In March, 2023, Barney Bishop, who chairs the board of Florida’s Tallahassee Classical School, told an interviewer, “We don’t use pronouns.”
The far right has declared war on pronouns, but Bishop’s salvo got buried under the larger story: Tallahassee Classical’s principal was fired for failing to warn parents that an eighth grade class was going to see Michelangelo’s iconic statue of David. Several parents complained about that art history lesson because David is nude—one called the statue pornography.
Trying to downplay the undraped statue incident, Chairman Bishop tried to refocus 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 had to use three pronouns, “we,” “they,” and “them,” to claim that Tallahassee Classical’s doesn’t use them.
It should come as no surprise that grammar schools got their name because they taught grammar. William Lily’s Latin Grammar (1542) treated pronouns as an essential part of speech, and English grammarians copied this for centuries. Here’s Lily’s definition: “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. It stands to reason that pronouns should be central to the grammar lessons one would expect from a Tallahassee charter school with a “classical” focus.
A century ago, conservatives trashed America’s schools for not teaching enough grammar. That led to an explosion of grammar lessons, and students who were corrected for saying things like “Her and me went to the store” learned that pronouns were about as classical as you could get. Now conservatives have made pronouns taboo. Use them and you could lose your job. That’s what happened to two resident advisors at a small religious college in western New York State who put pronouns in their emails. Houghton College terminated them for violating its no-pronouns-in-bio rule.
What causes all the fuss is the fact that English pronouns have gender. Some nouns have gender too. And the far right has a big problem with gender. They insist there are only two: male and female. But biologists and psychologists say concepts like sex and gender are complicated. So do grammarians. Traditional—read “conservative”— grammars typically identified multiple genders. For example, Lily’s students learned the seven Latin genders, and English grammarians through the nineteenth century identified four or more for English. But at schools like Tallahassee Classical and Houghton College, that’s far too many genders.
Today the right fears that pronouns promote moral turpitude and criminal behavior. Just months before Tallahassee Classical melted down over Renaissance art, the Florida legislature defined both sex and pronouns as binary and immutable. HB 1069, signed into law by governor Ron DeSantis, asserts that “it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to that person’s sex.” The bill further prohibits state schools from requiring 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. There’s no mistaking the religious undertone here: using false pronouns is a sign that you’re worshipping false gods.
And yet, some on the right are turning words into false pronouns to own the libs. In 2016, when the University of Michigan began allowing students to designate their pronouns, one conservative student declared, “I henceforth shall be referred to as His Majesty.”
The war on pronouns takes no prisoners, labeling as false the pronouns that we all use every day. In 2022, Lavern Spicer, a failed right-wing candidate for the House of Representatives, tweeted, “There are no pronouns in the Constitution,” though the Constitution begins with a pronoun: “We the people of the United States.” Spicer added, “There are no pronouns in the Bible.” Wrong! Both the Old and New Testaments abound in pronouns—not just in the English translations but in the originals as well. My message to Spicer: “Physician, heal thyself.” Or, if you prefer, “medice cura te ipsum.” And, if you want to be even more classical, “ϊατρε θεραπευϲον ϲεαυ τον” (Luke 4:23; emphasis added).
Spicer ended her rant by claiming, “Pronouns are a modern phenomenon spread by EGO.” Also wrong. Ego is a Latin pronoun. It means “I.” I wonder how the Tallahassee Classical’s Latin teacher handles that inconvenient truth. But Spicer was undeterred. In a follow-up tweet, she used two pronouns to claim, “You will never catch me using pronouns.”
Joey Mannarino, another right-wing “political strategist,” used a pronoun to bluntly deny the legitimacy of pronouns: “I would cut my own balls off before using pronouns to refer to someone.” Which produced the blunter comment from Benjamin Dreyer, the author of a best-selling usage guide, “You’ll have to find ’em first.”
Sometimes, when they’re not denying their existence altogether, right wingers mock pronouns. Mannarino’s Twitter bio lists his pronouns as “Shut/Up.” In the same vein, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert dismissed the practice of declaring one’s pronouns by tweeting, “My pronoun is ‘Patriot.’” Commentator Fred Wellman replied, “It’s a noun. So is idiot.” Not all the replies were that polite.
Recently, FoxNews anchor Harris Faulkner picked yet another noun as her pronoun. Faulkner, not a commentator but a reporter on the conservative network, waded into politics when she complained that “the left” wants to “pronoun us to death.” She added, “Well know this: the Lord has determined I am a woman, and my pronouns are U.S.A.”
And when a trans model appeared in a Nike sports bra ad earlier this year, conservative columnist Judith Woods equated pronouns with genitals, hoping that the backlash to the ad would “whack the wokerati right in their pronouns."
The far right—usually opposed to trigger warnings—thinks that pronouns are more triggering than guns. After a mass shooting in a Kentucky bank, one conservative ideologue called the fact that the shooter put “he/him” pronouns in his LinkedIn profile a “red flag.” That same commentator probably opposes red flag laws that would disarm those judged potentially violent. Another tweeted, “It’s not the guns. It’s the pronoun extremists.” And a third added, “Ban assault pronouns now.” Which is one step away from saying, “guns don’t kill people, pronouns do.”
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. And when courts decide that book bans violate the First Amendment, Republicans in states like Missouri vote to defund public libraries rather than put controversial books back on the shelves. Florida’s HB 1069 not only restricts pronoun use, it allows any parent to require the immediate removal from a classroom or library of any book they find objectionable. Given that it's virtually impossible to write a book that doesn’t use pronouns, that puts the whole collection at risk. Another bill before the Arizona legislature would let a parent challenge any book promoting “gender fluidity, gender pronouns or . . . pedophilia.” For the right, pronouns are the grammatical gateway to perversion.
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, thon (1858), hiser (1876), zie (1890), he’er (1911), and hir (1920). Yet these pronouns, according to bills in Florida, Arizona, Kentucky, and other states, threaten the nation’s youth. And according to a new guidance from the Sunak government, schools in England will not allow the use of pronouns that do not correspond to a student’s gender as assigned at birth unless parents approve.
Objecting to pronouns also bolsters the conservative position that antidiscrimination laws violate the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal law against sex discrimination extends to transgender persons (Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia). In a 70-page rant that had little to do with the decision that two employees were wrongfully fired for transitioning, Justice Samuel Alito joined the war on pronouns. Alito didn’t want to ban singular they or any of the coined gender pronouns. Instead, he argued that requiring teachers, students, and employees to use such pronouns is unconstitutional.
In 1943, the Supreme Court updated its free-speech doctrine to say that compelled speech—forcing someone to say words that violate a deeply-held belief—violates the First Amendment’s speech protection, and so the state cannot compel students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette). Alito would take this protection against compelled speech one step farther, arguing, in effect, “You can’t make me say your pronouns.” And when in 2021 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).
Despite what conservative jurists, commentators, and Republican legislators in red states might want us to think, pronouns remain an essential part of English. And like most words, they change with time and context. Singular they, one of the gender pronouns under attack today, appeared in English as early as 1375. That’s 300 years before the second person plural you transitioned to become singular as well, replacing the older second person thou. Proof, if you need it, that grammar is not immutable.
But grammatical facts mean little to conservatives intent on weaponizing the pronoun, turning it from a classical, respectable, and thoroughly conventional part of speech into a reviled symbol in their war on culture. That led yet another conservative activist, Isabella Riley Moody, to tweet her opposition not to particular pronouns but to the entire grammatical category: “I want to eradicate the word ‘pronouns’ from the English language.” I have no idea what Ms. Moody would call the word “I” in that sentence.
Textbook publishers have long tailored content to the demands of conservative states—even math books marketed to red states 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. And it’s not just textbooks or literary works getting bowdlerized, it’s reference books as well. From time to time, individual schools have banned dictionaries that contain definitions that some school official found inappropriate. In 1925, the state of Tennessee banned the teaching of evolution. In 2016, Tennessee banned linguistic evolution as well, prohibiting the use of state funds “to promote the use of gender neutral pronouns.” Presumably that ban includes the hundreds of gender neutral pronouns coined in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the many dictionaries and grammars in Tennessee classrooms and libraries that contain entries for pronouns like hie, zie, and singular they.
For much of their history, pronouns have been a sleepy and uncontroversial part of speech. Given the right’s current war on pronouns, it won’t be long before red states demand that dictionaries revise their definition of pronoun. The Oxford English Dictionary defines pronoun as “1. A word . . . that refers either to the participants in the discourse . . . or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere.” That’s pretty much a modern version of what William Lily wrote back in 1542. With the war on pronouns heating up, the OED would be well advised to update that definition by adding something like this: “2. Any word that the extreme right finds fault with, esp. a pronoun of the third person,” and “3. The genitals.”
Grammar and gender may seem like a contemporary concern, but the grammarians of yore were well aware that language struggled to reflect gender diversity. In 1792, the Scottish philosopher, economist, and grammarian James Anderson argued that even when it was meant to be generic, the pronoun he far too often excluded women. To remedy the situation, Anderson proposed ou, common in the Gloucestershire dialect, as an inclusive, ungendered pronoun—he called ou “indeterminate.” Intent on showing how grammatical gender could reflect biological diversity, Anderson then proposed a system of thirteen separate genders to cover all the possible combinations of humans, animals, and things.
Anderson didn’t offer any new pronouns besides ou. But imagine the uproar if you dared to teach this eighteenth-century grammarian’s take on the multiplicity of genders in any school in Florida today. Instead of just banning pronouns, they’d have to ban grammar altogether.
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 “I,” “we,” “you,” and “they.”
___
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.
