Leave me alone to think my way around problems caused by he, she and they, but do not dictate to me

As one who identifies as a writer in the English language, Malachi O’doherty is loath to introduce more jargon

There are some arguments that a man (to use a controversial term) might be as well staying out of. Or a woman, too. As JK Rowling found out to her cost last week. Rowling objected on Twitter to a sign that addressed “people who menstruate”, saying that there is a word for such people.

She clearly doesn’t want to be part of the effort to readjust language to a reality long overlooked, that many people are not simply definable by the gender that seemed to apply at birth. Some want simply to be referred to as “they/their”, avoiding gender attribution altogether.

A recent example I saw on Twitter went something like: “My child is reading their book.”

“Whose book?”

“The child’s book.”

It is probably too late to reverse this usage now, but language works best when it is most intelligible and this insistence on individuals being referred to by plural pronouns is unfortunate because it reduces clarity.

The old way was simply to use “he” for everything.

A book about, say, hillwalking would have a sentence like: “The modern hillwalker will find that he has many different types of boot to choose from.”

That language was standard, but ignored the fact that many hillwalkers are not men.

And the way round that was to write “he or she” every time. That is cumbersome and I always try to find ways of working round it to avoid it. I quite like “s/he”; perhaps it could be pronounced as “shahee”.

Then society, moving further in its concern to accommodate everyone, discovered that not everyone is a he or a she, or wants to be referred to as such.

Some might have started out as one in the eyes of the world, and needed to identify as the other. That, strictly, shouldn’t be a problem with the pronouns.

I don’t see anything wrong with referring to a male who was born female as “he’”.

Where it arises in the case of the child reading “their” book is that the parents may have thought better of assigning a gender to the child until the child itself (at least “it” is a singular term) has decided.

I am a writer, so I am picky about language. I feel that I have a responsibility to use it well and so I won’t describe a single individual by a plural pronoun.

Leave me alone and I will try to work round the problem without giving offence, but I am not going to be dictated to on how I should do that.

Language evolves, but rarely by dictat, and much journalism still declines to label every individual as “they”.

The New Yorker magazine in a recent article specified that an interviewee preferred the pronoun “they” and then applied it to that person throughout the article.

Generally it still uses “he” and “she”, assuming gender to be obvious, as it is in most cases.

You wouldn’t describe Arlene Foster as “they” and you’d be a braver man than I am if you phoned her up to check.

JK Rowling is a writer, too, and in asserting her (yes, her) right to use the word “woman” she probably feels that she is protecting her own right to use language without having to incorporate crass constructions to avoid offence.

The person who posted the sign to “people who menstruate” was allowing for the prospect that some who menstruate identify as male, or as neither male nor female. But can’t we have new words to reflect our new understanding of gender complexities?

It used to be that all women were either Mrs or Miss. And, quite understandably, women argued that this imposed a requirement on them to declare whether they were married or not.

They said they wanted a form of address which did not specify marital status. The word that is now used is Ms. A perfect solution to an obvious injustice.

Should we have a new word for men who menstruate? That is, for people who identify as male while still being biologically female, according to the broad reading of the category within the animal kingdom (maybe I shouldn’t use the word “kingdom” there).

Clearly, there is a group of people who do not want to be regarded as “women”, even though they have female bodies that are still synchronised with the Moon. As there are people whose bodies produce semen, but identify as female.

Should signs addressed to men not now call them “men”, but “people who produce semen”? This on the understanding that some of them are women.

I don’t have an answer, just a very strong wariness of trends to soften the focus of the language, or clutter it with jargon, that being my primary concern as one who identifies as a writer of English.

Of course, language changes. Martin Luther King used a word that is never heard today to describe black people.

The word “black” would have been offensive in his day. The word “negro” is offensive today and the coarser version is so offensive when used by a white person that even quoting it invites outrage, as Green Party TD Eamon Ryan found out last week.

Grammatical constructions that we were slapped for using at school are now freely used in Assembly debates: “I seen”, “He should have went”, or, worse still, “should of went”.

And even the BBC is now content with atrocities like “the amount of people”, or “the Government have”.

So, there is no firm bulwark available to us with which to preserve a living language against evolution, nor should there be.

But evolutionary adaptations in language happen for the same reason that they happen in species; they make life easier. They are a better fit.

Changing the language in such a way that puts a strain on it and compromises meaning, even for the best of intentions, is unlikely to work.

Language often fails to pinpoint precisely.

Look at the way we use it in Northern Ireland (to use a political geography term which will inevitably be interpreted by some as carrying ideological implications).

We routinely use words like nationalist, Catholic, Protestant, unionist and community in ways that convey our intended meaning, but don’t cover all the people we usually refer to and often cover people they shouldn’t.

I think we will still be using the word woman for a long time to come. As for them, those who don’t want a designation, I wish they had come up with a better idea of how to refer to individuals than pluralising them.