A Capital Idea for a New Pronoun

I get why people use they instead of he and she: they don’t want to be gendered and they don’t want to gender others. I may be old, but I can roll with the times and even learn a few new tricks.

Where I have the biggest problem with they as a singular pronoun is when, especially in writing, singular and plural theys get mixed together.

“They had not spoken to their family since they disowned them.” Did they disown their family or did their family disown them?

“Karen said goodbye to their friends before I drove them off to college.” Who got driven off to college, Karen or their friends?

People often argue in favor of the singular they by citing historical examples of its use in English, by Chaucer and Shakespeare for example, and in casual everyday speech. The meaning, in those cases, is usually clear. These days, though, we’re doing something different with “they” … we’re trying to avoid stereotyping ourselves or others by gender, and in writing it can get complex and confusing in a hurry.

Here’s a way to fix that. The idea comes from John McWhorter, who writes about linguistics for the New York Times: “When ‘they’ refers to a nonbinary person, why not capitalize it?”

Indeed, why not? Some will say we don’t capitalize pronouns in English, but we do: “I” is the most commonly-used pronoun of all. We borrow from other languages all the time, so why not borrow from the Germans, who use “sie” for “them” and “Sie” for “you”?

Let’s apply the idea to the examples I used above:

“They had not spoken to Their family since they disowned Them.” Who disowned whom? Now we know.

“Karen said goodbye to Their friends before I drove them off to college.” Miss your friends, Karen? Maybe you should have gone to college with them.

I like it! I might even start using it in my writing, even though, as I said in an older post, “I think in the future we’ll look back on this era of pronoun experimentation with embarrassment. You can tell me all day long how Chaucer and Shakespeare used the singular they, and maybe they did once or twice, but we all grew up with a clear understanding of singular and plural pronouns, and if Chaucer and Shakespeare were so damn hot on the singular they why did they also use him and her?