They Who Control Speech…

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Peggy Noonan writes:

Offices and schools are forced to grapple with all the new gender-neutral pronouns. … It’s wrong, when you meet a new co-worker, to ask his pronouns. (We don’t say “preferred” pronouns—that “implies someone’s gender is a preference”!) You don’t want him wondering if you think he’s transgender or nonbinary. Instead, introduce yourself in a way that summons his pronouns: “Hi, I’m Jim and my pronoun is he/him.” Use “they” a lot. It’s gender neutral. Suggested sentence: “I spoke to the marketing director and they said they’d get back to me.”
This is grammatically incorrect but so what? Correct grammar, and the intelligibility it allows, is a small price to pay for inclusion and equality.

Also:

An odd thing is they always insist they’re doing this in the name of kindness and large-spiritedness. And yet, have you ever met them? They’re not individually kind or large-spirited. They’re more like messianic schoolmasters.

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2 Comments for “They Who Control Speech…”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    “blah, censorship is bad…unless it goes after people that dont worship me.”

    nside Liberty University’s ‘culture of fear’: How Jerry Falwell Jr. silences students and professors who reject his pro-Trump politics.

    I am compelled to point out, though, that the pronoun police are much more evil than the content police. Uh, huh.

  2. posted by Rob McGee on

    Shouldn’t it be “they who controls speech”? And “Meet Chris — they is a diversity educator?”

    (I mean, if the point is to use “they” as a unisex singular pronoun, might as well be consistent about it.)

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