In March, the Tallahassee Classical School declared war on pronouns. The chair of the school's governing board, Barney Bishop, told an interviewer, “We don’t use pronouns.”
That got buried under the larger story, the ouster of Tallahassee Classical’s principal for failing to provide parents with a trigger warning before an eighth grade class viewed a picture of Michelangelo’s iconic statue of David. But it turns out that some people think pronouns are more dangerous than nudity.
In his attempt at damage control, Bishop downplayed the naked statue incident and refocused the story on the charter school’s vaunted “classical” curriculum: “We teach them phonics. We teach Singapore math. They learn to speak Latin.” Emphasizing the conservative nature of the school, he boasted, “We don’t use pronouns.”
Pace Bishop, you can’t speak Latin without pronouns. And you can’t speak English without them either. Bishop himself used three pronouns, “we,” “they,” and “them,” to claim that Tallahassee Classical doesn’t use pronouns.
It should come as no surprise that grammar schools got their name because they taught grammar, and pronouns are central to the kind of grammar one might expect from a school with a “classical” focus. William Lily’s Latin grammar (1542) set a template for teaching English grammar that lasted for centuries. Here’s his definition of pronouns: “a Pronoun is a Part of Speech, much like to a Noun, which is used in shewing or rehearsing.” Lily’s students studied nouns and pronouns right after they learned the alphabet. Then they went on to verbs, particles, and the other parts of speech.
A century ago, conservatives trashed America’s schools for not emphasizing grammar enough. That led to an explosion of grammar lessons, and anyone corrected for saying “Him and me went to the store” learned that pronouns were about as classical as you could get.
Now the right wants to cancel pronouns, fearing that, like the Renaissance statue of the unclad David, which one Tallahassee parent labeled pornographic, they are the gateway to moral turpitude and criminal behavior.
Also in March, a bill, SB 1320, was introduced in the Florida state senate defining sex as both binary and immutable. It defines grammar as binary and immutable as well: "[I]t is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to that person’s sex.” Schools may not require employees or students to use a “false” pronoun. An employee may not tell students their own “false” pronoun. Nor may employees ask a student for their “false” pronoun.
In their war on pronouns, conservatives go even further, denying the pronouns that we use every day. Last year Lavern Spicer, a failed right-wing candidate for the House of Representatives, tweeted, “There are no pronouns in the Constitution." She added, "There are no pronouns in the Bible. Pronouns are a modern phenomenon spread by EGO.”
Spicer was wrong on all counts. Pronouns are not new. English had pronouns before it was even called English. The Constitution begins with a pronoun: “We the people of the United States.” As for the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments abound in pronouns—not just in the English translations but in the originals as well. In a follow-up tweet, Spicer used two pronouns to deny that she herself used them: “You will never catch me using pronouns.”
Sometimes right wingers mock pronouns, when they’re not denying their existence altogether. For example, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert dismissed the practice of declaring one’s pronouns by tweeting, “My pronoun is ‘Patriot.’” Critics lost no time in pointing out that “patriot” is a noun. Not all the corrections were polite.
And the hits just keep on coming. When a trans model appeared in a Nike sports bra ad, conservative columnist Judith Woods, equating pronouns with genitals, hoped the backlash to the ad would “whack the wokerati right in their pronouns.”
The far right thinks pronouns are more triggering than guns. After a mass shooting in a Kentucky bank, one far-right commentator called the fact that the shooter put “he/him” pronouns in his LinkedIn bio a “red flag.” Another tweeted, “It’s not the guns. It’s the pronoun extremists,” and a third added, “Ban assault pronouns now.”
As the linguist Kirby Conrod notes, objecting to the denial or intentional mis-definition of pronouns won’t change anyone’s mind about them. But the right-wing attack on pronouns is dangerous because it’s aiding the attack on America’s public schools and libraries.
The number of book bans in 2022 more than doubled those in 2021, as schools and libraries across the country were forced to remove books about “divisive concepts” like race, slavery, gender, and the Holocaust. Now bills like Florida’s SB 1320 would not only restrict pronoun use, they would allow any parent to require the immediate removal from a classroom or library of any book they find objectionable. Another bill before the Arizona legislature would let a parent challenge any book that “promote[s] gender fluidity, gender pronouns or [that] groom[s] children into normalizing pedophilia.”
The term “gender pronouns” refers to some of the oldest words in English, like he, she, and it. It includes singular they, which has been gender-nonspecific since the fourteenth century. And it includes nonbinary pronouns like E, coined way back in 1841, hiser (1876), zie (1890), and hir (1920). Yet such pronouns, according to bills in Florida, Arizona, Kentucky, and other states, threaten the nation’s youth.
Objecting to pronouns also bolsters the conservative challenge to antidiscrimination laws. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal law against sex discrimination protects transgender persons (Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia). In a 70-page rant that had little to do with the Court’s ruling that two employees were wrongfully fired for transitioning, Justice Samuel Alito joined the war on pronouns. For him, requiring teachers, students, and employees to use singular they or any of the coined gender pronouns constitutes compelled speech—forcing someone to say words that violate a deeply-held belief, a violation of the First Amendment’s speech protection.
In 1943, the Supreme Court updated its free-speech doctrine to say that, yes, the First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech, but it also prevents the government from compelling speech. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Court ruled that the state cannot compel students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Alito would take the protection against compelled speech one step farther, arguing, in effect, “You can’t make me say your pronouns.” And when a professor at an Ohio university claimed that making him use a trans student’s pronoun would violate his deeply-held belief that grammar and gender are immutable, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit agreed that inclusive pronouns are not protected by the First Amendment (Meriwether v. Hartop, 2021). Other courts have reached similar conclusions.
Despite what conservative legislators in red states might want us to think, scientists know that sex and gender are complex biological and social phenomena, not simple, immutable binaries. And linguists know that grammar is flexible, changing with time and context. Even pronouns change: singular they, one of the gender pronouns under attack today, appeared in English 300 years before singular you replaced the second person singular thou.
Even so, conservatives have weaponized the pronoun, turning it from a classical, respectable, and thoroughly conventional part of speech into a reviled symbol in their war on culture, to the point where outspoken homophobe Isabella Riley Moody wants to do away with the part of speech altogether, tweeting: “I want to eradicate the word ‘pronouns’ from the English language."
Textbook publishers have long tailored content to the demands of school boards in conservative states—even math books get rewritten to remove any hint of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Most recently, the College Board changed its AP course on African American Studies because Florida objected to its focus on, well, African American studies. So content providers, eager to secure sales, are already shielding students from vital information. From time to time, individual schools have banned dictionaries that contain definitions that some school official found inappropriate for schoolchildren. Given the right’s current propensity for book-banning, it won’t be long before states like Florida, Arizona, Texas, and Tennessee insist that dictionaries redefine pronoun to reflect their war on what has been for much of its history a fairly uncontroversial part of speech. Here's what such a redefinition might look like.
In the meantime, the Tallahassee Classical School is looking for a new principal. It's also looking for a new part of speech to cover words like "we," “they,” and “them.”
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Discover more about the history of gender pronouns in my book What's Your Pronoun? Beyond he and she. And learn more about the history behind today's free speech issues in my latest book, You Can't Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech.
