It’s better than the other options we have in contemporary English. But its awkwardness — applying a plural to a singular person — is an indication of the conceptual limits of English and of the way one’s language molds one’s thinking.
I use it. It feels awkward. Many people reject it for reasons they wouldn’t be aware of, if they spoke Finnish, for example.
And at this point I really don’t care.
It seems like your dander is up these days and you are in a mood to go full tilt debate team.
I have other things to spend my energy on.
I’ve only encountered the awkwardness if it is a forced insertion for where grammar would have strongly favored “he” or “she”. But I think you are underestimating the elasticity of already existing language in thinking this hasn’t already been in natural use. E.g. decades ago, before any of this became part of any gender wars, it would/was/and still is perfectly natural to say of someone (even just one person-singular): “They are in the lunchroom right now.” That is a perfectly natural way to state it - zero awkwardness, 100% ‘standard usage’. So our language is already there, at least in part. It would seem that objections tend stem more from the underlying ideologies or motivations than from grammatical awkwardness.
The change is using they/them to refer to identified non-binary individuals and not simply as a gender-inclusive (could be either he or she, we don’t know) singular pronoun for unidentified hypothetical individuals.
And yes, using they as a plural can carry on as before, just as using you/your for both singular and plural carries on. At one point in history there was a familiar formal distinction for singular you/your, with you/your being formal singular (as well as plural) and thee/thou being informal, but that distinction disappeared. When the communicative context requires disambiguating plural you from singular you, people say y’all or you guys or you’uns, and we communicate just fine. We also use you as a generic pronoun intead of “one” all the time and people manage to understand they aren’t being addressed. Most of the time at least. My husband uses “you” all the time instead of “people” and often uses you instead of I to express his own opinions, which I sometimes find confusing when he is talking to me, but he’s a native English speaker, so this is obviously how some people learned to use English.
I didn’t know we were debating anything. Sorry for whatever tone you read into what I wrote, it wasn’t intended. I thought I was just sharing information.
Hey, I’ve already gotten woman-splained by my doctor. You’re piling on. 
Completely aside from pronoun politics, I find it exasperating to read a column thinking a group is referenced and later sorting out that it is an individual, and once straightened out to have to reread to get the proper sense of the article. Also, verb forms reflect singular or plural subjects and that information is lost there as well.
True, but I find it similarly exasperating to read something that uses “he” throughout and then find that it was intended generically. (Or, my pet peeve, being told that Adam means “man,” a word that can point to an individual man, an individual person, humans collectively or – rarely – males collectively.)
Right, we don’t use “Is you going to…” for the singular and “Are you going to…” for the plural. “You” is always conjugated as plural (except this sentence). And that’s the same for “they.”
This does lead to information loss sometimes, but I don’t think there’s an easy solution. English pronouns are a mess. And the mess does real damage, whether to intersex people, women made invisible in generic masculine pronouns, or collective statements of Scripture that can be read individualistically due to the double duty of our “you.”
Except when it’s not. As I noted somewhere prior, even though “they” seen as a word in isolation will be understood as plural - it nonetheless is perfectly normal English for me to respond to the question “Where is that student?” with the answer: “They are in the lunchroom.” (especially if we don’t know said student’s gender but we do know one thing - “they” was referring to singular in that instance and not plural.)
[I guess all I’m suggesting, is that as far as common usage goes, ‘they’ seems to have flexible conjugation that allows for it to encompass not only plural, but sometimes singular as well. It’s more elastic in that regard than ‘that’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’ which are never allowed to refer to plural I don’t think. Awkwardness can and does exist to be sure, but let’s not pretend it was all awkwardness now, even in those cases where no awkwardness had existed before.]
-Merv
Yes, maybe I wasn’t using the right words. “You” and “they” can both refer to either a singular or plural referent, but grammatically the words are plural. You wouldn’t answer “They is in the lunchroom” any more than we’d say to an individual, “You is in the lunchroom.”
Megan DeFranza | Eerdmans Author Interview Series
This comment is transferred from another thread because the topic is linked to the intersex question.
These questions may be considered in the context of intersexes and other deviations from the developmental ‘norm’ but they could be as well be discussed in the context of creation and evolution of humankind.
Very good questions. Either one believes that God ‘guides’ the developmental pathways to the detail that someone is born as an atypical or handicapped person or alternatively, we have to accept that God normally guides this kind of matters on a more general level, not at the level of a developing embryo. There may be exceptions to the latter alternative, like God wanting to show His glory or love in a special way or alternatively, to guide the larger weave of events towards a direction He wants.
I do not know the mind of God or His purposes well enough so I have to partly rely on my ‘gut feeling’. The developmental deviations may sometimes cause much suffering at the individual level - not always but quite often. Intersexes are not the worst kind of deviations, so my comment on the suffering of individuals was mainly for the ‘worse’ deviations.
It would not be easy to accept that God would cause so much ‘unnecessary’ suffering (without a greater purpose). The simplest approach would be to accept that God does not normally tinker with the details very much - developmental deviations may be (mainly) ‘natural’ deviations from the ‘natural’ pathway, not something that God ‘handmade’.
If that is true for a developing embryo, it could be also true for the past of the humankind. God guiding the ‘big picture’ but allowing the natural laws He created to act in the details of how humanity develops - in the past, now, and in the future (if the return of the Messiah does not happen soon).
(Numerous resources listed)
Nice to be reminded on Megan’s website of someone else doing good work who was gone too soon.
Thanks for the title and the table.
Very informative.
I haven’t had time to read much of it at all, but there was a good podcast with her I think I shared with you. Although there is more q&a than I had hoped for.
I will try to get back to the book. Thanks for the reminder. Many moving pieces over here.
I think part of the value of her work is showing that sex/gender variations exist, whether people hide or exhibit them, and that these things are not a choice or a fad in the way the discussion is often framed in churches.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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