Grammar: one of life’s few certainties.
That’s a belief I inherited from my late father, a man who routinely yelled at television commentators mangling object pronouns (“between him and me, not ‘between he and I’!”); butchering phrases like “as far as” (“Is concerned! ‘As far as his injury is concerned’! Do they think it’s ‘as for’?”); misusing his preferred pronunciations (“‘Forte’ has one syllable! It’s not ‘forté’!”). His summation of most TV talking heads: Idiots trying to sound educated.
Dad diagrammed sentences for grammar-school nuns, reported for a newspaper, served as editor for a publisher of psychology books, wrote unfailingly punctilious prose. I learned from him to consult reference works, style guides (Strunk & White, the Chicago Manual of Style, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage). Claims of descriptivists (that grammarians should describe how language evolves over time) couldn’t touch his faith in prescriptivism: humans were forever falling short of proper standards. (Not set by him, I hear Dad insist: set by experts.)
Unsurprisingly, Dad has perched on my shoulder whenever I’ve typed, as a student, reporter, teacher, writer. Not just while writing; a former reporting colleague, hearing me at a baseball game correct my then-girlfriend’s usage, said, “Give it a rest, Grammar Nazi” — a description I’ve worn ever since, with equanimity if not pride. As far as grammar is concerned, the fascist shoe fits. (Or, as below, fascist T-shirt.)
One of Dad’s early lessons concerned pronoun agreement: singular subjects take singular pronouns (“The girl loved the books her aunt gave her”); plural subjects take plural pronouns ("The children loved the books their aunt gave them”). I still recall his critique of a high-school newspaper column I’d proudly presented, which occasioned a lesson in proper pronoun use with collective nouns: “The Tigers won their game” but “The team won its game.” (Every time I hear the British use the collective plural — “Manchester United are falling apart” — I’m thrown for a tiny loop.)
All this is context for the recent decision, in my 50s, to accept as singular the pronouns “they/them/theirs,” preferred by trans folk and others seeking to uproot the gender binary.
I had happily worked for decades supplanting traditional 20th-century usages of “he/him/his” as the third-person singular pronoun with “she/her/hers” — a modest bow to feminism that maintained the pronoun’s singularity. But using “they” instead of “she” — that generates reader confusion: as Dad insisted, a writing bane to be at all costs avoided. Couldn’t English users come up with a gender-neutral singular pronoun? Were “xe” or “ze” gaining any traction?
In short, they were not; the singular “they” has triumphed. (Victory for Descriptivists!) Word choices are modest in the context of revolutions. But I’m convinced that using singular pronouns against the will of trans folk contributes to their societal erasure, while using their pronouns of choice is an act of simple decency.
Not, as The Kid would be the first to tell you, that I’m good at it. (The Kid identifies as “she,” fiercely champions use of the singular “they.”) The Girlfriend’s elder child identifies as genderqueer, takes “they” as their preferred pronoun; I misapply singular pronouns to them about half the time (down from perhaps 80 percent of the time a year ago). A half-century of grammar lessons aren’t unlearned in the turn of a page. I’m not proud of it; I’m working on it.
Recently The Kid asked me about a news item that insisted on identifying, clunkily, that a person quoted in the story preferred to use the gender-neutral “they.” “What’s up with that?” The Kid asked.
I turned to the style guide — in this case, The Associated Press Style Guide (favored by media organizations across the continent), which in 2017 bowed to the singular “they” but encouraged editors and reporters to write around it: “In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun. Be sure that the phrasing does not imply more than one person.”
This, I told her, is like reading Western news stories about people in Southeast Asia, where absence of surnames leads to such routine sentences as, “Widodo, like many people in Indonesia, uses only one name.”
“When’s that going to change?” The Kid asked.
“I imagine faster than some grammarians might like,” I said.
All this — my father, language, rapidity of change — came to mind Monday, when the Supreme Court surprised the nation by ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects from discrimination lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender workers.
The decision came not with the sweeping rhetoric of Justice Anthony Kennedy insisting that Constitutional protections apply to LGBTQ folk but with Justice Neil Gorsuch insisting on textual precision. Gorsuch conceded that 1964 legislators who included the word “sex” in the law (which also bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin) would not have conceived that it could protect, as in one of the cases in question, a transgender funeral home worker. But, he wrote, “the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.”
The legal and social progress of the LGBTQ community over my lifetime has been shockingly, happily swift. When I compare the pervasive, domineering homophobia of me and my peers in the 1970s and 1980s to the culture of The Kid and her peers, who are creating LGBTQ clubs in middle school, it’s like we grew up in different millennia. (OK, we did. But I mean the passage of 1,000 years, not 40.)
I’m not saying homophobia and transphobia don’t persist, including at The Kid’s school, where I’ve heard students on school trips use “fag” as a routine slur. (So familiar! I had classmates whose parents wouldn’t allow them on a 90-mile school trip to a San Francisco art museum, since they might see “fags and queers in the streets.”) Not a soul in my California Central Valley high school of more than 2,000 — including teachers, janitors, administrators, coaches — identified as lesbian or gay. Such a declaration would have left any kid without a shred of social standing, any adult without a job.
Compare this to my nephew, now in his 30s, who more than a decade ago eschewed the notion of “coming out” to his parents. “Did anyone ask my sister to declare her heterosexuality?” he reasonably asked.
I thought of the swiftness of social change when I read two responses to Sunday’s post about how Dad’s love of jazz contributed to his racial tolerance. Both responses are worth reading in full, but I’ll summarize. My older cousin idealized Dad — “would probably have believed it if someone had told me that Uncle Paul and Gregory Peck in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ were separated at birth.” Paul loved books, ideas, art; he marched in Selma in 1965. “Your dad … seemed fearless to me, eager to embrace the world and enjoy its pleasures.”
My nephew, meanwhile, tells a different tale. My nephew’s mother is a Native American who taught him to embrace his heritage (as did we on his Irish side). He was stunned when, at the age of 6 or 7, while watching news with his grandfather, he saw Paul leap from his chair in anger upon watching a story of Native Americans protesting the sports world’s most racist name, the Washington Redskins.
“Are you kidding me?!” Dad yelled. “THEY’RE HONORING THEM!" He looked at his young Native American grandson and said, "Right??" — “as if,” my nephew writes, “to receive some sort of validation from me.”
My nephew wrote, “If a person as open-minded as Paul could say something so utterly offensive and racist to his grandchild, then it certainly goes to show just how engrained these views are in our own families, whether we realize it or not.”
My dad’s been dead for almost a decade; my nephew regrets not being able to talk with him about the memory. (“That would surely have been a rich and therapeutic conversation.”) I imagine my nephew, if necessary, gently instructing him that, in racial and sexual politics, concepts like “honor” and “insult” remain in the eye of the beheld, not the beholder.
Dad’s views hadn’t caught up with the change in sexual politics, either. (One 1970s sign of the rapidity of shifting language: on the TV comedy “The Bob Newhart Show,” when a patient of the psychiatrist played by Newhart said, “For the first time in my life I feel sad to be gay,” both my parents burst out laughing; none of us four kids got the joke.)
To provide context, Dad was raised a strict Catholic. The church’s rejection of gender queerness can be interpolated from its response to Monday’s Supreme Court decision, as stated by Archbishop José Gomez: “Protecting our neighbors from unjust discrimination does not require redefining human nature.”
Dad in his 30s left the church, replacing its teachings in part by working in the field of psychotherapy, the foundations of which were laid by Sigmund Freud, whose views on same-sex love were complex, tentative, contradictory. In a 1935 letter to a mother asking him to treat her son’s homosexuality, Freud wrote that it “is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, … [no] illness: we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function.” In the same letter, he wrote that it is “produced by a certain arrest of sexual development” — if not a pathology, at least a deviation from the norm.
When his four kids were adults Dad — I can’t recall the exact circumstances — told us that had any of us expressed love for a same-sex partner, he would have felt he had “failed” us somehow, that he would have “failed” as a father. We looked at each other in amazement: Really? Our tolerant father, expressing such deep-seated homophobia? Someone told him, I think, that his self-judgment would have been a waste of energy; the conversation moved on.
Humans are not evolving inevitably toward greater tolerance. Our species is a mess; our ability to love our neighbors as ourselves waxes, wanes, remains contingent on a host of factors, not least the open-mindedness expressed by civic leaders.
I’d like to think that my father’s racial tolerance, however bounded, provides a foundation — a grammar — I use to make sense of experience. I strive to refine that grammar in ways that bolster acceptance, kindness, love. I’m sure I fall short; as I do to him, I try to extend tolerance to myself.
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