They/them pronouns in primary school workbooks

[KellyMaureen]

I've been asked to review some resources for kids about autism. It takes the form of a workbook for primary school kids. There are two characters who are twins, one with a unisex name which is usually always spelled the same, and the other with a name that can be used for boys or girls but is spelled the usual way you would spell it for a boy. Both dressed exactly the same except for different coloured T-shirts.

Both these kids have they/them pronouns in this workbook. Is this now the norm? Will there come a time when there is no he/she? This is what this feels like. I wanted to ask that question in feedback, but I'm unsure how to give my feedback without sounding inappropriate. AIBU about this?

What are your thoughts please? This is a genuine question, and something I only feel comfortable asking anonymously so please don't accuse me of goading. I don't want to cause trouble. Thank you.

Question for all you "singular they" fans - does this mean you're comfortable with They is going to school and They has seen their friend?

Or are we to pluralise everything, so They have seen their friends, but they didn't say hello? They don't know what to make of this. Who's being snubbed here?

The pronoun matches the verb: they have.

Finland have gender neutral pronouns. Han. People know who they’re talking about.

Perhaps it would cause a lot fewer problems here if we did too. Maybe that is a sensible way of doing things. Language evolves.

I’ve had this argument a lot on here including earlier today, but here goes again.

In many dialects in the UK, “they” is a perfectly grammatically correct pronoun for singular people where the sex either isn’t known, or doesn’t matter. This isn’t a new thing, or anything to do with non-binary people - my grandmother was born in 1913 and used that construction all her life (as do I, and everyone else I grew up with).

Just because you aren’t aware of it doesn’t mean it isn’t an established construction. It is grammatically correct within the dialect - we don’t all speak RP.

As if fronted adverbials we’re not enough.

OK, so why the made-up themself, then? The extant word is themselves.

And why make it so difficult to tell which 'them' snubbed the other 'them' - the single or the group?

They singular is perfectly fine grammatically.

This sentence that you've quoted however is so clumsy and far from natural.

Stevie likes their favourite subject at school which is science. They're really good at it.

Even if you change it to "Stevie likes his favourite subject at school which is science. He's really good at it." It's still a really badly written sentence. If it was written by an EAL learner I'd help them to correct it to flow better e.g "Stevie's favourite subject at school is science, they're/he's really good at it".

I'd be more concerned about the writer's lack of sense of flow in written English than use of they-singular.

RP is a form of pronunciation rather than grammar, but
RP speakers do use they in this way sometimes. It is perfectly correct.

I don’t really think it comes across well in the context of the book the OP is reviewing though.

Yes, because in English we use singular 'they' to denote a person whose name and sex we don't know. It carries more information, not less: I don't yet know who this person is.

Exactly. Thank you.
For example:
Someone HAS left their coat behind. I hope they ARE going to come back for it.

Clearly singular throughout. Denying the use of singular they is obtuse. English is nuanced, you can switch grammatical conventions easily and fluently. Even young children.

Themself is also a perfectly acceptable use of English. The OED gives a very clear example: "the casual observer might easily think themself back in 1945".

But, whatever age you are, you still don't magically know in many scenarios whether 'they' refers to one person or more than one.

Whatever is the point in deciding that your language is just too precise, so we must therefore make a concerted effort - starting with the youngsters - to deliberately make it more ambiguous and liable to confusion?

Neither do I, it needs editing and I agree was probably done to make the book unisex rather than non-binary.

But there’s an amazing amount of hatred for this perfectly normal way of speaking on here, and it is really frustrating to see “normal” threads derailed by people asking if the OP is woke for using it.

Finnish does have singular and plural third-person pronouns, though, @Sometimeago. This is why there was an initial push for a newly-invented pronoun, most often 'ze' and 'zey'.

That went pear-shaped when all the non-binaries decided they were even more speshul, resulting in a list of hundreds of made-up pronouns. Making everybody plural might have seemed obvious to somebody, but the outcome is a third person which is not only genderless but numberless as well.

Yes - in possibly swaying to the 'let's call everybody they by default' crowd, the author has made understandably-confused people ask if the 'they' is because they are twins i.e. there are obviously two of them.

This may well blur comprehension and actually serve to strengthen unhelpful widespread stereotypes that twins are basically one homogenous person in two halves, rather than two entirely different and separate individuals who just happened to share a womb before they were born.

English has a numberless second person, of course. We attempt to get round it by saying things like 'you all' when we need to clarify a multiple 'you', and 'just you' to single out a 'you'.

If third person becomes plural as well, we will end up having to furtle around that, too. It's workable, but seems a bit daft when we've already got distinctive pronouns.

What problems do you believe we have that need to be solved that are currently caused by our use of 'he' and 'she' to (respectively) refer to male and female people or animals?

Finnish is not better or worse than English; they are just different languages that happily co-exist - they are not in competition with each other.

Yes, good point.

That was why the translators of the King James Bible deliberately chose to reintroduce the then-already-archaic singular 'thees' and 'thous', to sit alongside the 'yous', which, for clarity, they only used when referring to more than one person.

In fact, not to derail, but there are at least a couple of notable instances that have been pointed out where newer Bible versions that only use 'you' throughout can potentially be interpreted in dramatically different ways doctrinally if you don't know whether just one person is being addressed or multiple people/everybody.

By nature, I'm repulsed by imposed changes that make English less comprehensible. If we had to de-sex the language, it would've been better to go down the ze/zey route.

But the de-sexing irritates the fuck out of me, because it demands that we pretend we can't see what sex people are. It's exactly the same as saying you don't see 'race'. That has belatedly hit the skids, and I don't think we should now be doing the same with sex.

For anyone who's been living in a remote bothy for the last ten years, being 'race blind' means you're denying any difference between dark-skinned and light-skinned people. That means you will blatantly ignore all the obstacles confronting dark-skinned people in this life.

Doing it with sex means you'll ignore the obstacles faced by female people.

I find usage context usually makes it clear whether they/them is singular or plural. Maybe because I can see how it works in one language it's easier to imagine how it could work in another, especially one like English that isn't like Spanish where most nouns are gendered.

The text of the book referred to in the OP isn't really more confusing for using they/them/their, it's not grammatically wrong, it's just not that usual yet to have kids books where we don't know if the kid in the book is a boy or a girl.

Exactly.

There's two different uses of singular they. It's not really correct that it's grammatically incorrect -- that was what we were told and we were forced to use "he" for an unknown subject, but that was, to be quite honest, silly and style guides now say it is dispensable.

The first is the unknown subject, or person of unknown gender: "Ask the manager if they can fix it." "Ask your child about their day when they get home." Or you have a name and don't know if they're male or female: "Ask Flibbertigibbet for their opinion." This shouldn't be controversial at all really; using "they" as a neutral pronoun instead of the masculine default is quite right.

What's contested is whether or not "they" can be used as a singular pronoun for a known subject, as Alex is here. And it doesn't seem to be clear to me whether the intention is that, or if it's really the unknown gender case and the workbook writers are working very hard to avoid gender stereotyping.

I'm not convinced children will be that confused. They've certainly heard the first situation many times. (And I have two with ASD.)

But how is it better to have to rely on context when we already have a very clear grammatical way that's been in place and understood by everybody for centuries? It's like the language equivalent of Mrs Doyle 'liking the misery'.

Blind people find all manner of resourceful and practical ways to live as 'normal' a life as they possibly can; but I can't think there would be a single blind person who would actively choose to be blind if there were somehow a pair of functioning eyes made available to them.

Unless it's for a very specific purpose, such as Tyke Tyler, I wouldn't rate an author's story-telling skills very highly if they can't even concisely communicate to the reader the sex of the character(s). If they're unable even to convey such a mundane, basic thing as whether a character is female or male, whatever will they be like when it comes to telling the actual interesting parts of the story?

YABU. The language is changing. It would actually be better to ditch the concept of he and she entirely as that would lead to less discrimination between the genders.

I teach primary and I’ve never seen resources use pronouns in this way. Singular ‘they’ absolutely does exist but only when you’re unsure who you’re talking about: “It’s someone’s birthday today; they left cake in the staffroom.”
In your context however, someone has gone to the trouble of creating fictional characters but has stopped short of giving them a gender. It would be extremely rare for a small child to use ‘they/them’ pronouns (perhaps a child who is intersex?) I’ve certainly never come across anyone that young who doesn’t identify as male or female, it’s much more of a teenage thing.
As a teacher, I’d probably just end up changing the text to make it clearer.

Incorrect, sadly. Sex discrimination is gender, to all intents and purposes. It privileges the physical speed, strength and force of the male while judging female menstruation, hormone cycles, pregnancy and maternity as weaknesses.
... I could write an essay here but will restrain myself!

People don't stop being male or female just because you refuse to say so.

There are significant differences between the sexes from before birth; these become ever more significant as life unfolds. Everyone can tell a girl from a boy, they don't need to be colour-coded or have different hair cuts.

The world will continue to train girls to value themselves for beauty, softness and kindness but encourage them to be bad at maths, scared of engines and submissive to males. It will continue to teach boys they are more logical, reliable and assertive while discouraging their softness, artistry and creativity. This is "gender" and it's what we need to get rid of. You won't get rid of it by removing words from the language.

If we ditch the concept of he and she, who wins women's sporting prizes? Have you even thought about why there are different events for the two sexes? Or imagine yourself locked in a room every night with someone of the opposite sex: what could possibly go wrong, and why are prisons segregated by sex? When "they" applies for a high-powered job, the interviewer will make assumptions about "their" priorities when starting a family, regardless of pronouns.

Remove sex markers from language, and all you really remove is the language to identify sexism.