Big Idea #1: "Boy or a Girl"

Answer: Neither! Assessing people's pronouns kinda makes my head hurt, but, so be it...

The Big Idea: Why wouldn’t creating special pronouns for non-binary folks be even better than using they/them? Wouldn’t we be honoring their preference to identify as gender-neutral that much more? And at the same time we could eliminate the confusion of using a plural pronoun to refer to one specific person.

[And by the way, when I say “Big Idea,” I don’t mean to suggest I’m offering up world-changing profundities, here. In most cases—and most definitely in today’s case—I’m gonna be pretty ignorant about the ins and outs of the topic. In fact, that’s kind of the point. So I just mean “Big Idea” as in, This is the lead topic of today’s newsletter. (And calling this section “The Big Idea” helped legitimize calling the newsletter CeeGees: Ideas, too, which I wanted to do to reference the Bee Gees’ album Idea.)]

But anyway. What first drove me to ponder the they/them issue, to be honest, was my grammar enthusiast’s brain (which is also, remember, the brain of a hopelessly swammy SWAM—that is, a straight white American male).

I was just about to email the writer of an otherwise stellar article that she had a really bad typo on her hands—because that’s what we annoying perfectionist-copy editors do, alert people to their grammar and punctuation errors whether they like it or not, and whether any online reader in the 2020s gives a shit about typos or not.

But the sentence was something like:

"If Cameron is concerned about their mental health, they should seek professional help."

I assumed the writer began writing about two people who were concerned about their mental health, and then decided to only write about Cameron without remembering to also change “their” and “they” to “his” and “he” or “her” and “she.”

But then, as I read further, the context began to appear. The writer indeed meant to use “their” and “they,” because Cameron identified as non-binary. Not that the writer ever gave us a break and actually articulated Cameron’s preference, as would have been helpful and appreciated. But after the tenth usage of “they” when “he” or “she” might have been used, I finally got the hint.

I get that, even though it’s technically “wrong,” it has become commonplace to use they/them/their when referring to one unknown individual, as in:

"If someone is concerned about their mental health, they should seek professional help."

I still stumble over it a little in my own writing, but I’ve long since accepted this as something we do now. (And incidentally, when spoken aloud, it sounds even more “right.”) But why do we have to make it so hard on ourselves by using “they/them/their” as one non-binary person’s pronouns?

It’s not that I don’t want to do “The Work” to incorporate this new rule into my language and writing. (Or at least that’s not what I’m consciously thinking.) It’s just confusing! And I would think non-binary identifiers would (1) not want to be associated with something that was so hard and confusing to incorporate into everyday language, and (2) would feel empowered, respected, seen if we created a whole new set of words expressly because we want to simplify the process of recognizing the preferences of the non-binary.

Well, as it turns out, it ain’t that simple. It’s friggin’ complicated, like most of the issues I’ll probably be talking about in CeeGees: Ideas. Life is a jumble of nuance. Most pervasive human quandaries aren’t easily explained, or remedied.

For now let’s just say: Don’t be a dick. And if you get someone’s pronouns wrong and you get chastised for it, then they…might be a dick. But they might also be going through some stuff that’s built up over a lifetime of daily struggle just to be OK with being who they are and having to make others feel OK with them being who they are.

You won’t get chastised, though, I’ll bet—if you’re making an effort to be an ally. Most people are good people, and therefore most non-binary people will recognize you’re trying to be a good person and show them some respect. And therefore they’ll show you the same.

Next time the Music Box, will talk about music stuff. ‘Cuz I’m a musician. I think for CG:I #1 on Tuesday (Oct 18) I’ll talk about the fact that my all-time favorite band is not very compatible with the spirit behind this newsletter.