Pronouns culture war: Does it matter what people call themselves?

The governor of Florida, the plastic talisman for America’s toxic culture wars, earlier this year signed a law banning teachers from asking children to give their preferred personal pronouns.

Ron DeSantis, way behind in the polls, is trying to out-do Donald Trump in their fight for the Republican presidential nomination.

So he has turned his state in to a sort of testing ground for hot-button talking points on race, sexuality and gender. It has not been going well.

Some children in Florida – I kid you not – have been told slavery could have an upside: because its victims might learn a trade.

Mr DeSantis has landed himself in a feud with Disney, one of his state’s biggest employers, over his Mickey Mouse “Don’t say Gay” laws on how to handle sexual orientation and trans issues in the classroom.

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His new regulations – which may remind older readers of the old homophobic Section 2A in Scotland – came in to force this week.

They are, I guess, a pretty good case study of what happens when you try to turn Facebook rants and stump speech rhetoric in to legislation.

In Orlando, home of Walt Disney World, the local school board has admitted it does not know how to address pupils whose gender identity does not match their birth certificate, even those who have transitioned with the support of their parents.

Its solution: to stop using pronouns altogether. Trans kids are, at all times, to be referred to by their surname and never “he”, “she” or “they”. I have no idea how practical this workaround is going to prove. Because, well, pronouns are pretty hard to avoid. Which is why, of course, they are so damned sensitive.

Hey, let us not pretend it is easy for teachers to manage different perspectives on gender and sex in the classroom, even without such rules.

The language row, after all, is a proxy for wider, more fundamental, more visceral disagreements.

But that does not mean that words, even small ones, do not matter.

They could be career-ending, at least in parts of America controlled by Republicans. Under the new DeSantis law educators could be fired – and stripped of the right to teach – for accepting the pronouns of a trans kid. Talk about “cancel culture”.

Ron DeSantis (Image: free)

There are clearly social conservatives who are triggered by people with their pronouns in their email signatures or social media bios.

They see this as some kind of “woke” badge at best or an attempt to compel speech at worst, a way of forcing them to accept – with some of the smallest and most everyday words in our language – something many of them see as impossible: that “hes” can become “shes” and vice-versa.

This is not the first time pronouns have been dragged in to huge, even epoch-defining cultural conflicts.

There was a fascinating pronominal stushie among reformers and linguists in China last century – one I am not going to pretend to even begin to understand – about whether the language needed an equivalent of “she”.

Around the same time Benito Mussolini took a terrible dislike to the courteous form of “you” in modern Italian, lei. The fascist dictator thought this harmless little word, which also means ‘she” was effeminate and foreign-inspired. Real Italians, Mussolini ordered, should instead say “voi”, now usually only a plural form.

So, yes, second and third person pronouns can be “political”: they define how we talk to and about others. But this means they can also be “polite”.

I suspect many of us who accept the pronouns of a trans person are doing so because, well, it would be rude not to.

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It is amazing what most of us will do to be courteous, to avoid creating a fuss or giving unnecessary offence, including to strangers. So we change how we speak, often without really thinking about it.

Indeed, it is this instinct that some gender-critical feminists baulk at.

But it is our urge to be polite that – for me, anyway – is creating a much more interesting story of English personal pronouns.

Foreigners studying our language will be told we do not have what experts call a T-V Distinction, the way that, say, French has “tu’ and “vous”.

English has just one “you”, they will learn. That has far from always been true. And is it now?

Think of the way some people who use “yourself” or “yourselves” as a way of sounding courteous when talking to others. Are more people doing this, at least in Britain? I suspect so.

This change comes as fewer of us use honorifics like “Mr” or “Mrs” when we address others, or say “sir” or “madam” to show respect.

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Sticklers do not like this development. There are even “good English” guides on the internet warning saying “yourself” instead of “you” when trying to be polite. That is usually a sign that change is afoot.

Languages, as is so often said, are in a constant state of flux and this inevitably generates a lot of opinion.

There will be people who think addressing someone as “yourself” is ghastly and common. And others who see it as courteous and pleasant.

There will be those who loathe, say, the (actually rather old) usage of “they” as a non-gender-specific third-person pronoun.

English speakers are also gradually trying out different ways to have a plural second person pronoun, Some are adopting the Scots “yous”, the “y’all” of the southern United States or even just “you guys”. These also spark strong views.

Me? I think we should be cool with changing pronouns to show people respect, whether they are trans or not.