How to Be Wrong: From “He or She” to “They”

(Oops! I’ve elided a couple weeks without blogging. What can I say? The to-do list was willing, but the back-to-school and High-Holidays scheduling was weak.)

Once, I was a grammar true believer.

Okay, maybe I still am. I still prefer “none is” to “none are” in ambiguous cases. I will hyphenate my compound adjectives even if it looks weird. But I will use “they” as the ungendered singular third-person pronoun.

Sadly (given its triviality in the grand scheme of things), that’s not a decision I made lightly. Once, I was a firm supporter of “he or she.” It seemed simple: “they” is plural, “he” and “she” are singular, and that’s that.

The argument of my friends and boyfriend, who maintained that “he or she” sounded awkward? I pooh-poohed. Good writing, I insisted, required finesse. Composing with more care and creativity might be annoying, but to abandon grammatical logic for convenience smacked of laziness. One could always take the plunge and pluralize the whole sentence, couldn’t one? (Or perhaps sound like a character from an Edwardian novel?)

Likewise, when my students used the singular they, I waved the textbook and pointed out that verbs must match their nouns in number and person. (They still do; there’s a difference between making an informed decision about a rule and not understanding the position one is taking.) Some of the exercises in our workbooks are based on the distinction.

Of course, there are some arguments from historical precedent and common use that support the singular “they.” I know people who find them persuasive; I didn’t. Grammar can be necessary to facilitate understanding; sometimes, we enforce punctuation rules because otherwise meaning is ambiguous.

(For example, certain people who live with me might unwittingly cause confusion over whether a hockey-playing acquaintance is a go-to sub [for the team in general] or a “go” to sub [this evening]. *ahem*)

Anyway, in this case, I felt that “they” made the speaker’s intention ambiguous. So what changed, you might ask?

I care about grammar, it’s true. But I care about people more.

Simply put, my (yes) go-to substitution of “he or she” isn’t sufficient. When I wrote “he or she,” I meant to include every person as a potential subject of the sentence. That’s what I thought I was doing in sample sentences like “If an engineer leads a project, he or she deserves credit.”: implying linguistically that anyone, regardless of gender, can be an engineer.

But I had the privilege of being ignorant about people I’d been excluding: those whose gender is non-binary. There are more genders than male and female, and if I want to be inclusive, I can’t limit my pronouns to two.

English doesn’t have a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun. The closest we have that still acknowledges its referent as a person is… my former nemesis “they.”

There are ways to be wrong about being right. One of those ways is to be factually right about something unimportant — such as a particular interpretation of certain grammatical rules within certain style guides — and wrong about something crucial.

Such as treating everyone like a human being.

It’s tempting to try to have my cake and eat it too by holding on to my previous reasons while changing my behaviour, but that’s not being wrong, that’s being condescending.

Agreeing to waive a rule explicitly to include someone else while still justifying one’s previous adherence isn’t acknowledging the flawed thinking that went into supporting the rule. It’s presenting yourself as a martyr for compromising while hoarding the authority of who gets to make the rules.

With the Internet amplifying the voices of many systematically silenced and social change making it easier to hear voices many didn’t know live among us, people in positions of privilege, like me, are able to learn a lot of things we’re wrong about. Even though it’s not necessarily our fault we’re wrong, our false beliefs have consequences for others, and it’s our responsibility to change them.

Being wrong is often unpleasant. Nobody likes having to admit a mistake. Nobody likes having to shift everything around in their brains to see the world a new way. It takes work.

(It’s like when you have half the picture of a sliding puzzle — it’s hard to be willing to ruin the part you already feel like you’ve solved to get the whole thing done.)

But the only way to avoid being wrong is to avoid expressing your beliefs or to ignore any challenge to them. I don’t know about you, but I’m only just getting over the temptation of the first and certainly have a lot of work to do on the second.

At this time of the year, during the High Holidays, Jews are encouraged not only to review their behaviour of the previous year for mistakes but to clearly and deliberately confess — to God and possibly each other — that we were wrong. We detail how we were wrong, in what aspect of thought. This is considered the first step toward redemption.

Why? Because if one were to attempt to change one’s behaviour out of social necessity without accepting that the belief fueling that behaviour is wrong, it’s not likely one would succeed. After all, social necessity is possible only in certain social contexts: those of us with certain types of privilege know that many who say the right things in public are willing to reveal sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. in private if it doesn’t seem like anyone from the marginalized group is present or will complain.

But accepting that one was wrong opens the door to moving forward. Everyone sometimes sticks with a position a lot longer than they should because the alternative is the embarrassment of “losing” the argument. But once we admit we were mistaken or deceived, our ego can take a hike from our concerns. We can worry about how to be right instead.

I’m no saint: I know there must be lots of things I’m wrong about that I’m not yet ready to admit to myself. That kind of confession can be the most difficult. It took me a while at the end of high school to realize that what I thought was funny banter hurt my friends’ feelings, even though a few of them told me so, and longer to address the patterns of thought that made me feel it was a necessity for social interaction. It took me even longer to realize I was wrong about the way I thought race relations worked in twenty-first-century North America.

And it took me a long time to let go of the idea of prescriptive grammar as the final authority on strategies for inclusive speech. But I can. And I will.

Sometimes, to go forward, you have to first make the effort to stop and turn around.