We don’t even notice the singular use of you today, and it's quite possible that the nonbinary they is headed for a similarly unremarkable fate-only usage and time will tell. "You are" has, of course, been perfectly grammatical for centuries, and it’s worth noting that thee and thou were long ago completely displaced by singular you in standard speech and writing-concrete evidence of the constant evolution of language. It's helpful to remember that the pronoun you was initially plural, which is why it too takes the plural verb even when it's referring to a single person. Nonbinary they takes a plural verb, despite referring to one person, which can make the grammatically conservative uncomfortable. It is increasingly common to see they and them as a person’s pronouns in Twitter bios, email signatures, and conference nametags. And the American Psychological Association’s blog officially recommended that singular they will be preferred in professional writing over “he or she” when the reference is to a person whose gender is unknown or to a person who prefers they. Singer Sam Smith announced in September that they now use they and them as pronouns. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (WA) revealed in April during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Equality Act that her child is gender-nonconforming and uses they. Nonbinary they was also prominent in the news in 2019.
The addition of this new sense, “used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary,” did itself create a spike of interest in the word, but a substantial increase in lookups for they had been occurring all year to that point-with lookup numbers nearly double from the previous year. There's no doubt that its use is established in the English language, which is why it was added to the dictionary this past September.
More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as all over social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers.
No one has to come if they don’t want to. The nonbinary pronoun sense of 'they' was added in September 2019.Įnglish famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone, someone, and anyone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.
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