The Pronoun Elites And The Struggle To Gain Control Of Language

For the ruling elites dispossessing the public of its traditional vocabulary is essential to secure cultural hegemony

Why call the class of people who dominate the institutions of the state and culture as well as organisations within the public and private sectors the Pronoun Elite? Because one of the main ways that the ruling elites seek to secure their hegemony and legitimate their status is through controlling the public’s language. The self-definition of the contemporary elite and its sense of cohesion is communicated through a carefully curated language that highlights the distinction between itself and the rest of society. To achieve this objective the elites are drawn towards distancing themselves and others from traditional language and replace it with newly invented phrases and words.

The commanding status acquired by transgender-speak serves as testimony to the cultural influence of the Pronoun Elite. The speed with which the different sections of the elites adopted transgenderist language was truly breath taking. Almost overnight heads of public and private institutions embraced transgenderism and before you could blink your eyes, they insisted that you should insert your favourite pronoun in your email. Suddenly official documents demand to know your preferred pronoun. The patient safety form that I am asked to sign wishes to know what sex I was registered at birth. Out of the blue, the language through which people gave meaning to the most intimate dimensions of their lives have been revised. Pronouns communicate a person’s identity and once their use becomes a matter of invention and choice those who control language gain tremendous influence over people’s perception of themselves.

Whatever the origins of the obsession with publicising your pronoun, its normalisation was very much a top-down affair. Without any public consultations the public was dispossessed of its taken-for-granted language.  Institutions launched training programmes and workshops designed to raise the awareness of their members about the need to change their vocabulary. The dramatic linguistic revolution that ensued was promoted as a long overdue reform designed to validate the needs of a hitherto overlooked section of society.

Age-old linguistic conventions were denounced for their heteronormative assumptions and previous modes of communication were rejected on the ground that they transmitted outdated, pernicious values. The ease with which conventional distinctions between men and women have been eroded has surprised even trans-activists. As one American law professor sympathetic to this cause has noted:

‘With stunning speed, nonbinary gender identities have gone from obscurity to prominence in American public life. The use of gender neutral pronouns such as "they, them, and theirs" to describe an individual person is growing in acceptance. "All gender" restrooms are appearing around the country And an increasing number of U.S. jurisdictions are recognizing a third-gender category. In June 2016, an Oregon court became the first U.S. court to officially recognize nonbinary gender identity.In October 2017, California passed its Gender Recognition Act,5 a law allowing any individual to change the sex’¹

The United Kingdom and parts of Northern Europe have been no less hospitable to a dramatic revision of the vocabulary through which the relationship between men and women is conceptualised. Transgenderist rhetoric has trumped time honoured conventions.

The rapidity with which longstanding linguistic conventions were disrupted was made possible by the vanguard role assumed by powerful institutions and their elites. Whereas once upon a time campus radicals were in the forefront of challenging traditional language usage, today sections of the cultural and political establishment are playing a pivotal role in the promotion of semantic engineering. The media has become so habituated to the practice of semantic engineering that it scarcely noted Buckingham Palace’s official recognition of the vocabulary of transgender identity politics (preferred pronouns) in its New Year Honours list. When the British Royal Family presides over the abandonment of linguistic conventions it is only a matter of time important words that have been is use for ages become casualties of the assault on traditional language.

Some of the most taken-for-granted, everyday expressions relating to our family and community life are now deemed unacceptable by the seemingly never-ending publication of new ‘inclusive language guides’. Words like ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, ‘homeless’, ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’, ‘ex-pat’, and terms like ‘deprived neighbourhoods’, ‘second generation’, ‘lifestyle choices’, and ‘economic migrant’ are now deemed unacceptable by the Inclusive Language Guide published by the  Local Government Association. As a ‘positive’ alternative to objectionable terms like ‘mum’ and ‘dad’, the LGA suggests using the infelicitous ‘birthing parent’.

The project of displacing the male/female distinction with gender-neutral language is promoted through some of the most grotesque examples of the re-engineering of language. When “woman” is replaced by “menstruating person”, “mother” gives way to a “parent who gives birth”, “breastfeeding” becomes “chestfeeding”, or “pregnant women” is reframed as “pregnant people”, a new reality is well under construction. This unpleasant reality is unapologetically communicated by the leading medical journal, the Lancet, when it decided to refer to women as “bodies with vaginas”.

As is the case with all top-down initiatives, those that relate to the project of de-authorising conventional language are not a response to public demand. Take the numerous guidelines on language usage that public and private institutions issue. Nor do people have much choice as to whether or not fall in line with the outlook of the Pronoun Elite. Nor is the project of advocating new pronouns

is not confined to winning hearts and minds. It is also fervently committed to forcing people to adopt new non-binary pronouns such as they, ze, or zee.  In many parts of North America, the policing of gender-related language is backed up by formal and informal sanctions against individuals who refuse to alter their vocabulary. Directives issued in 2015 by New York City’s Commission on Human Rights state that employers, landlords and employers who intentionally use the wrong pronouns with their non-binary employees or tenants can face fines up to $ 250,000. In 2018, the Governor of California, Jerry Brown endorsed a bill that threatened health professionals who ‘wilfully and repeatedly’ declined to use a patient’s preferred pronouns. Over the past decade, the attacks on so-called outdated language and practices have escalated and, in some jurisdictions, even criminalised. In British Columbia, Canada, a tribunal has ruled that misgendering a person – not using the correct pronouns – violates their human rights. Using a wrong pronoun can lead to a loss of employment. In July 2023, Michigan’s House of Representatives passed a hate speech bill that criminalises causing someone to feel threatened by words, including misusing pronouns. Someone guilty of the felony of misusing a pronoun can face up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

The Pronoun Elite

Historically, a nation’s elite was regarded as the guardian of the language that organically evolved through the experience of a community. The poet and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge who developed the concept of the Clerisy in the 19^th century, saw language as a living phenomenon, which was always in the process of becoming. His vision of a national Clerisy was underwritten by the belief that language was a civilisational accomplishment that required nurturing by the most gifted members of the elite. He wrote;

‘The care of the national language I consider as at all times a sacred trust and a most important privilege of the higher orders of society. Every man of education should make it the object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his language pure and entire, to speak it, so far as is in his power, in all its beauty and perfection. . . . A nation which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last of her intellectual independ- ence, and testifies her willingness to cease to exist’².

When it came to the task of preserving the national language, Coleridge was more idealistic and fervent than most. Nevertheless, a commitment to preserving the integrity of a received language and the cultural values associated with was widely shared by the Victorian elites. Respect for a community’s linguistic inheritance continued well into the 20^th century. The new words and slangs that gained public usage emerged out of the experience of a community rather than from the heads of anti-traditionalist cultural elites.

Coleridge’s Clerisy radopted an orientation towards language and culture which is the polar opposite to that of the Pronoun Elites. The Clerisy and successive generations of elites took seriously the authority of pre-existing linguistic conventions. They understood that language was a living phenomenon and accepted that new words would enter the vocabulary but they did not see themselves as semantic engineers who were in the business of manufacturing new expressions and words. Very importantly they were not in the business of policing language and forcing people to change their vocabulary.

In contrast to the approach of the Clerisy, the Pronoun Elites possess a zealous commitment to the project of de-authorising linguistic conventions and traditional language. They reject the pre-existing vocabulary as discriminatory, exclusive, heteronormative, racist, classist, disablist, or sexist. On occasion they flaunt their usage of newly invented terms and casually drop words like white privilege, white fragility, Latinx, intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender into the conversation. They take delight in ‘raising the awareness’ of their cultural inferiors through correcting their language usage. In case those lacking awareness have missed the point, the Pronoun Elites and their institutions are ready to provide them with copious guides to correct language usage.

The Pronoun Elite’s assault on language is integral to their objective of establishing their cultural authority. Unlike the Clerisy, who were clear about who they were and who possessed a strong sense of cohesion, vocation and mission, the Pronoun Elite lacks a l’espirit de corps that can bind its various constituencies together. It is through gaining control of language that these elites can represent themselves as the possessors of virtue. Their use of a language of virtue provides them with cultural distinction and symbolic authority. Through corporate advertising, public relations, the media, and education their language of virtue has acquired symbolic authority. In this way the Pronoun Elite hopes to endow itself with a measure of legitimacy.

The Pronoun Elite does not attempt to control our language because they are fascinated by linguistic development. They do not seek to control our language just because it provides them with a sense of distinction and cohesion. They do not only seek to control our language because it helps them to impose their view of the world on the way they think. They do not only seek to assume control over language to enforce their cultural hegemony over society. They believe that through de-legitimating the traditional vocabulary they can acquire a measure of moral authority. Painfully aware of their lack of legitimacy, the ruling elites have decided to find a solution to their predicament through the medium of culture. Since culture is mediated through language it is not surprising that they opted to create a vocabulary of their own making.

Never forget that language really matters! Through the re-engineering of language, the meaning that people attach to their experience is altered. History shows that language does not simply mirror people’s reality but also, to some extent, constructs it. It is through language that people both express and give meaning through their life.

The demand to indicate your preferred pronoun may not come across as big deal. But once you accept the assumption that your pronoun is no longer self-evident and that who you are is not obvious to the eye, you have taken a step into a reality not of your own making. The dispossession of the reality into which you and your ancestors were born represents subjugation to a cultural regime over which you have no control.

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1. Jessica A. Clarke, They, Them, and Theirs, 132 Harv. L. Rev. 894 (2019) ,p.896

2. S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, ed. John CoI- mer, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Cob- urn, 16 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 10:69,43.