So a few months ago, one of my editors asked me if I wanted to write an essay on the politics of pronouns, and after some dithering I decided that I did. I duly hammered out the piece and sent it off, and a while later my editor got in touch to tell me that actually, having read the thing, he wouldn’t be able to publish it.
You can relax: I promise I’m not taking this in the usual direction. I do not think that the piece I wrote was too controversial, too radical, too heterodox, or that I was being censored for my wild and dangerous opinions on these little nubs of language. I’m not even saying his decision was unfair. (Anyone who’s ever written for money knows that this happens sometimes; it’s why we have kill fees.) But the reason was interesting: as it happens, my piece was not controversial enough. I didn’t poke fun at xe or ey, or any similarly sexy new grammatical constructions. I didn’t even spend that much time with he and she. Most of it was about the other pronouns, the uncontroversial ones, I and me and you, because I think they’re a lot more interesting than they seem. ‘You can get in a lot of trouble,’ I began, ‘if you call someone by the wrong pronoun. For instance, there are some people who must never be addressed as you.’
Every so often, some politician or media figure makes a grand declaration, usually totally unprompted. I will never use pronouns. You will never catch me using a single pronoun. And then everyone clambers over each other trying to point out that actually, they’ve just used three. This ritual takes place every few months, and nobody seems to learn much from the experience, even though it sometimes makes it into the actual newspaper. We tend not to think too much about these words. We just say them: they fall out of our mouths so easily that you can end up puking out a bunch of pronouns without even noticing.
This is a pretty good clue that there’s something up: whenever you come across a part of existence that seems totally natural and obvious, you can be certain that some vast ideological structure is working behind the stage. And it is. Pronouns might be the most intrinsically political words in the English language; this is how we describe who we are and how we relate to other people. It’s not for nothing that in the 2016 US Democratic primary, the choice could basically be expressed as a conflict between two different sets of pronouns. I’m with her. Not me, us.
So in my piece I wrote a little about the contemporary squabbles over gendered pronouns, but a lot more about other things—like, for instance, the fact that Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, once forbade any of his subjects from uttering the word zhèn (朕), or I. Everyone else had to start using the much plainer wo (我) instead, which is still the ordinary first-person pronoun in modern Chinese. (There’s an apocryphal account in which wo originally meant something like this worthless body.) This seems extreme, but I think I get it. Why should some ordinary peasant get to have the same grandeur of self as the Son of Heaven? There’s something imperious about I, even in English—especially in English: that grand stark majuscule, thrusting itself into the world. (No other language capitalises its first-person pronoun; in German my toenails take the grand Zehennagel, but I am merely ich. Why do we do it? Well, a lowercase i is very small, and it could get lost: fourteenth-century monks were worried that future transcriptors might accidentally lump it together with the start or end of the surrounding words. The self is like a lonely comet, falling into any nearby gravity sink—so they made it into a sun. Maybe this is another reason why, four hundred years down the line, industrial capitalism emerged in England rather than somewhere else.) Other people have felt it too. Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia contains a horribly sharpened little aphorism. ‘Among some people,’ he writes, ‘it is already an impertinence to say I.’ That line might not land in quite the same way if he’d said the impertinent syllable was me.
Pronouns have strange histories and stranger uses; they’re the material residue of thousands of years of class struggle. They reveal some of the hidden rules that govern our lives. But in the end, my editor suggested that I could narrow my focus a little, and write about gender dysphoria instead.
There are a lot of essays about gender dysphoria out there; most of them seem to be on this platform, and not all of them are bad. But if you’re interested in the other stuff, this one is for you.