Pronoun discussions prove an easy object of scorn and ridicule. When news filtered through that during meetings at the Occupation, those present discussed what pronouns (He/She/They…) they felt comfortable using, it induced a fairly predictable reaction amongst those observing.

This kind of reaction, though predictable, is indicative of a pervasive attitude held towards gender issues. As a society we want to believe that such conversations are the product of self-importance; we want to disarm their radical potential by passing them off as petty and irrelevant.

Pronoun discussions, the target of a particularly insipid and lazy philistinism, are not merely the self-indulgent practice of Left-wing groups. When we, as a society, consider our use of pronouns, we too readily obscure the debate with talk of ‘pandering’ to the demands of ‘special interest’ groups, rather than engaging with the nature of societal norms and their deployment in our everyday language.

The question asked by this debate is whether or not it matters to have a linguistic category as a signifier of identity. The issues at stake here are fundamental to notions of self-identity, and our access to identifiable categories. That pronoun discussions are the butt of  easily ridiculed bares no reflection on the legitimacy of the debate, but more often illuminates the extent to which concepts of gender have become naturalised through everyday speech. What we often fail to recognise is that language encodes an ideology and that by uncritically using an inherited grammar, we collude with a particular way of thinking about the world and our bodies.

To historicize the binary pronoun is to prize open its ideology, and to show how certain notions of sexuality and gender are encoded within it – notions that become naturalised through reiteration.

There has admittedly been a great deal of progress in pronoun use (though not without some resentment), so that nowadays speakers and writers are far more sympathetic to their uses of these terms. S/he is vastly more desirable to the patriarchal he, and has been adopted without too much complaint. But whilst s/he redresses the balance in favour of an excluded feminine category, this balance still very much reflects a tired and regressive concept of gender, and one that is as much exclusory as ‘he’ once was.

The terms of this debate remain stuck in a concept of ‘essential’ binary gender; a formation we’re prescribed with at birth that then acquires the appearance of an irrevocable naturalness through its reiteration in language. We must negotiate a new basis for representation that incorporates contemporary theories regarding gender, one that dismisses the binary formation as a heteronormative fiction. This debate is an urgent one if we wish to live in a society that truly recognises people of all genders and sexualities.

So what of the ridicule? It’s very easy to blithely claim that our use of pronouns doesn’t matter, that ‘people know what you mean’, or ‘it isn’t bad, it’s just a word’. Roland Barthes had a good term for concepts like these: the “Unhealthy Sign”. For Barthes, when a sign (a linguistic unit signifying a “thing”) becomes too naturalised, when it passes itself off as innocent and unchangeable, then it is at its most ideological and authoritarian. And let’s face it: those who are most reticent to change are often the dominant, white, middle class males.

Alternatively, in a deft act of subversion, we might hear the response that, if we distrust pronoun categorisation so much, why would we want to accommodate marginalized groups within what we see as a normative framework?

The answer is simple: pronoun categorization may be a fiction, but it’s an operative fiction. And we must provide access to that fiction to all groups of society.