Everybody’s announcing their pronouns—in their email, on their Twitters and Instas, in class, even on Zoom. "I’m she/her,” they say. “I’m he/him.” “My pronoun is they.” “I’m zie/hir.” or “em” or “xe” or even, “I don’t use pronouns.”
People call them gender pronouns, or nonbinary pronouns, or gender-neutral pronouns, or even neopronouns, though they’re anything but new. Singular ‘they’ goes back to the 14th century. A Yale doctor coined e, es, em in 1841. Thon was coined in 1858 by a well-known American hymn writer. Se, heesh, le, um, and a few hundred more pop up from the mid-19th century through the mid-20th. Heer, hiser, and himer were promoted by Ella Young, Chicago’s first woman Superintendent of Schools, in 1912. The editor of the Sacramento Bee coined hir in 1920 and its reporters used that pronoun sporadically through the 1940s. A. A. Milne, who created Winnie the Pooh, made the case for heesh in 1931. Those early pronouns sought gender equality for women. Today the gender pronouns address the need for words to refer to people who are nonbinary, trans, and gender-nonconforming, as well. Other languages are exploring ways to broaden their representation of gender too, notably Swedish, French, Spanish, and German.
What’s behind these pronouns is a sense that, so far as third person singular personal pronouns are concerned, the English pronoun system is just not inclusive enough. Gender pronouns seek to remedy that, offering a way to recognize someone’s humanity, to acknowledge people’s right to choose how they should be addressed. Sometimes pronouns politicize gender to emphasize social inequity. Sometimes they hide gender when it’s irrelevant. Or they protect a person’s identity, the right to remain anonymous in a hostile online world.
Grammar may not be physics, but for every pronoun there seems to be an equal and opposite “antipronoun.” A tweet complains, “If you use pronouns, I can’t be your friend.” A professor in Ohio is suing his university for making him say a trans student’s pronoun. Even the Supreme Court gets in on the act. In a 2021 case about Facebook that has nothing to do with pronouns, Justice Alito went out of his way to argue that pronoun laws and regulations violate Constitutional speech protections, setting up a conflict between antidiscrimination laws, authorized by the Fourteenth Amendment, and First Amendment guarantees of free speech.
Professor Dennis Baron writes about the English language and its history, emphasizing communication technologies, minority language and dialect rights, gender issues, and the intersection of language and the law. In addition to scholarly publications, he frequently comments on language, law, and technology issues in the news, and his essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and many other papers; he is regularly consulted by journalists and has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, the Voice of America, and the CBC – he's discussed the changing English language with radio hosts ranging from Stephen Fry to Joan Rivers. He's consulted in a number of legal cases, and served as lead author of "the Linguists' Brief,” a linguistic analysis of the Second Amendment in the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the one about the right to bear arms. His latest book is What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She (Liveright 2020), a social, political, and legal history of English gender pronouns from the 18th century to the present. And his next book is provisionally titled, Unprotected Speech: You can’t always say what you want.
