According to the Pew Research Center, most Americans have heard something about gender-neutral and nonbinary pronouns, and one in five adults knows someone who uses such pronouns. As these pronouns gain currency, they’re also generating some backlash, especially on social media, where people feel free to say a lot of not nice things that may not always be carefully thought out.
Here’s what I mean.
I’m not sure what prompted Elon Musk to tweet “Pronouns suck.” I’m not sure what prompts him to say most of what he’s reported to say. But given the huge numbers of likes and retweets for “pronouns suck,” Musk’s followers found his grammatical wisdom electrifying.
Then there’s this, which is a little less ambiguous:
That “F*CK your pronouns” button made a splash when J.K. Rowling, who’s been taking anti-trans positions lately, retweeted a post from Wild Womyn’s Workshop. The British radical feminist, self-proclaimed “gender-critical” site markets the button, whose message equates pronouns with gender fraud.
Consistent with the PEW findings, stating your pronouns is becoming a professional requirement, as this tweet suggests:
For many readers, saying “My pronouns are . . .” on a résumé or in a signature announces the writer as progressive. But if putting your pronouns in your signature becomes standard business practice, are they no longer progressive? That’s the suggestion in this tweet, which challenges a landlord for putting her pronouns in an eviction email.
These examples don’t specify if the pronouns in question are personal, relative, demonstrative, or interrogative. But everybody knows that statements like “Pronouns suck” and “F*CK your pronouns” are not referring to I, we, you, who, which, these, or why. They’re referring specifically to gender pronouns. Because the answer to “What’s your pronoun?” is a third person singular personal pronoun.
Stating your pronouns suggests that you’re aware that pronouns are political, but as this next tweet shows, it may prompt pushback from readers who don’t want to deal with someone they perceive to be progressive:
This tweet in reference to a Reddit page suggests that some people conflate gender pronouns with all pronouns in their rejections of pronouns, a position that falls apart since the post itself uses the pronoun we:
Which is made even clearer in this tweet, which shows it’s best not to look for grammatical self-awareness from pronoun haters:
Then there are trolls who make fun of pronouns. When options for designating pronouns became a thing at universities a few years ago, one snarky student announced their pronoun was “his majesty.” Tweeters may mock pronouns by announcing fake or derisive pronouns, as this collection shows:
It’s especially easily to attack pronouns as part of the language of wokeness if you don’t really know what a pronoun is, as in this example of a graphic accompanying an attack on wokeness by Nicholas Clairmont in Tablet, where they/them is labeled a noun. Those who attack grammar don’t always know a lot about grammar.
Instead of mocking pronouns, some pronoun critics invoke the Constitution, bringing the full and majestic power of the law down on a humble part of speech. The late Geoffrey Nunberg sent me a copy of an email he received from an angry ex-Foreign Service officer in response to his Fresh Air commentary on singular they, an email which sums up the pronoun backlash by suggesting that Second Amendment people may have to step in to defend his First Amendment rights:
“If you give them your pronouns today they will come for the rest of your free speech tomorrow.”
If that sounds off-the-wall, consider the more-chilling impact of Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), a case in which the US Supreme Court ruled that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII” of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In a section headed “Freedom of Speech,” Alito warns that the decision supporting gender rights not only opens up bathrooms and locker rooms to sexual predators, it runs afoul of the First Amendment protection against compelled speech by forcing people to use pronouns against their will. To demonstrate this, Alito notes that some colleges enforce pronoun rules, and he cites a New York City law that makes “the failure to use an individual’s . . . pronoun a punishable offense.”
Alito would like to deliver the ultimate backlash against pronouns by having a conservative Supreme Court declare them unconstitutional.
It's unlikely that the framers had pronouns in mind when they crafted the First Amendment, But even if a court were to ban pronouns outright, people will continue to use whatever words feel right to them in a particular situation, whether they want to announce their own pronouns or be sensitive to others, or they want to voice their contempt, or they're trying to evict a tenant.
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If you'd like to learn more about the history of gender pronouns, pick up a copy of my new book, What's your pronoun? Beyond he and she, available from Liveright/W.W. Norton here, or wherever you buy or borrow books.
