by Sam Smith changes pronouns to they/them
...
Six months ago, Smith said they did not feel male or female, but "I flow somewhere in between".
On Friday, the 27-year-old said they had been "surrounded by people that support me in this decision".
They wrote: "I understand there will be many mistakes and mis-gendering but all I ask is you please please try. I hope you can see me like I see myself now. Thank you."
This has come up a lot recently with some non-binary individuals wanting to be referred to as 'they/them' and people arguing that it's ungrammatical (as if grammar isn't just codified usage). But one thing you often hear as an argument as to why it is grammatical is that singular they has existed for centuries and indeed Shakespeare himself used it. It's basically an argument from history that it's valid because it's not actually a new usage. However, when people give examples, they tend to give examples that are not the same usage. For example:
"Someone crashed their car outside the post office."
"The customer should be told how much they owe."
Both of these pronouns refer to a singular person, but the difference is that they are referring to an unknown or unspecified singular person. Is there actually any evidence that the use of 'they' to refer to a specific known person isn't a brand new usage? Because every example I've seen cited has been in this 'indefinite' usage, to borrow a term from another part of grammar.
And I guess a follow up question, how successful do you think activists will be at getting people to change their language to reflect people's preferences beyond switching from 'he' to 'she' (or vice-versa) for trans people? They have certainly succeeded to some extent with written media. The BBC and Telegraph both covered this story using singular, 'definite' they to refer to Sam Smith, but the Associated Press have an official policy to only ever use it if there's no way to write around it (creating some pretty incoherent and frankly shit paragraphs in their articles). But in the wider public, and particularly with spoken language, I question how much they'll be able to control language. It can work in some limited situations like getting people to stop using a particular word and replace it with a more PC version, but these words are rarely such high-frequency examples that are such an automatic and ingrained part of the language.
