I hate to say it, but the colloquial use of “their” when you mean “his or her” is just wrong. It may solve the gender problem, and there is no doubt that it has taken over in the spoken language, but it does so at the expense of number. An antecedent that is in the singular cannot take a plural pronoun. And yet it does, all the time—certainly in speech. It’s not fair. Why should a lowly common-gender plural pronoun trump our singular feminine and masculine pronouns, our kings and queens and jacks? If we didn’t make such a fuss about the epicene, the masculine pronoun would just blend in and disappear: the invisible he. Working on a piece by the television critic Emily Nussbaum, I noticed a “their” with a singular antecedent and queried in “his,” but Nussbaum wanted no part of the patriarchal pronoun—“the invisible his” was not invisible to her—and insisted on “his or her.” I thought it stuck out, but it was her piece, so we did it her way.
It is best if these makeshift solutions don’t draw attention to themselves, and we often try to rewrite a sentence to make the problem go away (although sometimes the copy editor herself must know when to go away). The longtime New Yorker staff writer Mark Singer used the vernacular “their” in a charming piece that read like a routine by a Borscht Belt comedian; his sentence would have had to be completely recast in order to avoid what Eleanor Gould called “number trouble.” (Sounds a little like “female trouble.”) What about “one’s”? As an alternative, “one’s” is so stiff that no one, not Fowler and certainly not Singer, seriously considers it. Singer wanted his language to reflect the way people talk, a not unreasonable expectation, and he was playing it for laughs. I backed down, allowing something ungrammatical to appear in the magazine, which, in future times, would be held up as proof that it was grammatical because The New Yorker had printed it. Oy vey! I have to admit that as a copy editor I agree with the conservatives—my job is to do no harm. But as a person—and as a writer and reader—I am all over the place. I admired both Nussbaum for finding a substitute for the natural-sounding plural and Singer for insisting on keeping it. Whatever they did, their pronouns ultimately blended in. And that’s what you want.
Nobody seems to take very seriously a fourth possibility (fifth, counting heesh and its ilk): Why not mix it up a little? Why can’t a woman use feminine pronouns if she feels like it? And what is stopping a man from once in a while throwing in a “her” or a “she”? Garner mentions it (“as anybody can see for herself ”) but mostly to reject it or deride it as a gimmick resorted to by American academics for purposes of political correctness: “Such phrases are often alternated with those containing masculine pronouns, or, in some writing, appear uniformly. Whether this phraseology will someday stop sounding strange to most readers only time will tell.” He warns that “the method carries two risks. First, unintended connotations may invade the writing.” I am not sure what he means by this, but it sounds bitchy. “Second, this makeshift is likely to do a disservice to women in the long run, for it would probably be adopted by only a small minority of writers: the rest would continue with the generic masculine pronoun.” The force of Garner’s colon there suggests that those who continue to use the generic masculine pronoun will do so with a vengeance, perhaps in boldface, as if to strengthen the masculine grip on the language, which would amount to a fresh insult to womankind.
Yet the “small minority of writers” includes David Foster Wallace, who happens to be one of Garner’s favorites. And the effect of that feminine pronoun, at least on me, is to engender sympathy. I like better any male writer who is uxorious in his use of pronouns. Sing in me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!
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It’s possible that the makeshifts come more easily to me because I have experienced a pronoun transplant. Nothing makes it clearer how intimately and deeply pronouns are embedded in our lives than having to alter them to refer to someone you’ve known all your life. Just when I was mounting an assault on the Italian language, sorting the nouns that ended in a (mostly feminine) from the nouns that ended in o (mostly masculine), struggling to make sense of the ones that ended in e, the difference between sex and gender leaped out of the textbook and into my real life: my younger brother announced that he was transgender. Dee was two years younger than me, and we had been close—or at least I thought we were close. We grew up together in Cleveland and we both escaped to New York, where we were friends, sometimes neighbors, often confidantes, collaborators, drinking buddies.