Gender’s having a pronoun war but you can call me whatever you like

Gender can be a pronoun minefield

What’s your preferred personal pronoun, a friend asked? Well, I said, I like “you” (tee hee); I’m keen to see “thou” come back; the royal “we” is irresistible but hard to carry off and, for general usage, there’s something special about “us”.

Yeah, not what she meant. She was teasing out my opinion on the trend of identifying your preferred personal pronoun in emails, business cards, CVs, social media handles and wherever one introduces oneself (another fine pronoun). Then we got into the debate.

Evidently declaring a preferred gender identity is not just fashionable, it’s a polite way of acknowledging that people who identify outside of the he/she realm feel supported in their decision to declare their identity. And this usually means that they want to use the pronoun “they”.

Fair enough, I said, I don’t mind how people refer to themselves. They could call themselves princess, superman, world’s best dad or wizard of lightbulb moments (a favourite in startups). That’s cool, I’ll call anyone “they” if they like (even if I’ll struggle with the resulting grammatical awkwardness).

But, she said, you should show your support for their decision by joining them in declaring your gender preference or else they will think you are snubbing them. They might even think you’re a dinosaur.

What’s wrong with being a dinosaur, I retorted, do you have something against them? I will, henceforth, be known as Ms Dinosaur and I won’t declare my gender until I pick your innards out of my teeth.

As soon as I mentioned Ms, I realised that we have been down this path before.

In the 1980s, it became fashionable for women to reject traditional marital titles in favour of Ms. Women decided that it wasn’t fair that men could cruise through life with the moniker Mr (after a brief period of Master) while women were tagged by their marital status. The adoption of Ms quashed presumptions about whether a woman had kids, whether she might be available or have a hulk of a husband nearby. It just basically made it harder for men to be sexist.

Among my friendship group, many chose to adopt Ms, some were keen to embrace the title Mrs, some stuck with Miss and a few were so peeved they got a doctorate, but overall the great transition happened smoothly.

I never felt pressure to adopt Mrs, nobody demanded that every woman should adopt Ms and I don’t recall any man adopting Ms to support my decision.

For that matter, men weren’t shamed for keeping their powerful Mr to themselves.

Coercion is the difference. Whereas in the great feminist revival of the eighties, everyone had the freedom to choose their own moniker, in the great gender revival of today, we are being pressured to declare a position.

Now, I’m not fond of insignia. I dropped my middle name as a teenager; I don’t remember my confirmation name; I often don’t bother with the Ms and I don’t get upset if people call me by my husband’s name.

I don’t want to be forced into adding an identifier to my name just because others have decided to. I didn’t like it when men could decide to call me Mrs and I don’t like it now when someone says I should add a gender signal to my name. And, that’s especially so in the workforce where gender is not meant to matter (or, at least, that’s what feminists have been arguing for decades).

As we play around with pronouns, I’m not going to invoke the royal “we” and I won’t bang on about my fondness for “us” but I will say, thou is being very annoying.