Gender Bender

I read that The Chicago Manual of Style has a “Glossary of Problematic Words and Phrases” at paragraph 5.220. Since I could easily be called a problematic person depending on what’s stuck in my craw on a given day, I fully empathize with words that were probably labeled problematic by a kindergarten teacher with an overcrowded classroom and too few winks on their favorite online dating site.

Notice how I cleverly segued into one of today’s top problematic words in that last sentence: the dreaded “singular they/their.” In the old days, in addition to striking through the reference to “online dating sites,” which didn’t exist yet, that sentence would have used the singular she/her, as in “her favorite online dating site,” right? The sentence had no plural noun and grade school teachers were most often women, so there was little reason for a pronoun debate in a mid-century writer’s overcrowded brain. Now that gender identity issues have evolved to a level even a 1970s bra-burner could never have imagined, pronoun parsing is trickier than ever.

Yesterday I read on mentalfloss.com that the Washington Post Style Guide has been amended to accept the “singular they” because it’s “the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral, third-person singular personal pronoun.” As one commenter pithily noted, “Language is plastic. We must also bend.”

I was almost convinced to reach for my trusty mental floss and swipe the pronoun plaque from my brain, when I thought about PVC pipe, which is made of plastic and doesn’t bend. Then I get a confetti-infused Facebook notification that reads, “It’s John’s Smith’s birthday today. Wish them well.” Can’t some programming “genius” write some code so Facebook realizes that John Smith’s profile picture looks like a he and tell me to wish “him” well? Or is that the tiny T-Rex part of my brain doing the thinking?

One thing’s for sure. Now that I’ll have this dilemma stuck in my craw for the rest of the day, Malia will be a problematic word for anyone who crosses my path. Anybody got any better thoughts on gender-neutral pronouns for the conflicted writer?