Allen’s personal comments

Pronouns for Non-binary Individuals: “They”?


My pronouns are…

I see a lot of Internet foolishness with the label “My pronouns are,” usually from people who did not do too well in the fourth grade and who want to make some kind of political point:

Things have gotten very silly. Pronoun has started to mean “political statement.” Let's clear things up. Pronouns are simply place-holders so a speaker or writer does not need to use the proper name of everyone mentioned.

Getting back to genuine English

In the discussion of personal pronoun usage, there are several distinct groups:

  1. The grammar hard-liners, who think of the rules as iron-clad and unchanging. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, he probably had an English grammar handbook (and an old one at that) dangling from one corner.
  2. The slightly more relaxed academics, who generally enforce the rules, but point out that English is a living language, and speakers sometimes like to say things in ways that don’t exactly conform to the rigid rules.
  3. Common speakers, who just want to be understood and respected by the people we are speaking or writing to. There are dozens and dozens of small language subgroups, some of them only a few city blocks wide, some more educated than others, and pronoun usage is a way that many of them differ.

Add into that mix one more group:

2a. People who would like to reshape the language to reflect new social realities.

Coming out

People who self-identify as non-binary (not comfortable with either “male” or “female” as a label) have always been around, and in some cultures (Native American, for example) they are celebrated and given special honor. In recent years, this group has gained more self-confidence, and USA mainstream culture is becoming aware of the need to write graciously and respectfully to and about non-binary persons.

In this discussion, I don’t want to pass judgment. I assume that for the non-binary person, that self-identity was not a choice, just as I did not choose to have brown eyes or to be short. All I want to write about here is pronouns.

“They”?

Two completely different issues show up when you use they for an individual.

The first is the completely unknown person. Here’s a typical example:

Someone left their book on the table.

The grammar hard-liners point out that someone has one in it, so a plural pronoun (their) doesn’t work. The relaxed academics (including my boss) respond that for hundreds of years educated people would have said it this way without anyone getting confused. Those who want the language to reflect social realities object to the idea that for hundreds of years the language defaulted to masculine if the identity of the person was unknown (“Someone left his book on the table.”)—and their vote would go toward the very awkward “Someone left his or her book on the table.”

The second issue is the known person who is uncomfortable with being referred to as either “he” or “she.” More than once recently, I’ve been asked to fill in a form with a question such as this:

Pronoun preference:
☐ he/him
☐ she/her
☐ they/them

That sort of form solves one problem but creates another. The problem is that English pronoun reference looks backward to the most recent noun(s) that agree in number and gender. Thus:

George and Martha went out for dinner to celebrate his birthday.

means that it was undoubtedly George’s birthday. However, if Chris has filled in a form like the one above, the reader doesn’t usually know which checkbox got filled (and with a name like Chris, all three are possible), so if you write:

George and Chris went out for dinner to celebrate their birthday.

the most natural reading is that George and Chris share the same birthdate. If someone points out that their is being used as a singular non-gendered pronoun, I’m still confused. George’s birthday or Chris’s?

How shall we write?

I’m going to propose two rules:

The unknown person

This one is easy. There is no need whatsoever to throw a personal pronoun into the last part of that sentence. Nobody would ever object to “Someone left a book on the table.” And if the situation is clearly gendered, for example the men’s swimming team or a Catholic convent, there’s no problem with using a gendered pronoun. If Mother Superior is addressing the sisters of the convent, nobody would object to her saying, “Someone left her book on the table.”

There is really no reason to focus on the identity of the book-leaving person; the whole point is that there is an unclaimed book on that table. The book-leaver can be deleted without damaging the sentence: “Someone left a book on the table.”

The non-binary person

The problem, of course, is that English doesn’t have a non-gendered singular personal pronoun. (Using “it” to refer to persons would be extremely rude.) A second problem is that readers generally stick with the assumptions we’ve been taught and we don’t usually have access to that checkbox form. I think you can still write around the challenge presented by non-binary subjects without being either confusing or offensive:

George and Chris went out for dinner to celebrate Chris’s birthday. During the meal, George mentioned hearing Chris’s new song, and said it was beautiful. (No gendered pronouns needed!)

The grammar is still evolving

A few years back, when we first began to get serious about gender-neutral writing, we struggled with a lot of awkwardness and several ideas got tried and abandoned. One suggestion was to simply alternate gender references by paragraph, so all the odd-numbered paragraphs would use masculine pronouns and all the even-numbered paragraphs would use feminine. That was very difficult to write and confusing to read. Another idea, which got more traction, was to use s/he as the standard personal pronoun. That didn’t work too well either because people really do imagine the sounds that words make when they are reading, and s/he was awkward: “suh-hee.” And what would we do for the objective case? “him/er”? “her/im”?

Fortunately, as we kept at it, most mature writers got to the point where gender-neutrality was just built into the fabric of the text. It took a few years. And I suspect that the same will happen with non-binary pronouns. For the moment, though, things are still awkward.

Yet one more rule

And it’s the same as the rule for personal names:


* All English usage is sort of a group consensus among respected writers. There is no Board of Usage deciding whether Mx is acceptable or whether “they” for a single person takes a plural verb. It took a while for Ms to become well accepted as an honorific for women (without referring to marital status), and other grammar rules evolve from year to year, sometimes very quickly. Your best strategy to get it right is to read good quality writing and see how they do things.


The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.

The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.

Revised 7/21/23 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.