Sometimes it's hard to be someone who learned all their grammar in the 1950's. My initial reaction to use of they for a gender fluid person was that of an English teacher from the last century: “They can’t do that!”
But the more I read and the more I considered the very real case of those born somewhere in the middle of the spectrum that is gender, the more I began to accept this jarring usage, albeit while gritting my teeth a bit.
Recently, in editing one of the submissions for my class, I ran into a paragraph where a tarot reader is explaining the card for The Mage and says of the figure on the card ‘They’re pointing up with one hand…” As I was prepared to correct that they, I noticed that the writer had described the mage as androgynous. Aha! I pulled back my electronic red pencil, feeling inordinately proud of myself for having made this shift. I refuse to be like the folks who still cling to the two spaces after a period or never split an infinitive despite the change in most modern style books. As long as I’m being paid for editing, I owe it to the writers to stay up to date and aware of current usage. But I have found myself wishing there were a gender neutral pronoun so that they would continue to be plural forever. Then I realized–we’ve been using they to refer to a single person for years--in cases where the gender is unknown. As in: Someone left a note on my car Who was it? They didn’t sign it Or look back at that first sentence. 'Someone who learned all their grammar..."I'm that someone and I know my gender, yet I didn't write her.
Weird.
