Politicizing Pronouns

No one should gratuitously insult anyone else. However, if each of us arbitrarily decide to create
new meanings for any word, contrary to an accepted meaning, or to create new words unknown
to everyone around us, and government then punishes anyone who does not use our subjectively
created devised vocabulary as weve chosen to define it, the language will ultimately descend
into a subjectively chaotic babble. The purpose of language is to communicate, not to placate or
to comfort; words are tools of thought, expressing ideas capable of exchange because they are
understood as having a common meaning.
New York Citys Commission on Human Rights has announced a policy to punish those who do
not address a person by the pronoun which that person subjectively determines as appropriate for
them. Specifically, the NYCCHR says that it is now illegal discrimination or harassment to
address someone by a pronoun other than by the pronoun that the addressee has chosen. That
choice, moreover, may come from an apparently unlimited universe of possibilities.
Facebook now identifies an admittedly incomplete list of at least 50 custom gender identities
and corresponding pronouns and New York Citys Commission on Human Rights has published
its incomplete list. Among the commonly used alternative pronouns among some self-identified
transgendered people are ze and hir.
Now an Oregon School District has agreed to pay $60,000 in attorney fees and damages to a
transgender teacher who, among other things, objected that calling her her(she was born
biologically female), he, it or by any pronoun other than they, amounted to illegal
harassment and discrimination as Oregon Live reports.
If the word they is now a pronoun for the second person singular synonymous with you, as
this Oregon teacher insists, then how will anyone know when the word they is even being used
properly as the third person plural in reference even to a group including this teacher who insists
that she alone is they?
While a single individuals idiosyncratic preferred pronoun of address may itself seem quaintly
whimsical, when government brings its coercive powers to compel the recognition of each
arbitrarily designated meaning of words contrary to their understood definition, or, in the case of
sounds such as ze and hir, recognize a new vocabulary with no generally accepted meaning
because another person insists on such recognition, it can only damage the language.
Eugene Volokh has a more extensive discussion of the social and legal issues surrounding these
efforts to essentially politicize pronouns.
5/24/2016 Lawrence B. Hunt of Hunt & Associates, P.C. All rights reserved.