In recent years, pronouns have become grammar’s unexpected heroes and villains. How a person uses third-person pronouns such as “he,” “she,” “they,” and “zir”—both about others and about himself, herself, themself, themselves, or zirself—says a great deal about who he, she, they, or zir is. For example, to quote from Alex Byrne’s devastating review of Judith Butler’s new book Who’s Afraid of Gender?:
Butler, who became legally non-binary a few years ago, is “she” to her detractors and “they” to her supporters. Although a “they/them” review of her book might be positive or negative, a “she/her” review is an infallible sign of thumbs down.
With pronominal landmines everywhere and not enough sappers, many people now find themselves stepping gingerly across what was until recently ordinary linguistic territory. After all, if you are told that someone’s gender identity can “change from day to day”—as Harvard students were in an official publication a few years back—you may decide that the safest course of action is not to speak at all.
As a linguist with a longstanding interest in pronouns but no patience for pressuring people to announce who they are pronominally, I have not myself hesitated to speak. At the same time, I have not tried to gin up outrage for its own sake and hope always to have assessed the issues fairly. In an article about pronouns that I published in The New Criterion of March 2023, for instance, I called for the development of an “account of the reasons to resist pronominal madness . . . that respects the rights of those who will not submit to compelled speech and those who do not conform to conventional gender norms.” And until a few days ago, I had not found myself in a situation that left me pronominally flummoxed.
On Thursday, March 28, I submitted a piece to The New Criterion on putatively harmful language at the American Civil Liberties Union. It followed on the heels of an article that had appeared on the front page of The New York Times not quite one week earlier. A prominent figure in that article was an aclu employee whom the Times referred to as “Amber Hikes,” “Ms. Hikes,” and “her.”
My piece appeared on Friday, April 5, under the title “Oh, my word!” Now, editors often like to monkey with authors’ prose, but one phrase in my manuscript of March 28 that I did not expect would need alteration spoke of
Amber Hikes (“they/she”), who was then the ACLU’s chief equity and inclusion officer and who describes herself as “unapologetically queer and Black.”
The pronouns and description came from Hikes’s aclu webpage, to which I included a link. The day before publication, however, an eagle-eyed editor wrote to say that I had made a mistake: Hikes’s pronouns, according to that webpage, are “they/them.”
Gosh, I thought—that sure was careless of me. And I was immediately unhappy for a larger social-cum-grammatical reason: phrases such as “who describes herself,” which I take to be unobjectionable when referring to someone with the pronouns “they/she,” are evidently pointed when that same someone instead goes by “they/them.”
Since Hikes is a woman, I could have been pointed and kept “herself” here, as well as the three other mentions of Hikes as “she,” “her,” and “herself.” Plenty of commentators would have done so, and I understand why. But the piece in question didn’t seem the venue to pick a fight about Hikes’s pronouns, and, in truth, I’m never keen on fights of this kind. Provided that I can find a not-too-clunky way of avoiding pronouns entirely, I am usually willing to tread carefully and accommodate a woman’s wish not to be called “she” and a man’s wish not to be called “he.”
But the thing is this: I had not been careless. Between March 28 and the first week of April, Hikes announced a change of pronouns. To be specific, Hikes’s announcement came on March 31, otherwise known as International Transgender Day of Visibility, which this year fell on what is for most Christians Easter Sunday. (Two days earlier, on “this twenty-ninth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four,” President Biden had issued a proclamation.) Here’s some of what Hikes wrote on Instagram (emojis omitted):
Allow me to reintroduce myself—my name is AJ. . . . I’m Black AF. I’m queer. I’m non-binary. I’m AJ (they/them). Happy Easter, Happy Trans Day of Visibility. Here’s to rebirth in all of its beautiful and evolving forms.
Hikes’s aclu webpage was then immediately updated as well: “AJ Hikes” and “they/them.”
Accordingly, besides adding two sentences about the change of name and pronouns, I reworked the phrase that the editor had flagged, with the result that my initial description of pre-rebirthed AJ Hikes appeared like this:
the person who was then the ACLU’s “unapologetically queer and Black” chief equity and inclusion officer, someone by the name of Amber Hikes who used the pronouns “they/she.”
Later in the same paragraph, what I had originally written as “Hikes herself” became “even Hikes.” And so on.
The story continues. After publication, I began composing another article, for which reason I returned to Hikes’s aclu webpage just a few hours after “Oh, my word!” had appeared. To my surprise, Hikes’s name was still listed as AJ, but Hikes’s pronouns were back to “they/she.” At that point, I submitted the first draft of the piece you are reading now.
Then on April 9, I heard from the good people at The New Criterion again. The Wayback Machine confirmed that what I had written about Hikes four days earlier was accurate, but—I kid you not—the pronouns on Hikes’s webpage are once more given as “they/them.” I will not predict what they will be when you next click on the link. Perhaps these reversals merely reflect the failure of a webpage to update properly. Or perhaps not.
You probably find the repetition of “Hikes” and “Hikes’s” in the last two paragraphs as clunky as I do. Such awkwardness is part of the point of pronominal madness. If you acquiesce, you signal that you’re a hero. But if you don’t, you signal that you’re a villain; or if you spend time recrafting sentences so as to avoid the landmines, you’re wasting your energy; or if you do what I did and write “Hikes’s . . . Hikes’s . . . Hikes’s,” you sound like an idiot. It’s important to note that the difficulties are by no means confined to the Right: if a non-binary or transgender person does something evil, then the Left goes out of its way to avoid pronouns, as in the case of the coverage in the Times last year of the heartbreaking elementary-school shooting in Nashville.
For what it’s worth, I believe it is a common courtesy—but should not be a legal requirement—to call people by the names they wish to go by. I also believe it is courteous—but, again, should not be mandated—to use people’s preferred pronouns, or at least to avoid pronouns that they disavow. This second point is especially contentious, though, and I have no trouble defending the free-speech rights of those who believe that pronouns like “he” and “she” have an inherent truth value that trumps what I refer to as courtesy.
What would, could, or should have happened if the editor had been less assiduous or if I, in reading proof, hadn’t clicked on the link to Hikes’s aclu bio and noticed the new name and new pronouns? Would it have been an egregious act of “deadnaming” and/or misgendering if I, entirely inadvertently and with no bad intentions whatsoever, had kept “Amber Hikes” and/or “they/she” throughout something published between March 31 and April 5? Would the situation be morally or legally different if I had done this even after learning of the changes to “AJ Hikes” and “they/them”? For that matter, was it a mistake for me to retain the initial mention of “Amber Hikes” and her then-preferred pronouns “they/she” in my description of the situation at the time of the events I described in the piece? And what about everything I’ve just written here, now that I know that Hikes remains “AJ Hikes” but seems to be vacillating between “they/she” and “they/them”?
These are concerns that, only a few years ago, not many would have raised because they wouldn’t have made much sense. Now, however, they are part of a series of increasingly urgent questions about deadnaming and misgendering to which we as a society need to come up with sensible answers.