They/Them

At an event in the local Jewish community, I remarked on the lovely apple red shirt someone was wearing. “People say it looks like Christmas,” she observed. I responded with a knowing chuckle. Every year I have to re-negotiate my relationship to Christmas, but I’m fine with it. Then she doubled down, leaning in conspiratorially and whispering “They’re not the only ones who can have color.” It’s amazing to me how, in the current climate, an innocent exchange about fashion can turn on a dime into an us/them moment. A silk shirt can become an opportunity to fractionalize the whole. Every time that happens in every passing conversation on every street corner, the distance between us and among us grows. More fear bubbles up to fill the resulting empty spaces.

I’ve been thinking about how there was a time when the third person plural pronouns, They/Them, had a simple purpose in grammar. “Where are the kids? They’re in the backyard.” “What are your folks doing for the holidays?” “Jim and I going to Boston to visit them over Thanksgiving weekend.” They/them were neutral, middle-distance words that you used to talk about more than one other person over there. In the recent past, they/them became the preferred pronouns of some? many? trans people, speaking of themselves in the plural as individuals who have experienced more than one gender identity. This usage is deeply personal. It’s a way that someone identifies not his or herself but themself. It’s a very intimate, close-up reference to an interior state of awareness.

But there is another more widespread usage at large in the language. This is the locution that sends the pronoun as far away from the speaker as it can run in order to refer to the Other, someone you are indicating you don’t want to break bread with. They….Jews, Blacks, evangelicals, women, immigrants, people with tattoos, Zionists. Them….Trumpers, Muslims, trans people, Latinos, men, liberals. The culture can be infinitely splintered. There is no limit. I realize that One Nation Indivisible is a stretch, but we’ve arrived at a place where no amount of magnetism seems able to attract the scattered pieces back into the whole. We need to reflect on the magnetic power of words, how that power can be harnessed for good or for ill. 

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

I begin with the primary understanding that the purpose of language is to communicate, to make the magical and implausible leap from me to you. By definition, the intention of language is to connect people. But we have so corrupted that noble purpose that words themselves have become at best fences and at worst weapons. The point of a fence is to protect people on one side from people on the other side. Once the fence has been erected, it’s hard to take it down. Sometimes you have to burrow down under it. In the moist, rich earth under racial conflict, gender tension and class warfare, worms are doing whatever worms do. Grass and weeds are pushing up. Seeds are germinating. 

In three weeks, Frank and I will be leaving for our winter residence on the western slope of the Sierras in northern California. In my family there and among their friends, people are enthusiastic about the outcome of the election. They believe their taxes will go down. My grandson in Minnesota, voting for the first time, also cast his ballot for the Republicans. He is a small government, the market-will-take-care-of-it kind of guy. These Americans, as I understand it, do not share my belief in the importance of providing for the common good. They want government off their backs. They want fewer regulations, less bureaucracy. I, on the other hand, want everyone’s situation to improve. Am I crazy? At the same time, convinced that I see the big picture and am more tolerant of difference, I find to my dismay that it is native to me to they/them these people. I know a few things about a few things, but I don’t understand the first thing about their worldview. I am lost in the wilderness of my own country. No megaphone, it seems, is big enough to allow my speech to reach them or vice versa. How am I going to learn how to do this, how to listen? How will I separate my revulsion for the people who were just elected, their greed, their bludgeoning of democratic norms, the pleasure they take in degrading women, from the hope that I will somehow be able to recognize the heartbeat of the millions of people, including and especially my own loved ones, who voted for them? 

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