They

“First Do No Harm” protestors at the American Academy of Pediatrics “Better Together” conference in Anaheim, on Oct. 8. Photo from @RevfoXXUS on Twitter.

We feminists hope and even believe that the work we’ve done over the past decades has expanded the boundaries of what it means, and can mean, to be a woman, but that hope and belief seems to me to have foundered on the pronoun issues of gender fluidity.

Teachers and publishers are struggling to find their way, as are the rest of us, in a time when “they” replaces “me” or “I,” leading to problems with verb conjugations and with a simple way to understand sentences. Will we learn to translate? How will “they” read the writings of the past? Will “they” abandon our foremothers, leading to further isolation, especially for writers, from the traditions that reflect a respect for the integrity of language—when it seems to fly in the face of the integrity of the individual?

We are all hearing the stories: a friend’s ten-year-old granddaughter who is insisting on transitioning—and my friend was not reassured by my saying that no doctor would agree to suppress hormones in a child still some years from adolescence who has no breasts to be sacrificed. My uneasiness with a woman sacrificing her breasts draws from the many years when we’ve tried to deal with female self-mutilation, because no matter how we justify it, slicing off breasts is a mutilation.

And yet, since I remember the misery of being a girl at a time when girls suffered every form of indignity, I understand the level of suffering that would make it seem that self-mutilation is the only way out. For me, it helped to crop my hair as short as a boy’s and borrow my brothers’ shirts, and then came all the possibilities of sexuality, most of them exciting and positive and expanding the rewards of having breasts. The power of the mature female, present in all her bodily beauty, is something I would never have wanted to give up.

A recent episode on NPR’s Sunday afternoon program “In This America” brings an interview with a man receiving testosterone treatments for an experiment. He revealed that the treatments led to fantasies of rape and murder he’d never had before and which contradicted his basic character and values. Monkeying around with hormones always has unintended and possibly dangerous consequences.

What will it be like for “they” when they reach old age? By then will they have found a community of like-minded sufferers who are comforted by their shared pronoun? And what about those of us who teach and flounder when addressing the new terminology, then face the rage of “they” when misidentified?

What about publishing fiction written by “they”? Will the usage become so common, and the verb changes so accepted, that those outside of that community can still connect with “they”‘s writing? Otherwise more separation, more alienation, and a curtailment of what reading good fiction can mean: a link to other people and other realities, other pasts.

I hear when trying to discuss this issue that “it’s accepted” and there is nothing more to be said, without seeming to trample the rights of individuals to make private choices, but like most so-called private choices, this affects the rest of us. An atmosphere of intimidation that makes it hard even to address these problems is harmful to all of us; “it’s accepted” has been used for many injurious practice, such as racism.

And yet, I saw in my granddaughter’s closed and certain expression that the time for discussion, if it ever existed, is long over. And that can hardly benefit any of us.

In Women