Pardon My Pronouns

 I love the New Yorker, really I do.

It has been a bastion of intelligence and critical thinking through some dark times.

Now,  of course, I have John Oliver and Stephen Colbert to watch on youtube, but some of my old friends are disintegrating before my eyes: Judy Wooldruff is drifting off into maudlin-ville, commenting at the end of reports from her reporters "So heartbreaking" as if we need to be instructed how to feel about what we've just seen. Would Walter Cronkite have felt the need, after film from Vietnam, showing wounded and dying American soldiers, "So, sad"?  And then Judy hosts a gallery of photos of a selection of people who have died from COVID with piano music in the background and a monologue about how "Shirley loved her garden and her excursions to Walmart and her grandchildren. And her family says she never missed an episode of 'As the World Turns."

Gwen Ifiil, she is not.

I do like Jonathan Capehart, who replaced Mark Shields not a moment too soon.

Even in the New Yorker, however, we have editorial decisions which leave one gasping.

Take this one from an otherwise riveting story about polygamy in America. The author drifts off into a polygamous arrangement among some folks who are "gender fluid" or "trans" or something:

"Andy  goes by the pronoun "they" and described themself as "gender ambivalent." A lawyer in their early thirties, they spoke in long, hyperactive paragraphs, their eyes wide with passionate focus. Their pronoun preference, however, is mild. 'If you're saying a sentence about me, you can use whatever pronoun you want,' they said. 'They're all manifestation of the incomplete power of language to translate human experience into sound. We're all genderqueer."

--And so it goes. How much is wrong with this paragraph?

Let me count the ways:

#1 Since when does the right of a transgender or fluid gender soul to not be offended by insensitivity regarding his/her gender transcend and over ride my right to speak the Queen's English the way I learned and have spoken it since age 2. Why should I have to re circuit all the neurons in the speech center of my brain for fear of offending a person who was born a he but now prefers to be a she or a they? Surely, that person can understand the difficulty this poses for others. Why should everyone else have to change?

#2 Getting singular vs plural right was so embedded in my infant bring  the "they" referring to a singular person just sounds wrong. Can you imagine someone trying to translate this into French?

#3 What exactly do eyes wide with passionate focus look like? Are they different than eyes wide with horror at the idea of calling a single person a "they"?

#4 Translating human experience into sound through language is not impossible. In fact, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Truman Capote--I could go on--occasionally succeeded in doing just that. 

I understand, as Howard Cossell (born Cohen) said of Muhammed Ali (born Cassius Clay) a man (or woman) should have the right to be called by the name he or she wishes to to be known by.

I understand some people grew up calling Negros or African Americans "Nigger" and those people should learn to call colored people something less offensive, but that does not require a rewiring of mental circuits, synapses or brains and trying to negotiate paragraphs with he/she/they combinations which do not fit plural/singular constructions.

I must draw the line at "they."

And it annoys me to see the pronoun choice appear next to pictures or profiles on the internet, in special deference to this practice. 

Does the world really need to stop because you have special preferences?

Watching the Ken Burns/Lynn Novak  thing on Hemingway last night, I was struck by some of the film clips from Paris 1924, where women were sitting at sidewalk cafe tables smoking cigars, drinking wine with men and laughing. They were rebelling against the strictures of Victorian scruples. Hemingway's father had scolded him for mentioning in a short story that a man had got gonorrhea from his lover saying, "Gentlemen do no mention venereal disease outside the doctor's office." THAT was the world of sex in the first decades of the 20th century. 

Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, we have she/he/they. 

Those women in Paris were happy to lead their liberated lives, and needed nobody to consensualy validate their choices. 

Now, we must all buy into it.

Fie on that.