Imagine this scene in a story involving four characters, where one of them is non-binary: They are faced with a choice. Should they enter the spaceship?
They said they should, but they said no. Their fear kept them from agreeing.
Huh?
Yeah, exactly.
I was reading a science fiction story recently with exactly that kind of confusion. After a few pages, I gave up. There was just no way to figure out who “they” was referring to at any given point, even when I kept going back to try and keep track as the story moved forward.
I get it that non-binary people do not want to be pigeonholed by gender-specific pronouns, and I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with arbitrarily demolishing grammatical rules that have been developed over hundreds of years to eliminate the kind of confusion I illustrated above.
People keep saying “get over it” because language changes and evolves. Yes, it does, and that’s a good thing. But there’s evolution, where language grows in form, complexity, and nuance in response to changing conditions, and then there’s devolution, where language devolves (regresses) to a less functional state. That’s what’s happening here. Plural pronouns should never be used to describe singular subjects. Period. It leads to confusion and unintentional ambiguity, the very opposite of what language is meant to do, which is convey meaning in the way the speaker intends (to include intentional ambiguity).
There is a better way to solve the problem, one in keeping with the natural evolution of language. I suggest we start using a new set of singular pronouns when referring to non-binary people. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think the ones in this blog’s title will work:
Subject: he, she, ve
Object: him, her, ver
Possessive: his, hers, ves
Re-writing the above example using these pronouns eliminates any confusion:
They said they should, but ve said no. Ves fear kept ver from agreeing. Or:
Ve said they should, but they said no. Their fear kept them from agreeing.
These are only suggestions, and I’m entirely open to others. What I am not open to is arbitrarily mangling language rules and introducing unnecessary confusion, and then vilifying anyone who objects.
