Featuring dennis baron and conversation they are here to discuss dennis new book, what your pronoun. The book is going to be for purchase outside after the program and dennis will be signing books. All proceeds from your purchase will go to benefit the new york Public Library. Before i introduce our wonderful discussion i want to highlight some of the amazingou events we have coming up this season. Tomorrowng we have poets joins with friends to read from their brilliant new collection of poems. On valentines day, we have our largest public event Series Library after hours the citys most cerebral happyci hour. [laughter] therapy poetry readings, trivia and interactive collections displayed with picture collection and more. Bring yourself, bring a lover, bring a friend you want to turn into a lever. [laughter] to our special edition of library after hours. On favorite 25th, we have two leading negotiators of the un Paris Agreement will join organizer to present options that government, corporation and individuals can take to fend off climate disaster. So those are events that are just this month. Our amazing season also includeste a tribute to toni morrisons, beloved, and partnership with the schomburg center. A discussion with writers reflecting on landmark cases. We have talks with Terry Mcmillan and so many more. So you can learn about our programs by signing up on our mailing list, which is on her website, and white. Org. Libraries are so great, if you dont have a library card you should. Why . Because you can check out materials and search the catalog with thousands of titles including the wonderful books that dennis has recommended and you can find those recommendations on your adventure program. You also have access to the majoring collections across our researchce division. We have papers, we have manuscripts we have virginia woolfs correspondence and you can access all of those with their library card. So to give you a sense of the format for tonights conversation, diane and dennis will speak for about 45 minutes, after which they will take a few questions from the audience. Remember there is a difference between a question and declarations. We like questions here. [laughter] so with that, please join me in welcoming diana and dennis. Rj [applause] hello. Thank you for coming to this Public Library in manhattan. Joining me and dennis here to talk about his new book. [applause] did anybody here or feel excited to read thisto book . Yeah, me too. When i got asked this event i was really excited because i am a journalist and i work in media. I work advise fulltime i freelance for various different publications on prints and digital publications as well. Ive been doing that for five years, the trans person who about trans issues, i have fielded so many comments and inquiries from the public around various aspects what it means to be transgender or to be gender nonconforming, which inherently is connected to a change in language often for people who are altering the way in which they are living their lives in the world. Identity and identifying factors like nays, and pronouns are part of that. So much of that feedback has been confusion and criticism ofem a change, or a seemingly new aspect of language that is occurring. Which people are uncomfortable with. Sometimes there is no problem and people are quite fine. In other times therere are large controversies that surround the way in which we are seeing languagege change as this versioning Transgender Movement has occurred over the last ten odd years. When i saw this book and i saw it was really a historical approach to looking at the way in which pronouns have been shaped over the years, i thought this actually just needed to be written. And who better to be able to supply an argument or not even an argument but a position and history and analysis of language that a linguist. Specifically around this subject matter. matter. While you dont directly deal with transgender issues your soul, someone like me is greatly benefited by the book that you produced. With that i would but to ask you to tell us a little bit about this book and what made you want to read it. Thank you first of all for the introduction. And for you are agreeing to be here tonight. Absolutely. And for all of you who came to listen to i came upon pronounce quite by accident many years ago when i was researching Something Else that i cant even remember what it was. Ive always been interested in people who try to reform language to to they found something they didnt like or something that was missing and felt that they could make it right. We dont have enough words. We have too many words. [laughter] there was a guy in 1792, James Anderson who fortunately was an economist rather than a linguist but he decided that english needed 13 genders that [applause] icon. Were not enough. 13 genders. Fortunately he did not provide 13 different pronouns. Didnt provide any pronouns at all. Interesting. His contribution to the linguistic landscape of 18th century scotland went completely ignored, probably that was a good thing because we have trouble memorizing grammar schools if we had to multiply by 13, what would that do to sat . [laughter] it would be a nightmare. The country would shut down. Yeah. One of the things that i discovered was that starting in the late 18 and 19th century people were noticing a missing word. They were noticing that a word was missing from english and it ngs a thirdperson singular pronoun that was not gender specific but that referred to people. We have a third person singular it, but nobody uses it for people particularly for adult people unless they mean to insult the person they are talking about, very common for 19th century politicians to call their opponents it. Anyway, starting around the middle of 19th century people began cleaning pronouns to fill the missing word gap, the earliest one i found. This was a discussion that was happening somewhat culturally, hey, where is our third pronoun . We are missing a pronoun. This was in 2018 . [laughter] this was in, you know, the earliest discussion i found was in 1789. Okay. Thats not brand new. Interesting. Not brand new. It wasnt associated with transissues or gender nonconforming issues at the time, partly because we didnt have a vocabulary enough developed to talk about the issues. Its not that people were not aware of gender nonconforming persons but it just wasnt a subject of grammatical concern at the time. There may have been other issues involved but people starting coining words. In 1811 first coin pronoun e. , just the letter e. A person from yale who did not find practicing medicine very satisfying so he would write a grammar book. [laughter] in his spare time. Maybe he didnt have too many patients. I dont know. He wrote the grammar book, only one copy of it survived interestingly enough in Yale University library. Wow. He gave them the copy. [laughter] thanks for nothing. Nobody is going to buy a grammar book that a doctor wrote. Anyway. Wow, so that is very i feel like that says a lot and, you know, even for someone theres so much theres a lot of it norrance around these kinds of issues from both sides because its someone who has no issue with the construction and integration of new gender pronouns to american lexicon or whatever. I also am not that well informed about the history of third or nongender pronouns. Having historical precedent as certain kind of validation to use of this language but maybe its not necessary even. As a linguist how do you approach the idea of thinking of language as something that can be right or wrong . Well, yeah. I i tend to my own approach to language is its what we do and what we say and what we write. Its not what we are supposed to do. Its what we actually do do and sometimes theres a disconnect between the rules that we think we are supposed to operate by and what we actually produce when we speak and write and im more interested in exploring how people actually use language and and how they feel that it may be differs from what they are supposed to be doing because we are aware often that we are breaking a rule that maybe we dont know why the rule is there and maybe we ought to question why that rule is there and why it bothers us so much if other people are breaking the rule, fors. Example. Using they as a singular. Right. I highly controversial. Highly controversial. I was talking to somebody this afternoon and he said this is great, people should be allowed to use the pronouns that they want to use but you know what, singular they, its just wrong. [laughter] and this guy was interviewing me and and oh, no. [laughter] what do you say when somebody when somebody has their attitude. This is just wrong. Its been around since the 14th century. They as a singular has been around for centuries. Twelfth century. 1375. They maybe live it was not in 12th century. Maybe thats his lifestyle. I only do 12th century stuff. Well, we didnt have pronouns that began with th in the 12th century. They came in a little bit later. So thats why so like we youre right. We use they singularly all of the time, right . All of the time. People who object to singular they use singular they. [laughter] listen to them. You mean they use singular they . [laughter] whoever they are. You have a phone call, did they leave a message . We just say that. Its totally normal english. Such a clearer its such a clearer example in our conversation prior to getting up on this stage. We were discussing it and i thought it was very appropriate what you were saying about how, you know, its its something that people have never dont take issue with use but then take issue with it when its associated with gender. Any way to point that sometimes these things can be standing for other perhaps social norms that are conflicting with them that theyve now attached . Right, language is often a substitute. We can agree on whats right, wrong about language. We dont have to talk about the fact that everybody here should specific english, thats one example. Right. The official English Movement argues that when in rome do what the romes do. Youre in United States speak english and if you dont speak english go back where you came from. Its a standing for immigrant feeling. Its okayy to criticize peoples language, not quite before 2016. Didnt used to be so normal to criticize where people came from. I mean, before 1924 it was okay to do it too. So, you know, the pronoun thing is a can be a standing for standing for attitudes towards gender nonconformity just as used to celebrate nonbinary people, it can be used to attack them. So within like, you know, this conversation i feel like its an interesting pairing here because my work focuses so highly on transgender rights and culture and politics in the United States specifically, so dealing, you know, in my work with the different perspectives on this that exist within politics and communities across the country for years now and you have not specifically been focused on transgender issues in your work to my understanding, right, youre a linguist that you noticed as cultures changing the aspect of it . Exactly. I find that interesting and useful because, you know, i wonder how in your experience thrt of wanting to write this book must have been inspired in part by seeing the increased usage of different kinds of pronouns maybe in the classroom, ootside of the classroom and culture and what what was that like for you as a linguist who is focusing on it from a lilinguistic perspective and not so much transgender right issue . I found it very exciting and interesting that all of a sudden people are having general conversations about a part of speech. [laughter] the lucky academic. This may be the only time this happens. [laughter] youre welcome. Im happy to make this contribution when all of a sudden parts of speech or a particular part of speech, not just pronouns but a particular kind of pronouns or a singular person s pronouns, their stories in the newspapers every week, maybe even every day. Wow, i used to tell people, you know, you go to a party and they say,sa well, what do you do andi say oh, im an english teacher and they would go, oh. [laughter] no. I better watch my grammar. Oh, no. I was at a new dentist once and he was preparing to fill a cavity and he said, oh, what do you do, i said he could understand what i said. Im an english teacher and he said that was my worst subject. [laughter] and then he said, you know, i better watch my grammar like im correcting his grammar. You have seen the tshirts, and as he watched his grammar i watched his hand tighten on the drill. [laughter] but all of a sudden, people want to talk about grammar. Hey, thats thats business for me, right . All of a sudden the doctor is in. [laughter] yeah, contribution. I think its also language around the world doesnt always have gender pronouns, right, like english does . English does. Its not actually necessary in language. There no gender pronouns in chinese or mandarin. It has nothing to do where the cultures are sexist, inclusive or anything, just a phenomena just happens. Diversity that exists in language. Yeah, theres one language, swedish which has been fairly successful in introducing a nonbinary gender neutral pronoun which was invented in the 1960s but became popular in the 1990s and has just about 5 years ago been put into the official Swedish Academy dictionary, so one of the things that seems to be going on with this pronoun is that when newspapers use it or when its used on tv shows, if you ever watch any on nbs, you will find a couple of episodes where they discuss. Its well enough known in sweden that you dont have to explain what it is when it appears. Right, because we are definitely not there yet. Not there yet. Even with terms like gender, for example, something that i still get people, you know, remember its interesting because its progressive for 5 years where for a while its like not even using it unless i was speaking with someone who i knew already knew it because i knew the other person wouldnt and then i noticed that that started to change and id be surprised when someone knew the terms transgender which i didnt expect to but still not known that widely and i often had to define it for people and yet its not like its not like it was created yesterday. Right. Right. And there are plenty of people who dont know that theres a pronoun issue that are not part of this conversation and and one of the things i hope my book is useful for when somebody is new to the discussion that this will give them some information, some background on where the pronouns came from, the factou that gender has been an issue off and on decades, centuries in english and in the 19th century american suffrages on the use of he in voting statutes because in 1850 in england and in 1871 in the u. S. And in 1867 in canada, the governments passed laws saying every time a masculine noun or pronoun appears in the law it includes woman. Nonboonary was not an issue back then in terms of rights of man and women were. If he in criminal law, can be convicted of it and punished for it than he in the voting law means that a woman can vote, a woman can vote. So we have the vote. Cleverred it. There you go. [laughter] susan b. Anthony raised the argument in 1872 speaking at an illinois suffrages meeting and judges andnd legislators in thek female judges and legislators . They were all men. [laughter] all of them. Shocking, shocking. There were men supporting women suffrage. No. Yeah, they were. They were. They filed bills in parliament to give woman the vote and how what was the response to the suffrages argument . The legislatures the legislators and judges said, i dont think so. He is inclusive is gender neutral, anybody is covered under a crime but it involves a right like voting or becoming an attorney or a doctor, then that right has to be specifically conferred. He is not generic. He is not neutral in the law. In 1841 two american abolitionists got into an argument, public argument in the press over whether he in the constitution, in article 2 which describes the qualifications and duties of president s, he in article 2 means that a woman cant be president. He means a woman cant be president , and windle phillips ho you may have heard of said, wait a minute, he in the fifth amendment gives men and women the right to remain silent. So he in the article 2 means that a woman could be president. Its generic. Its not exclusionary. That really fleshes out the point that you made earlier in the way that language is often just is often used in, you know, often comes into play while we are dealing with political and cultural issues because i guess that makes sense because we can only communicate or we communicate primarily through language. It also makes me think about, you know, yes, we are dealing with the idea of adding popular third nongender pronouns or third gender pronouns and things like this today but theres also a history of he and she baked in on what they existed, they only mean one thing and even the gender neutralization of he is interesting to me. I mean, back historically excuse me, from what you were just saying. Was there something that you found compelling about the history of he or she in english . Well, one of the problems with he when its used is all too often, it means only men. Theres a knowledge to inclusivity but when, you know, when youre dealing with a practical issue, the interpretation was almost always, no, this excludes women, this just means men and in the few instances where you have a generic use of she, the response where . B where, where. Im curious actually. In the early 20th century you start seeing complaints by men, men seem to wine a lot about language. Its like they are sensitive and emotional. They shouldnt be really be president s. I cant explain. They dont have the right temperament. They dont, they dont. They shouldnt be you dont. [laughter] right. You start seeing complaints by men that teachers, when we talk about teachers the pronouns that we shape but men teach, what about us, what about us. Youre ignoring us and apparently interesting. The National Education association in the early 1900s, there was a rebellion by a group of male teachers who objected to the use of generic to refer to teachers in the publicationses of the nea and they stood up at an annual meeting and said you cant use generic she anymore and the editor pulled out a call saying, look, weve had the complaint. Would anybody like to suggest a pronoun and there were a couple of writeins, suggestions, pronouns to solve this problem, but what the nea wound up doing was ditching generic she in favor of beginnerric. Even though at the time most people were still women they caved. Thats really interesting in part because its complicated in some ways where youd feel like absolutely at the time its such a clear example of like, you know, sexism, but then now i think for today like we think often what assumptions are we