Throwback Thursday: Originally posted to the VerboseTerse instance at Mon, 29 Oct 2018 03:45:51. This may also look familiar if you follow me on a certain social media site with a black background.
“Singular they,” I say. “Those are my pronouns.”[1]
Very recently I’ve come against some resistance with my pronouns… but not quite in the way you’d think. There was no malice, and confusion took its place.
For context, I’m American. And on top of that, I’m mono-lingual and the only language I’m fluent in is English. It took the other party voluntarily disclosing that English was their second language for me to have a “light bulb moment.”
And when I was confronted, again, with “but they is plural!” at a local gaming event soon after, I was able to recognize that same confusion.
“Hang on. Is English your native language?”
It was not.
Instead of refuting the many tired arguments as to why someone wouldn’t want to use Singular They[2], I was forced to consider a different tactic.
One major take-away from these interactions was more of a reminder of how classrooms can be horribly rigid in what they teach. Especially when it comes to English. When I was in the school system it never seemed to allow for nuances of different dialects and cultures, linguistic drift, and (yeah imma go here right quick) creativity. It appears that that hasn’t changed.
So ESL students go in the classroom, and come out with these preconceived notions of how English should work, only for the language itself to generally throw curveballs at you anyway.
Trust me. If it wasn’t going to be my Singular They/Them pronouns, it would have been something else. The Habitual Be. The Appalachian drawl. The ongoing war of Soda Vs. Pop. And English just being a fucking weird language on its own.
And no language is static unless it is dead.
My advice? Practice. Keep an ear out for cues. Immerse yourself in different, real environments. Do some readin’, here for example. Ask respectful questions.
Don’t beat yourself up when (yes, when) you screw up. We all do, even us native speakers, because there’s also the deprogramming of binary gender constructs to consider.[3]
Practice. It gets easier in time, honest.
And uh, sorry you had to learn this the hard way.
[1] I also use a set of neo-pronouns (zie/hir), but they are not the focus of this piece.
[2] “It’s not grammatically correct!” is a fairly common one, as well as the claim that “no one ever uses it.” But, you know, sometimes someone just uses that as an excuse to be an unaccommodating buttmunch.
[3] And this’ll be a whole can of worms for another time.