The problem with calling Sam Smith ‘they’

Singer Sam Smith has announced that from now on his pronouns are ‘they/them’, sparking an overdue conversation about the social justice movement’s ongoing efforts to influence the way we speak. Of course Smith is free to make his request – just as we are free to decide whether or not to accede – but with such attempts to skip over the natural process of language evolution, where does that leave the teachers whose job it is to uphold basic grammatical standards?

The expectation that ‘they’ and ‘them’ should be adopted as singular pronouns in formal speech and writing presents its own set of challenges. We are all aware of the common colloquial usage of ‘they’ as singular in the case of one whose gender is unknown. For instance, to say ‘Someone has left their phone’ is far more natural to us than ‘Someone has left his or her phone’, which would seem unwieldy even in the written form.