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Being an English major, one thing I can clearly recall is the importance of using non-gender-neutral pronouns on standardized tests, i.e. the SAT and SAT II. I’m sure you all remember the multiple choice sentences in which we had to “correct” the usage of they and their to the proper he or she or his or her. This was drilled into my head incessantly in every English class, preparatory course, and, of course, the number of times I’d taken the SATs (and ACTs) themselves. Apart from the fact that I adored English and wanted to do well on the tests to get into a Good School, etc. there was also my “neurosis” to consider: I can to the States as a non-English speaker and made it a point to master it. Not surprisingly, it became very important for me to exercise proper grammar and to this day I’m one of those people who uses whom instead of who, makes a conscious effort not to end a sentence with a preposition, and never confuses less with fewer. So, the linguistic gender binary became engrained in me as a result. I was probably proud of my deliberate avoidance of gender-ambiguous language; good grammar demands precision; commitment to one side or the other.

The first time I found my good grammar challenged and even labeled discriminatory was over the summer at an internship with a non-profit teaching Sex Ed. I’d joked about some of our pamphlets being peppered with sub-par grammar because of the usage of “their” where “his or her” was called for. The other intern lightly reproached me, saying that we can’t assume that every individual falls within the gender binary. I was naturally taken aback. I felt defensive. A proper use and understanding of the English language is a more basic knowledge than sensitivity to individual identity, I thought. This “their” business is great and all if you’re a liberal, but in the real world it’s his or her, period. Or else you’re inevitably perceived as uneducated. And besides, most people do fall within the gender binary, do identify with one or the other, it’s only a (liberal) minority that falls outside of those categories, so by and large my linguistic choice would not only be recognized as correct, but would also go unchallenged.

Of course, despite my initial defensiveness, I was forced to rethink this he/she issue. I hated the fact that he or she always began with the male pronoun (s/he was just unbearably ugly and also not a word but a cop-out that reduced the female pronoun to something slashed up and mutilated) and that he was usually the default pronoun for any author, philosopher, reader, poet, critic, etc. in any academic paper. I had a brief rebellious stint in which I wrote papers in which I deliberately used she to refer to those parties, though that didn’t last long. Also aside from being an ugly mouthful (saying his or her EVERY time instead of their) their was incorrect because it implied multiplicity of person where a singularity was implied. So I committed myself to one. It seemed right: it was singular, it was gender-ambiguous, it was probably as formal as a reference pronoun could get in the academic world. I was pleased. However, now I’m beginning to wonder whether the implied singularity is not a fallacy as well. I recognize that even two-spirited people in our readings are still, physically singular – one body, regardless of how many identities - but I want to pose a question to people whether a corporeal singularity should be what is reflected in our linguistic choices when one’s (ha! I used it again!) identity may not reflect that at all. If we were to use some sort of a number-ambiguous pronoun on top of a gender-ambiguous pronoun, would there be any logic behind it or would it just make it difficult for us to distinguish between one and multiple human bodies (numbers)? Am I going overboard with my questioning of one-ness?