My pronouns are they/them/theirs. I insist that you use them when referring to me.
You can hear sentiments like that—perhaps not as succinctly—across countless Tic-Toks, news interviews, YouTube videos, debates, and in print, from the New York Times to Fox News. Yet, what you never encounter is someone saying, “OUR pronouns are…” or “WE insist…” or “referring to US” when a transgender person refers to himself or herself. The singular individual never refers to himself or herself in the plural. Instead, he or she demands that you address them as more than one entity—something larger than one person. Is this a power play, compelling you to do something they won’t? Power play or not, why doesn’t the singular person refer to himself or herself in the plural? What’s stopping him or her?
The answer to these questions is what worries me regarding a child’s language acquisition: Are these demands of trans and so-called nonbinary adults going to metastasize into confusion for a child so much so that the basic use of the grammar he or she forms, or is forming, will be hindered?
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My concerns come from understanding Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG) and Steven Pinker’s language instinct. In their theories of childhood language acquisition, acquisition is the sorting out from a deluge of sound signals a possible grammar as it fits itself neurologically into a part of the human brain. This sorting out comes naturally to toddlers as the grammar of any language fits into a mind developing around it.
One of their most cogent arguments that children acquire a language because the brain has a structure available for a grammar to be embedded in it, and the most thrilling argument, is that once sounds and phrases are sorted out to form grammar, children can create and understand sentences they never heard before, describe situations that have never occurred before, and produce infinite new ideas, especially imaginative ones. Language is not instruction or repetition but something a toddler grows into, like discovering how to use legs built for walking to walk, and then you walk wherever you want.
Steven Pinker writes in Language Instinct (Chatterboxes) the following:
To learn it [use of -s suffix for verbs in English] in the first place, a child must (1) notice that verbs end in -s in some sentences but appear bare-ended in others, (2) begin a search for the grammatical causes of this variation (as opposed to just accepting it as part of the spice of life), and (3) not rest until those crucial factors – tense, aspect and the number and person of the subject of the sentences have been sifted out of the ocean of conceivable but irrelevant factors. Why would anyone bother?
But children do bother. By the age of three and a half or earlier, they use the -s agreement suffix in more than ninety percent of the sentences that require it, and virtually never use it in the sentences that forbid it. This mastery is part of the grammar explosion, a period of several months in the third year of life during which children begin to speak fluent sentences, respecting most of the fine points of their communities spoken language.
If the -s rule, the last verb inflection left in English, is as complicated as Pinker has illustrated–though easily having settled deep into a child’s unconscious—then what is a child to do when adults insist that they violate something basic to that grammar, such as that one can be many, or boys and girls are not to be referred to as boys or girls? What are they to do with demands that contradict what they know for certain deep in their bones—their neurological bones, so to speak?
The argument that using plural pronouns for an individual is a tradition in English doesn’t make sense when one examines how singular plurals are used. No one has yet argued that using he for she or her for him, etc., is a tradition.
Take this, for example:
‘Someone broke into our house when we were away, and they stole my new desktop computer.’
‘Every citizen should take advantage of their right to vote.’
(Every citizen should take advantage of his or her right to vote.)
The “they” and “their” above are not plural pronouns referring to a singular person, but rather people collectively or an unknown person or persons, though indeed their anaphoric reference is singular.
Noam Chomsky writes in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (§8):
On the basis of the best information now available, it seems reasonable to suppose that a child cannot help constructing a particular sort of transformational grammar to account for the data presented to him, any more than he can control his perception of solid objects or his attention to line and angle.
[RELATED: The Battle Over Pronouns Coming to a College Near You]
What concerns me is the possible negative effect of a child being told that what she or he feels is right is wrong. How jarring must be the effect of transgender language, so-called inclusive language, on that neurological language structure in a child’s mind that a child cannot help constructing when he or she is ordered to ignore what is a physical development, a very part of themselves?
Children are presently being told that the grammar just formed in their mind is wrong without there being at least a substitute pattern, as there is learning a foreign language, because the alternative pronouns are at the whim of the person demanding them. Those demanding their use do not use first-person plural pronouns when referring to themselves, therefore violating their own neurological grammar. That grammar that has imbedded itself biologically into the UG part of the human brain. That grammar that children have taught themselves sifting through a bewildering number of spoken sounds: reinventing language as Steven Pinker has described it.
It is bad enough that as adults, we must, under the threat of cancelation, speak, write, and read falsely. However, adults have a fairly good grasp of reality. But what about the reality that children are just forming and being chatterboxes, having a great deal of fun doing it?
Cover by Jared Gould using image by Star on Adobe Stock (Asset ID#: 1126092920)
