Editor’s note: This article has been updated with a statement from FBC Elm Mott.
The pronoun is a basic concept of grammar first learned by intuition and later catalogued by name in the elementary years. Yet today it dominates much of our national conversation. In the aftermath of the ongoing LGBT revolution, many have had to grapple with the “preferred pronoun,” an unsettling if uncertain neologism.
Until very recently, most didn’t think twice about which pronouns to use, either for ourselves or for others. They came so naturally — in every sense of the word.
But the need for “preferred pronouns” arises in a world captivated by several ideological commitments: 1) the conceptual separation of gender and sex to the point that they are no longer mutually informing; 2) the questioning, if not outright rejection, of the dimorphic male-female sexual binary; and 3) an atomization of the self that untethers self-concept from reality, such that one’s…
