While it’s natural for the usage of pronouns to evolve, just as all language evolves, students are taught that pronouns are the bedrock of language, and it can be discomfiting when the rules about how to use them start to shift. It's unlikely you'd slam your hand on the wheel and exclaim, "Did you see that? He or she cut me off!" This version of singular they causes more consternation, grammatical and political. (TIME also ran a cover story on non-binary identities that year titled “Beyond He or She“.) And this year, singer Sam Smith announced on the same platform that “My pronouns are they/them.” In 2015, the American Dialect Society chose it as their word of the year, having seen how people were starting to use it to “ the gender binary.” In 2017, singer Jennifer Lopez made news when she used singular they on Instagram to refer to a younger family member. The newer usage of singular they to describe a known individual who is rejecting the yoke of other pronouns has been inching closer to the mainstream for years. Kirby Conrod, a University of Washington linguist who studies pronoun usage, provides the example of dealing with bad drivers: It’s unlikely you’d slam your hand on the wheel and exclaim, “Did you see that? He or she cut me off!” Though some traditionalists wrinkle their noses at seeing the word themself in a newspaper article, this usage has been around for some 600 years, and people employ it every day in conversation. Using singular they to refer to an unknown person is both better established in the language and less likely to lead to outrage on Twitter. and the adjective Latinx have been taken up with similar flair. This usage of singular they can operate as a form of protest against some of the most fundamental ideas governing society today: namely, that every person can be identified as male or female in a clear-cut manner and that males and females should look and act and be referred to in certain ways. The other is that singular they is being used by individuals - who might identify as transgender, non-binary, agender, intersex or even cisgender - who don’t feel like a gendered pronoun fits.
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