- All right, I know you love when your teachers did this, so I'm gonna do it too.

Pop quiz.

What do all of these have in common?

Take your time.

Yep, they are all pronouns in the English language.

But how people use these tiny little words can be very controversial.

What up world?

I'm Myles Bess, journalist and host of this here show.

And I use he-him pronouns.

Some people use she-her pronouns.

Some people use he-him.

And some people use the gender neutral pronouns they-them, or they might use any combination of these which has been known to cause some people's brains to just explode.

So today I'm asking why do gender pronouns matter?

- Pronouns matter to me because they're the way that I identify with myself.

And especially I get misgendered with pronouns a lot.

And so it just brings me back to a place where I don't identify, it doesn't feel like it's me and why does society have to put that label on me?

- [Myles] That's beyond Ve'ondre Mitchell.

She's an 18 year old social media influencer with five million followers on TikTok, where she educates folks about trans identity and experience.

She was assigned male at birth, but she came out as a trans girl at age seven.

And I asked Ve how she feels when people don't call her by the pronouns she identifies with.

- It makes me feel ostracized in a way where I kind of feel dehumanized 'cause I'm just like, I'm not putting on a facade, this is me.

- All right, so let's back it up a little bit.

What are pronouns anyway?

They are these little words we use to replace people's names, places, or things, which are nouns.

Ringing any first grade bells?

But when it comes to using them for a person we get into identity and that's where things get complex and political.

The big thing personal pronouns often signal is someone's gender identity.

And according to scientists, gender isn't this rigid he-she binary rooted in a sex a person was assigned at birth.

Biology and culture both influence our identity, which is fluid.

That means it's not carved in stone and can change.

And it can also be a spectrum.

It's each person's internal sense of how they personally identify.

It also means some people don't always identify with the sex that they were assigned at birth or the gender pronouns people use to describe them.

Often, these folks identify themselves as transgender.

Now they may have been assigned female or male at birth but may not identify with that label.

They may also feel like they don't fit within the gender binary at all.

A few identities that fall into this category are non-binary, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, and gender queer.

Some cultures have a long tradition of fluid gender identity.

Many native American tribes embrace an identity called two spirit, which is an umbrella phrase some tribes use to describe a whole range of gender identities.

And since some people don't identify in the gender binary it makes sense that they wouldn't use English pronouns like he-him or she-her.

In US pop culture, more and more celebrities like Demi Lovato, Janelle Monae, and Amandla Stenberg use they-them, as do about 25% of LGBTQ youth.

But there is a lot of resistance to using gender neutral pronouns.

In fact, according to Pew Research, almost half of all Americans say they feel somewhat or very uncomfortable using they-them pronouns.

And the level of discomfort has a lot to do with age and where you fall in the political spectrum.

And in extreme cases some people are saying it's a violation of their rights to be asked to use they-them pronouns for an individual.

A common excuse you may see out there is that using they-them to describe individual people is poor grammar.

All right, this is for y'all grammar police.

Let's get into it.

First off people use they-them in the singular all the time when the gender of someone is unknown.

Like you might say, I don't know who parked the car, but they did a terrible job.

Bam, that's using they as a singular pronoun and it's totally grammatically correct.

And also really common.

And Elon, what do you have against pronouns dude?

Like I thought you were all about free speech.

Where did that, did that get lost somewhere?

What's going on bro?

- People act like this is a new thing but there's actually a very long history of pronoun changes and those changes reflecting social and political changes.

- That's Lal Zimman, a sociolinguist anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara who studies language socialization.

Bleh, try saying that 10 times really fast.

- You know, language is always changing.

It always has, it always is whether we want it or not.

That's how language works.

- And when it comes to inventing new gender neutral pronouns we English speakers have been pretty creative y'all.

One linguist found more than 250 proposed gender neutral pronouns.

Take thon.

In 1884 this dude, Charles C Converse, no relation to the shoe, coined this pronoun by blending that and one.

It could be used to refer to both men and women and also when the gender was unknown, irrelevant, or where it needs to be concealed as in thon was the life of the party, dancing with thon bad self.

(laughs) The word caused a big stir in the media at the time.

Many praised it but of course there were haters.

There's always haters.

Just take a look at our comment section.

Now that's not an invitation to be a hater, but just look at the haters in our comment section.

Critics called Converse a grammatical crank and said thon was unnecessary and would cost a ton of money to change school books and dictionaries.

But anyway, after that, thon kind of just fizzled out but it did make its way into Miriam Webster's Dictionary in 1934.

Now some of these other ones are still used today, like ze and hir, but they haven't really gone mainstream.

They're still a little underground.

And not all these gender neutral pronouns were about pushing for more equality though.

Like for example, that time when men in power wanted to use he to describe everybody.

- For several centuries leading up to the 19th century, people had been arguing, we should really just use he because, you know, men are better than women.

And that kind of culminated in 1850 with British Parliament actually passing a law that he would be the default pronoun and that we would no longer use either he or she or singular they in official documents.

- So if pronouns keep evolving then why is there all this resistance to using they-them now?

Is it just about grammar or is there something else going on?

- The choice of pronouns has implications for what you believe about gender.

And so if people are feeling really scared or upset about the idea that there might be more than two genders or that gender might not be a biological situation, but something more social, the change in pronouns really represents that change to them.

- Politicians often play on this fear of change to get votes, something we're seeing in states like Florida and Texas, where governors have recently passed legislation that targets queer and trans youth.

But it's not only about politics.

Some people are just afraid of making a mistake or seeming out of touch.

We're seeing more and more queer users like Ve'ondre using social media to normalize respecting trans and non-binary folks' pronouns.

- I'd honestly say, do not worry about the stigmas that are around your identity.

At the end of the day, you need to live in your youth.

You need to be truthful to yourself.

And if you live in fear of how you're perceived, you can't be authentic and you can't really like, live happily.

So just like throw that out the window and know that there are people that can support you for being you.

And if they don't, knock 'em.

(laughs) - Now, none of this is simple and sure, it's easy to make a mistake.

I know I have, I'm not perfect.

But you can see that trying to get this right is less about being grammatically or politically correct and more about making people feel safe and respected.

Now we wanna hear from y'all.

What pronouns do you use and what do they mean to you?

And a special shoutout to our partners who collab with us to make this video, Peer Health Exchange.

Check out their dope TikTok channel and their new app selfsea, which was designed with and four young people age 13 to 18, and features a safe and inclusive digital community to discuss topics like this one.

Download selfsea on your iOS or Android device today, or visit selfsea.org or check out the link in the description below.

And as always I'm your host, Myles Bess.

Until next time, peace out.

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