this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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They bothers me for that reason. It obfuscates the conversation. Makes me feel like Abbot and Costello. Almost every conversation about my daughters non binary friends requires clarification about who we're talking about and usually we revert to calling everyone by name. I'm all for personal expression and everything, but I wish we picked a new word.
The way I put it to people who struggle with it is imagine you’ve invited a friend to dinner, and they ask “Do you mind if I bring a friend?” If you want to know what to cook, and you ask your friend, “Sure, but are they allergic to anything?” your friend will understand what you mean. Because you didn’t know the gender of your friend’s friend, you used “they” as a singular pronoun. Now just imagine you don’t know the biological sex of your daughter’s non-binary friends. It might help. :)
Okay, imagine you ask your teenage daughter what shenanigans she and her friends got up to on the weekend and try to track their happenings as the story progresses. Keep in mind there's three Thems in the mix. "and then they went.." "who they?" and it's either "oh, MJ" or it's 3 of them. Its clunky, imprecise and interupts the flow of the storytelling. We should have done what English has done every other time it needs a new word, steal one from another language.
English could go the smart way and remove gender from the language entirely like pre-1910 Chinese or Farsi or the like.
To be fair, I have the same problem when my wife is telling a story about her and her friends doing something. It's all "the she told her that she wasn't going to do that anymore" and I have to stop her and be like "wait wait, who told who that who wasn't going to do what anymore!?" 😅
I agree that "they" being plural sometimes too adds another dimension of figuring out what the girls were doing as a group rather than a girl was doing, but it's honestly already a shitshow. And (while I love my wife) made worse by a person who... maybe doesn't have their audience's interests in mind while telling a story. Because a well told story is structured to maintain a consistent use of pronouns and reintroduces by name when required. So, like, if we're talking about Carmen's story, she gets to be "she", and then you tell me how "she said to Joan, that Tabby had blah blah blah". That's a little bit the orator's fault.
New plan, we have first and second person pronouns (I and you), I think we need 5 new pronouns that correspond to "third person", "fourth person", "fifth person", etc.
And those can be gender non-specific, because the same problem happens when a guy is telling a story involving multiple guys. Then it can come up in the grammar that "Johnny was talking to Peter, and A told B that Richard was mad at A because C didn't go to B's BBQ."
Problem solved 😛
I’m all for neopronouns, and we do have them, but that would be even harder to teach people than the plural they. (Not to mention, it would face a lot more backlash.)
My perfect word would be something in between he/she so you could switch to it halfway through when you misspeak. I'm not trying to be ignorant but grammatical conventions are quite ingrained.
This would be just as much of a problem if they were boys or girls - multiple hes and shes instead of theys. The problem isn't "they", it always applies to multiple people of the same gender.
My son is trans and, prior to transitioning, when through a phase where he just felt non-binary. So e went from "she" to "they" to "he." I agree with you; though I felt it was important to refer to him in whatever was he felt appropriate, "they" always seemed awkward.