JK Rowling vs the pronoun police

Ah, pronouns – those once-innocent little words have become the Molotov cocktails of the 21st century. We used to learn them in primary school, blissfully unaware that ‘he’ and ‘she’ would one day destroy friendships, careers and dinner parties. Once just humble substitutes for names, they’re now a litmus test for moral worth, a gateway to Twitter pile-ons and a fast track to declaring your side in a culture war. Say the wrong one and you’re a bigot. Say the right one, wrongly, and you sound like a hostage reading a script with a gun to your head.

One woman who is certainly no hostage to this trend is Harry Potter author JK Rowling. A tweet by journalist Benjamin Ryan caught her eye last weekend. He claimed that ‘misgendering is cruel and rude, no matter how many edge cases or strawman arguments people can come up with to assert otherwise’. Rowling then shot back:

‘When you tell a woman she must pretend a man is a woman, you’re asserting the right to control her speech and perception of reality, while also trivialising and devaluing her female-specific experience. You’re asking her to agree that “woman” is a concept men can embody at will.’

What Rowling understands is that pronouns carry an entire worldview. She has endured years of online abuse since she first tweeted about trans issues in 2019, during which time the pronoun debate has only escalated. Today, using ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ can feel like firing the first shot in a culture war.

For the linguistically sensitive, a misused pronoun registers as a breach of reality. When they read or hear ‘she’, they instinctively compute ‘female’ – and when that turns out not to be the case, they feel swindled.

Meanwhile, for those who are equally linguistically attuned but supportive of trans ideology, the intensity is just as strong – only pointed in the opposite direction. They believe it is not only polite, but also morally essential, to use the ‘correct-gender, wrong-sex’ pronouns. For them, gender identity is sacred. Misgendering is not a mere social faux pas but a profound personal violation.

Not everyone relates to pronouns in this way. I often don’t notice them myself – and this is not out of politeness or kindness. Perhaps it’s because, as a psychotherapist, I work with detransitioners, some of whom feel they’ve passed the point of no return and end up keeping their adopted pronouns.

For me, the more urgent concern is the unfolding medical scandal: the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgeries on vulnerable young people. The debate over language matters, but the fight for children’s bodies matters far more.

Some believe this battle will be won through language. Others believe we need to get the kids out of the burning building before we start arguing about their pronouns.

Of course, there are also plenty of people who find themselves in neither camp. Take those who are trapped in domestic or professional situations where pronouns have become a form of soft tyranny. Maybe a daughter identifies as he / him, or a colleague is now a ze / zir hybrid, and they’re expected to fall in line, daily, with a forced smile. These people often find refuge online, where they can drop the pretence and breathe freely.

Others see pronouns as the ultimate status symbol. They wear them like medals of moral purity: ‘she/her’ in the email signature, ‘they/them’ in the Zoom name, and the unspoken message that they are better than you. These are the virtue-signallers, always on the lookout for the latest social-justice cause to align with – preferably one that costs them nothing and grants immediate smugness. They love the pronoun issue because it’s dramatic, performative and full of opportunities to be publicly kind while privately condescending. The trans discourse, to them, is chaotic, exciting and perfect for moral point-scoring.

And then we have the careerists. You can practically hear the gears turning in their heads at the moment. They sense that things are shifting – on women’s spaces and child transitioning – and they’re scrambling for position. They want to be seen as brave truth-tellers who saw the writing on the wall for trans ideology and spoke out when it was neither profitable nor popular to do so. They use wrong-sex pronouns to prove they’re not transphobic, while simultaneously offering carefully curated critiques of paediatric transition. They truly believe they’re among the enlightened few who will land on the right side of history in this grubby, dangerous and deeply polarised debate. And now, with the ideological winds changing direction, pronouns have become the perfect soft, safe and symbolic gesture – just enough to show they’re brave but not bigoted. The Guardian readers will approve, you see.

Of course, the largest group is the silent, disengaged majority. Most people couldn’t care less about pronouns. They’ll say ‘she’ or ‘he’ based on a glance and get on with their day. They’re not transphobic, they’re not political, they’re just disaffected. They don’t want to be dragged into a debate they don’t understand about people they’ve never met. If forced, they’ll comply, but only with a shrug and a look that says, Please don’t make this weirder than it already is. They’re the ones steadfastly ignoring the trans phenomenon while the rest of us argue about whether Pete can be a she.

Rowling is right – pronouns are not just a matter of politeness. Grammar is being used to smuggle in an ideology. Choosing what pronouns to use feels like picking a side in a war. I miss the days when the biggest grammatical crime was a split infinitive.

Stella O’Malley is the director and founder of Genspect.