Don’t Say ‘They’: Why Pronouns Matter


 By John Stonestreet and Heather Peterson - Posted at BreakPoint:

A couple weeks ago, a Title IX investigation was opened for three middle school boys from Wisconsin who used the pronoun she for a biologically female student who wished to go by they. Under the Biden administration, refusing to use misaligned pronouns is considered sex discrimination. Even style guides today encourage the use of they if it is the chosen pronoun of an individual.

One rationale given is that someone really is whatever gender he or she claims, and to not recognize that with pronouns is to contribute to that person’s psychological distress. This is the case even if, as Abigail Shrier describes as being increasingly common, a person’s gender dysphoria is socially conditioned. So, according to our own government, we are now in a zero-sum game: Either use individuals’ chosen pronouns or be blamed for their suicides.

Thankfully, many are beginning to recognize that even using the pronoun they for an individual is deeply problematic, much less fully imbibing all that the new transgender orthodoxy commands. Recently, the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir wrote an editorial entitled “Don’t Say ‘They.’” In it, Sapir argues that using they and them to refer to an individual is far from harmless and amounts to buying into an ideology that “gender is an oppressive social system.” In other words, using nonbinary plural pronouns and also opposite-sex pronouns says something that is not true about God’s design, the created reality of men and women.

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