Since I’m grateful to any publication that expands my vocabulary, my gratitude to The Sunday Times knows no bounds. Not only did its article on the thespian Asia Kate Dillon teach me new words, but it also opened up whole new horizons in grammar.
You’ll notice that I eschewed a gender-specific noun like ‘actor’ or ‘actress’ in identifying Dillon, opting instead for the gender-neutral ‘thespian’. For, as the article explains, “The actor Asia Kate Dillon is non-binary, meaning they identify as neither a man nor a woman and use the pronouns ‘they/them/their’ instead of ‘she/her’ or ‘he/his’.”
This short sentence enriched both my lexicon (‘non-binary’) and, by implication, grammar. The implication involves the verb following the plural antecedent ‘they’, when used to denote a single non-binary person.
Speaking of Dillon, is it ‘they are non-binary’ or ‘they is non-binary’? This dilemma evokes the memory of my childhood language, Russian.
In times olden, a peasant always spoke of his master in the plural. Thus a butler would tell a morning visitor that ‘they are not up yet’, meaning his master was still in bed.
This usage is a solecism. Russian, along with just about every European language except English, has two forms for addressing a person: informal ты and deferential вы (tu and vous in French, du and sie in German, tu and usted in Spanish and so forth). But educated speakers don’t transfer these plural second-person pronouns into third person.
What sounds quaint in Russian used to sound impossible in English, but, thanks to The Sunday Times, things are changing. As a lifetime champion of progress, I jump up and salute. And, as a creative person of the masculine gender, I’d like to make a modest contribution to solving this conundrum.
Since ‘they are’ in the singular sense doesn’t sit easily with the archaic canons of English, and ‘they is’ doesn’t yet seem possible this side of certain demographic groups, I propose the gender-neutral verb ‘be’ as the panacea. ‘They be’ also sounds vaguely ethnic, but that offers the extra benefit of enhanced diversity.
Other verbs may still present a problem though. Saying that Dillon ‘love’ acting may hint not so much at non-binary sexuality as binary personality, which is a psychiatric disorder.
Here the solution must be less straightforward. For example, since we’ve already accepted ‘be’ as a cure for all reactionary ills, perhaps we could build any sentence around this grammatical breakthrough.
Thus, instead of saying ‘they love acting’ or, even worse, ‘they loves acting’, we could say ‘they be in love with acting’. A word of caution: when saying this, refrain from indulging in Ali G gesticulation.
The article is written with the empathy and sensitivity one has learned to expect even from our conservative press. For example, the author laments, blood dripping out of their [sic] heart, that “Throughout the process of writing this profile, I heard Dillon misgendered as ‘she’ multiple times and even their IMDB page refers to them as an ‘actress’.”
A stick-in-the-mud pedant might suggest that the first four words in that sentence could be replaced with ‘when’, but this is a minor quibble compared to the gratitude one must feel for having learned yet another new word. I bet you’ve never heard the verb ‘misgender’ or its derivatives before – I certainly hadn’t until enlightened by our venerable newspaper.
Dillon themselves be a graduate of the Sunday Times language school, as witnessed by this heart-rending passage: “I feel like one thing I encounter is that, particularly with men who identify as men, when they find out I’m non-binary, they don’t know how to be in relation to someone that isn’t something that they understand.”
According to the article, Dillon be in possession of a fine aesthetic sense and a keen understanding of utilitarian morality: “Their body is inscribed with eight tattoos, including ‘Einfühlung’, the German word for empathy, on their neck, and ‘What you will’ on their right inner forearm – the alternate title to Dillon’s favourite Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night (of course), ‘and a reminder to me that as long as I’m not hurting myself, or anyone else, I should do what makes me happy’.”
I feel ashamed about having neglected to use my body as a poster site advertising my erudition, such as it is. However, though grateful for discovering that ‘alternate’ now means the same as ‘alternative’, I could still make a timid objection to the statement at the end.
When my bladder is bursting, relieving myself in full view of a Chelsea crowd would make me happy without really hurting anybody. However… well, you get the point.
Yet this slight philosophical lapse is more than made up for by Dillon’s ground-breaking contribution to physiology and microbiology. To wit: “Sex is between our legs, gender identity is between our ears.”
Now though I can claim only cursory familiarity with the disciplines in question, I seem to recall reading somewhere about things called ‘chromosomes’ that supposedly determine sex – sorry, I mean gender – identity. Skimming the surface, I’ve also run across words like ‘hormones’ or, more specifically, ‘testosterone’ and ‘oestrogen’. Silly me, I’ve never realised that those things reside strictly between our legs – or, come to that, between our ears.
“Today,” continued the article, “Dillon… lives… with long-term partner Christopher, who identifies as a man (they have an open relationship), and Eugene, a 12-year-old cat.” Neither the cat’s identification nor its role in the open relationship was made clear.
What Dillon stated unequivocally was that, other than Christopher, those who identify as men present a deadly threat to them: “They’re, like, ‘Do I… am I supposed to kill you?’”
The article is in awe of their courage: “Dillon mentions the potential instinct to kill someone who is non-binary so casually that it almost doesn’t register, but the threat of violence is a reality that they and other gender non-conforming individuals face daily.”
If that’s true, I’m appalled and yet hopeful. Such troglodyte urges can’t stop progress, whose salutary achievement is that a non-binary person like Dillon now performs in TV dramas – rather than at the county fairs of yore, alongside a man with breasts and a woman with a beard.
They have the person in Thailand that paints a line down the center of their body from head to toe. One half acts and dresses feminine the other half acts and dresses male.
You are being too kind (as is your wont) to a great organ of record. You are assuming that the creatives and sub-editors will partner in particular with the Heads of Portfolio of Engagement & Outreach, Executive Services and Technical Operations by harnessing and leveraging all that that they have to offer to propel the business forward from this point in time.
Why is this gender identification so problematic in our postmodern world? I have been in the delivery ward on multiple occasions and the obstetrician holds up the new baby and says “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” and no nurse or other doctor ever disagreed. It use to be so obvious.
“’it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’”
I suppose the reply would be, biologically YES but in later life the mentality might not be boy or girl? Is that correct?
Using that logic, then a Caucasian may mentally think later that they are really a Negroid. However, the overarching “bleeding obvious” still over-rules their desires.