likely reveal their gender at some point.
On the other hand, if I talk to you routinely and at length about a common friend who is nonbinary, such as: “I really like their cooking. They’re bringing stew to the potluck... I met their mother the other day”, then it feels like I’m drawing attention to our friend’s gender identity every time I mention them, putting it under the spotlight, and mostly in their absence, because it’s in the third person.
This is the experience I’ve been having lately when speaking to someone about a common friend or acquaintance who is nonbinary. Aside from the fact that even the most accommodating and well-meaning people still accidentally misgender nonbinary folks; even when we get it right, it feels a bit stilted–like a performance or an overcorrection. (It is not, but it feels that way).
I cannot fully explain why. Obviously, there's an unfair bias and flaw in this thinking, which is that I wouldn’t say the same thing about binary pronouns; namely, I wouldn’t say that referring to people as he or she draws unnecessary attention to their genders.
But the difficulty I’m having is in spirit, not logic. As I see it, there are currently two uses of they as a singular pronoun: one degenders, and the other–in an unintended way–emphasizes gender. And the reasons it does, as opposed to he or she, are not inherent; they are circumstantial, artifacts of the transitional moment we're in. Most people you’ll know who use they/them pronouns will have come to this identification consciously (i.e. it wasn’t thrust upon them at birth), and it could be something recent or ongoing for them, i.e., it could be a process. By using those pronouns you inadvertently take part in that highly personal and intimate process, for better or worse. Therefore, it’s not yet realistic to expect they to function at a gut level like he or she. It’s too early for that, in my opinion.
The solution is to keep respecting people’s preferred pronouns and let language and time take their course. Because the minor discomfort, awkwardness, or artificiality (which I hope I explained well enough) pales in comparison to the harm one can cause by intentionally misgendering someone.