Pennsylvania’s education department suggests the use of “gender neutral pronouns” in schools for “a more inclusive learning environment.” Among their suggestions are “ne,” “ve,” and “xe.”
Pronouns are what language scholars call a closed set, words we depend on to reduce our cognitive load, shortcuts that point to reality. Pronouns typically change slowly, except when, say, a foreign invasion brings new ones.
The problem with these newer pronouns is that they don’t point to reality at all. In fact, one website argues traditional pronouns “cause harm” by pointing to reality and “implying there are only two genders.”
But just as pumping wrong-sex hormones into a body can only mask but never change someone’s sex, the same is true of these “neo-pronouns.” And just as wrong-sex hormones can inflict permanent damage, so does the misuse of words. As scholar Abigail Favale wrote, to give up on a biologically aligned pronoun is “a kind of betrayal: of myself, my sex, and those bodily threads knit by nature and grace that bind us to Christ, and also the earth.”
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