It’s September, and a new year is beginning. Of course, trouble awaits. For college students, that can mean getting caught in a dorm room with a candle or a substance that can be lit by that candle. For faculty members, it can mean using the wrong pronoun to refer to a student.
About six years ago, I was speaking to a new first-year who said that she — or so I assumed from the student’s flowery sundress — had a single room. Knowing that other students had been tripled up in rooms meant for two, I said, “Wow, how’d you manage that?”
“Well,” replied Leslie (not a real name), “my roommate demanded another room when I told her that I was really a boy.” Index-finger tap to forehead. “Up here.”
Decades ago, before the term existed, I knew a few transgendered people, but they tended to look the part. Some women had crew cuts and wore men’s clothing. Some men feminized their appearances. But Leslie dressed in the girly-girliest apparel. No problem. Nonetheless, when it was time for me to write an evaluation that would become part of a transcript, I adhered to his pronoun preference.
Perhaps inappropriately, I pondered Leslie’s romantic prospects. As a born girl identifying as a boy who chose to look like a girl, she/he seemed to foreclose most avenues of hetero or homosexual experience, and I felt sad about that. Maybe Leslie, too, was saddened by the end of the year, because when I asked if I should still use the male pronoun for the final evaluation, her/his response was a sigh: “Whatever.” Given permission, I used the female pronoun.
Respect is the first principle of modern college culture. We must respect the right to free speech of students who would prohibit a campus visit from a speaker who might disagree with them. We must respect a vegan’s right to sneer at the mention of barbecue. Above all, we must respect the right of students to sexually self-identify in any way they wish.
Flexible pronouns were only the start of today’s complex self-identification process. Soon came an entirely new pronoun, “zhe,” meant to be universal. To me, this was less mystifying than the she/he conundrum, perhaps because I was sympathetic to its purpose. Take the following sentence: “She went to the store, where she purchased a hammer to fix a broken shelf.” There is no reason that this tale of domestic repair needs to be filtered through the protagonist’s sex. But if a sentence began, “Zhe walked into the room and unzipped my pants and tenderly …,” it might be important to know zhe’s sex or gender or identification. A good writer could figure out how to show that.
Now, having learned to adapt to unexpected or previously unknown pronouns, I am confronted by a new wrinkle in the language of identification. As one of the staff members at the college where I teach recently informed the faculty, “Some of the students will prefer to be referred to as ‘they.’ "
Really? Or rather, no, because here my problem is practical. Specifically, it’s what verb to use in those pesky evaluations. I cannot bring myself to write, “They is a good student.” Nor can I write, “They are a good student.” And I simply won’t write about an individual, “They are good students,” because “they” are not Walt Whitman. “They” do not contain multitudes. They are entitled to their own identity, but not to their own grammar. Therefore, in lieu of any pronoun, I will use whatever name a student provides. This will lead to a stilted paragraph, but it won’t be wrong.
Asked by faculty members how to deal with this violation of basic subject-verb agreement, administrators don’t know how to respond, maybe because they secretly hope that this is a matter of linguistic bell-bottom trousers. Just wait and they will go away.
Students are entitled to their own identity, but not to their own grammar.
In the meantime, I believe that many students are tired of the burdens of identity. Last year I told a gay black male who wrote a story about a gay black male that I didn’t care about race or gender, and the class gasped. Even though I explained that I cared more about what happened to the character and about the elegance of the prose, my comment could have been a signal to erect a guillotine on the campus lawn. Nonetheless, the student thanked me after class. He said, “No one looks at my stories. They just look at me.”
All of this comes back to the widely held assumption that my imperative as a college professor is to avoid giving offense and to make students feel “safe,” when I’d rather tell them: “Someone in this class will die before the age of 30. Many of you will have miserable jobs, unhappy marriages. Even those of you who succeed may suffer from gnawing fears that you don’t deserve your success.” Serving up comfort on marshmallow fluff is a disservice to students who will have to enter a world likely to be less accommodating than a college campus.
Ironically, any failure to support a student’s identity by using language of the student’s devising may create an “unsafe” environment for professors. If we don’t bow to the latest linguistic fad, we’re liable to be accused of a terrible and potentially job-terminating ism. Yet those who insist that the taint of our grammar makes us racist or sexist or classist or … whatever … are themselves guilty of istism. There, I said it. They’re istists. Yet I, too, am subject to sin. Stretch me on the rack of contemporary academic dogma and I’ll confess. I’m a pluralist.
