Me, myself, I... him, her, they...

One of the things about life is that, if you’re paying attention, you learn more about the world about you and about the people that inhabit it. This summer has been a case in point.

A chunk of it was spent acting as Returning Officer for the LGBT+ Liberal Democrats - an independent Returning Officer is required for such groups - and I was seriously exposed to the world of pronouns for the first time. There’s no doubt that the world we live in has become more complex and, as our society becomes more diverse in every sense, the range of linguistic options becomes wider. And pronouns are a part of this widening that, for my generation (I’m in my mid-fifties), can feel a bit daunting.

In an era of “culture wars”, there appear to be two ways of dealing with that, the first being to simply ignore it, refer to people as he or she, and not worry too much (or even at all) about whether you offend people. You’re probably the sort of person who complains about political correctness and lives in a relative monoculture. Given that I’m a self-described liberal, you might guess that this doesn’t work for me.

Suffolk is, for the most part, a relative monoculture. Whilst I’ve rather fallen in love with my small village in the Gipping Valley, minorities are highly noticeable because there are so few of them. It’s comfortable and, in some ways, unchallenging. And so, having to interact with a group of people who are extremely diverse, such as LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, is a reminder of how diversity and mutual respect should work. From my perspective, that was about getting pronouns right, using phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen” which, when you’re addressing a group which you know includes non-binary people, is actually just gratuitously rude.

I was taught early on in life that you should try to treat people as I would wish to be treated myself, and it strikes me that, in order to gain respect, you have to show some. And, by referring to people using their preferred pronouns is a part of that. Their preferred pronoun is a part of who they perceive themselves to be, so how much harm is it doing to me to use it?

And it does puzzle me why people get so angry about pronouns. What impact that it have other than asking you to think a little about the people you interact with, and why is that a bad thing? In a society where people seem increasingly to forget the impact that their actions have on other people, and often give the impression of not caring about that, wouldn’t it be great if people were a little more self-aware?

It isn’t necessarily “easy”, and people like me will get it wrong from time to time. A polite correction should suffice to enable us to get it right going forward though, and making an effort to overcome years of social upbringing and environment should deal with the rest.

So, bear with me - I am trying...