The venerable Merriam-Webster dictionary has declared the word “they” its 2019 word of the year. The singular they and its many supporters have won and it’s here to stay. Despite what many language skeptics think, the use of they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun is no mistake; it goes back to the 14th century.
For decades, transgender rights advocates have noted that literary giants Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and Geoffrey Chaucer all used singular they in their writing. In a letter dated Sept. 24, 1881, Dickinson wrote: “Almost anyone under the circumstances would have doubted if [the letter] were theirs, or indeed if they were themself — but to us it was clear.” In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare used “them” in reference to the word mother: “‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother — Since nature makes them partial — should o’erhear the speech.”
Even the most strident grammarians give pause when faced with evidence that singular they has long been a tool of the trade. Activists have also emphasized that singular they is used all the time in speaking and writing when we don’t know or don’t want to specify the gender of the subject — as in recent commentary about the whistleblower in the Trump impeachment inquiry.
The current usage of the singular they, however, has expanded beyond the historical precedent. A few months before declaring they the word of the year, Merriam-Webster added a new definition to the word: “used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.” Some might view this change as happening too quickly, but it has been a long time coming.
For hundreds of years, pronouns were used to denigrate trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people — especially in the press. When George Wilson, a Scottish immigrant worker, was hauled into the police station in New York’s Lower East Side in 1836 for being both drunk and trans, a reporter for the Journal of Commerce described them using female pronouns from start to finish, stating: “When she arrived there, she went to work in a factory, still retaining her boy’s dress,” despite the fact they lived and worked as a man and were legally married as a man to a woman.