Singular ‘they’ and what to tell your teacher (or anyone) when they say you’re using it wrong

hythmknwy:

I recently made a post about how I’m hesitant to use they over she or he/(s)he in a university standard English Literature essay on gender because, even though it’s grammatically correct, people - including academics - will bend over backwards to tell you that it should be used for only non-singular entities (as a plural form). The response I’ve had to this has been astounding. Numerous people have told me that they’ve been penalised for using ‘they’ as a singular pronoun in their school work, and in one case even had their essay read out as exemplary, but were specifically called out on their use of singular ‘they’ as incorrect, and told to specifically use ‘he’ instead. And I’m here to tell you why this is bullshit.

The rule of pronouns
A pronoun must agree with its antecedent gender and number eg John swam to France but no one was there to meet him - ‘him’ is the pronoun and agrees with the sentence subject, ‘John’. However, in some cases, this is more complex

Use of singular ‘they’ vs. more accepted plural pronouns

  • Nobody likes having his teeth drilled - sex-generic ‘he’
  • Nobody likes having his or her teeth drilled - conjoined pronouns
  • Nobody likes having their teeth drilled - singular they

None of these are ungrammatical. The ‘his or her’ usage is clumsy and is unlikely to be used in normal speech nor in academic papers (word saving is important). Sex-generic ‘he’ is the pronoun that most academics pressure students to use and is, unfortunately, obviously immersed in problematic notions of gender ambiguity and, subsequently, misogyny. Singular ‘they’ is also grammatical in that it follows the rule that it agrees with its antecedent; it acts as a variable bound by the quantifier ‘nobody’ (semantically there is no x such that x likes having their teeth drilled) but is the most likely to be contested by academics and self-righteous grammar enforcers alike

Singular ‘they’
Singular ‘they’ refers to the use of what, historically, was most frequently the form of the third-person plural pronoun, but which has been adopted to refer to an entity that is not (necessarily) semantically plural

  • My sister and her wife live in Brighton. They have six children
  • A professor had their laptop stolen from their office

The first is an uncontroversial use of they, referring to an antecedent of more than one entity. The second is considered controversial; their refers to a singular entity of unknown gender, and so is considered, by some, ungrammatical. This, however, has been named by people who have put a lot more time and research into the subject than them, as epicene they - this refers to a person of unknown gender, such as that professor with their stolen laptop. Another subcategory is generic they, eg. if anyone has a question, they should post it on the forum, in which they could be used to refer to either an unnamed individual or to a non-specific group

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.bloody