English has three main third person singular pronouns.
Those are "it", "he" and "she" - grammatically, the neuter, masculine and feminine.
These can be inflected for their various forms, but these are the lemmas of the words.
They are used to refer to some single person, or some single thing (with it) - thus "singular",
and they are used to talk about something or someone other than the
speaker themself or the person they're speaking to - hence "third person".
And that's all very nice and simple and easy and we could basically end
the video here... iiiiif it wasn't for that last sentence I just said.
Because here we have another third person pronoun. The reflexive "themself",
and nominative "they"... which is... plural... right...?
Except it isn't. Because these pronouns are being used to replace "the speaker",
not "the speakers" - a singular individual.
This is the fourth third person singular pronoun, grammatically, the epicene.
Epicentity is complete gender neutrality,
not just when something covers the masculine and feminine. Let me give you an example.
In French, when you refer to a group of male people, you use the plural
pronoun "ils", but when you refer to a group of female people, you use "elles".
But when those groups join together, the pronoun "ils" takes priority,
and so this pronoun is used to refer to masculine and feminine people!
But it's not epicene, because we have to remember where that "ils"
pronoun is from... and that is the masculine.
In that phrase about "the speaker", the epicene third person singular is
used because we don't know the gender of this person... it's as simple as that.
But where did this come from?
In Old English, the word for "they" was "hie",
and this was inherited into Early Middle English as... "he".
But see, in the 13th century, a new pronoun made its way into English.
The Old Norse "their" started spreading from the north of England to the south,
and over time it replaced the native word, giving us... "they".
Perhaps because of its status as an imported feature, it wasn't long before it started
being used for the epicene singular as well. The first recorded use of the
singular is in a poem called "William and the Werewolf", dated around 1375.
And since then, it's been in regular usage over the centuries in written language... and,
one would assume, in spoken language as well.
It appears in Shakespeare, in Austin, in Shaw... all the way into the present day.
See, since its beginning, the debate around the "singular they" was not
about stopping some new crazy word from entering the English language...
but rather, about ejecting an existing form on the basis of its supposedly being ungrammatical.
In the 1700s, nearly 400 years after its introduction,
certain grammarians started arguing that singular they had to go.
Why? Because a singular antecedent can't take a plural pronoun...
it's simple grammar.
The first recorded instance of this is in Ann Fisher's "A New Grammar",
published in 1745. What she proposes instead, is the use of the "generic he".
The generic he is the use of the masculine pronouns "he",
"him" and "his" where the gender of the referent is unknown.
Like in the sentence "everybody should love himself".
There's a big debate about whether this use was invented in the 1700s,
but I personally think it's likely that this use of "he" was around since Middle English,
existing alongside the singular they.
Remember, this "he" is generic, but it's not epicene.
This is fairly similar to the use of "man" as a stand-in for "human",
like in "All men are created equal".
But a generic "he" still conjures up the image of a man when you read it.
It suggests that the default human is... a male one.
Despite this, the generic he continued to be advocated for by grammarians in the
coming centuries, because singular they violated number agreement, and "he or she" was too clunky.
Even in 1985, language columnists were arguing for it with the phrase:
"the male embraces the female".
The thing is, this usage can be dangerous.
A lot of the time, this "he" was generic riiight up until
it was politically expedient for it to be explicitly masculine.
In 1881, the Detroit Free Press reported that Belva Lockwood, who was already a practicing
lawyer in the District of Columbia, was denied access to the Maryland bar because the state law
used the pronouns "he" and "him" when talking about lawyers... and Lockwood was a woman.
When Lockwood brought up another article of the code, stating that "the masculine shall
be held to include all genders except where such construction would be absurd and unreasonable",
the court allegedly responded:
"it would be absurd and unreasonable... to apply the pronouns he and him...
to a woman".
In 1916, so-called "US originalists" tried to stop Jeanette Rankin from sitting in Congress using the
exact same logic: the gendered pronouns in the US Constitution when talking about congressmen.
So people started trying to avoid both the generic he and the ungrammatical singular they,
which led to a wave of neologistic pronouns which could do the job.
That's why you get words like "thon",
a contraction of "the one" invented by Charles C. Converse...
in 1858!
That's right, the neopronoun "thon/thonself" is older than the theory of natural selection.
But none of these have really caught on... yet...
And so the singular they has survived.
A 1998 study of natural British English speech found that regardless of gender,
class, or level of education,
people overwhelmingly used the singular they over the generic he or other alternatives.
Even when openly asked what they preferred when referring to someone of an unspecified gender,
68% of participants said the singular they was the best choice.
This form isn't infiltrating the language - it's already here.
And if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But so far, what we've been talking about is cases where the gender of the
referent is unknown, and therefore an epicene singular is employed...
what about when the gender is known, but that gender is... neither masculine nor feminine?
Look, non-binary people exist, whether you like it or not.
You can give you a whole extremely "logical", "biological", "scientific",
"mathematical" argument in the comment section... if you want to...
But we can very easily establish that "gender" and "sex" mean different things,
that different societies at different times have had wildly different gender systems,
and that people are identifying as non-binary.
And we've got our linguistics hats on here! So we like the definitions of words,
considering other cultures, and talking about people's lived experiences.
Non-binary people exist, and it would be nice to be able to refer to them.
Maybe we should count ourselves lucky that English isn't like French or German or Arabic.
Since we already have an epicene, singular, animate,
third-person pronoun in everyday use... why not use it for non-binary people?
People do say that it gets confusing, and I can sympathise with this...
But come on! We all use singular "you", don't we?
"You" can mean a singular person you're talking to,
several people you're talking to, or... well... people in general.
In most Indo-European languages, "we" can include or exclude the listener.
In German, "sie/Sie" can mean "she", "they",
"it" when referring to a feminine noun, and the formal "you", both plural and singular.
In French, for the vast majority of verbs,
unless they happen to start with a vowel... you can't tell the difference between the
singular and plural third person!
And everyone gets on fine with this... because they're used to it.
The sooner you get used to calling people "they", the sooner it will cease to be confusing.
But if you really hate it, find it too bewildering, or too grammatically incorrect...
Then you can go for the alternative, the Charles C. Converse method.
Use neopronouns.
Because after all, what could be more grammatically incorrect, than using
a gendered pronoun for someone... which doesn't match their gender?