Guest Blog: Pronouns - by David Ford

Pronouns, those little words that make all the difference to how we communicate and make the whole process so much less cumbersome. I go by the name David. And there we have it, already and unintentionally, a pronoun has slipped in, in this case the word “I”, my singular first person personal pronoun.

Pronouns are there to make sentences easier to understand. Of course, the sentence above could have been written without the pronoun. In which case it could have read “David goes by the name David” which, while being correct, doesn’t really go far enough to give the full meaning of what I (it’s popped up again) want to say, as it doesn’t tell you, the reader, which David, David is. All we know is that a David goes by the name David, which is of itself an unnecessary thing to say. But of course, it’s not entirely unnecessary as David is one of those funny names which has a couple of ways of being used. There is the full version of the name “David”, there is the shortened version “Dave” and there is the more Celtic version “Davy” and so on.  To us, Davids, Daves, Davys, Dais, any and all of them, it makes a difference to us, as it’s how we want to be known in the world. Getting back to the original sentence, the one with the pronoun, which sparked this diversion “I go by the name David” if I wanted to rewrite it such that it didn’t have the same degree of ambiguity and not use the pronoun I suppose I’d have to write “David, the author of this piece, goes by the name David.”

But that’s another thing about the name David, people know that it’s one of those names that people use in a different way, they know me as David, they know of my friend Dave. Some people call me Davy, which again is ok with me, but only from some people. But it’s easy and people tend to get it right. I suppose they do what I do and look to see what form of the noun the person uses and then use that back at them. As I say, it’s a natural process.

This is the thing about pronouns, we all know what they are, we all use them instinctively and so we don’t actually give them any real thought.   

This is where being so entrenched in the binary system for gender identification causes problems for those of us who don’t identify in the way that people expect. I was assigned male at birth and brought up as a boy.  I have many of the characteristics that are generally seen as male characteristics. I need to shave every day. I have a deeper voice. And yet, none of this matches my identity of myself. I do not identify as a male person. Trapped as I am in the binary system, the best option for me, at the moment, is to identify as a Non-Binary person. This places me outside of the binary system. If anything, I also identify towards the female gender and so I am a Trans person, and have undergone part of the journey of socially transitioning. 

As I said in another post, I now go about the world in my happy place as a Trans person. This fits my current identity of myself. 

This, as you might expect is where pronouns come in and where living in a binary society becomes a problem. Society is gendered, a person is considered to be female or male. This being the limit of most people’s experience. Here I am referring to gender which to me is life as lived, not sex which is something else altogether. 

As a slight aside here, this just touches on something which is discussed a lot in the media at the moment, mostly by people who either have an axe to grind, or who don’t fully understand what they are saying and that is mixing up sex and gender. To me, this is all quite simple, we are all who we say we are and that’s the limit of it. Women are women, both Cis and Trans and men are men, both Cis and Trans and non-binary people are non-binary, and every shade and colour is every shade and colour. We only have one go at this life and Trans and Non-binary people shouldn’t be shoehorned into a system into which they clearly don’t fit.  I tried for many years to be the boy that I was assigned, but, as you can tell, that got me nowhere, other than a whole load of stress and unhappiness from which I have now emerged.

Anyway, I digress slightly.  But, not entirely as it shows how rigid the binary system is and how it affects everything, including, in this context, pronouns.

The English language has given us essentially three sets of pronouns, the first person which is how we refer to ourselves, these are ‘I’ and ‘we’;  the second person which is where we refer to someone directly, essentially ‘you’ and the third person where we are talking about someone else ‘He’, ‘She’, ‘They’. It is with these third person pronouns that the problems arise. 

The first-person pronouns are non-gendered, being I and we, the second person pronouns are non-gendered, being you, the third person pronouns are gendered ‘he’ and ‘she’, with ‘they’ being commonly, and wrongly thought to be plural. It isn’t, well, it can be, but it can also be singular. I’ve lost count with the number of times that I’ve come across people who say that ‘They’ or 'Them' is plural and yet who use it quite naturally in a singular context. They/Them/Their can quite clearly be plural as shown in this context:  John, Paul, George and Ringo got together they formed the Beatles. I like listening to them and their music. Ha! What I've actually done there is mix plural, (John, Paul, George and Ringo) with singular, The Beatles, the 's' on the end there causing more confusion.

Also, consider this when gender is not known or expressed. You have to imagine that I have just found a mobile phone on a table in a pub and I’m handing it in to the bar staff - “I’ve just found this phone on the table, I hope they come back and you’re able to give their phone back to them”. All pronouns there being singular.

See it's something that we just do quite naturally when we don't need to think about it.

I suppose that the point of all this is that we all have pronouns and for some of us they're really important. Being an ally means recognising that and just incorporating them into your everyday life.