Yesterday at the grocery store, a cashier said something puzzling. My items totaled $25.76 so I paid with a twenty, a five, a one, and a penny. Instead of receiving a quarter back as anticipated, the cashier handed me two dimes and four pennies. "What's the problem?" I asked. "I gave you the extra penny so I'd get a quarter back and not all of this small change," I explained.
"Oh, it turned out to be a little more," was the cashier's cryptic response.
I ended up giving her another penny along with the change she'd given me, and finally received a quarter in return. But the whole episode was troubling. Did the cashier tell me the wrong total initially? When I paid, did she enter the figure I'd given her incorrectly into the computer, neglecting to include the penny in the amount I paid? Are grocery items now being priced to four decimals, making my actual total something like $25.7655?
This interaction left me feeling mystified in a way that's become all too familiar. Like I was swimming in vague incompetence and barely functional systems, with no beach or life raft in sight. I've felt this way more and more since the world shifted in 2020. Navigating this new normal is hard, particularly when cognitive resources are being drained at every turn.
All told, I have half a dozen friends who are trans or non-binary. I misgendered one a couple of years ago and saw the negative emotional impact that had on my friend's face. Ever since, I've been very careful about using the right language to describe people. The biggest challenge with this is that 'they' is not an appropriate thing to call a singular person in most circumstances in the English language.
In most sentences, they is read as plural. When it's used in reference to a single individual, confusion results, forcing the reader or listener to expend extra cognitive resources to make sense of the sentence. This is burdensome and unnecessary. Surely there are better ways to handle gender identity with language in our culture.
I've written a couple of gender noncomforming characters into my novels over the years. In those cases, I chose not to use they and usually just referred to characters by their names. This is what I do in real life, too. Just refer to people by their names instead of perpetuating the linguistic madness that is the new they.
In my book The Brockton Exodus, the inhabitants of a utopian planet recognize three genders: male, female, and bis. Bis refers to any gender or sexual identity that is neither male nor female. I feel like that kind of arrangement would make way more sense than the increasingly long acronyms and compelled speech we're dealing with here in real life.
Things like complexity and attention splitting increase cognitive loading. Heavy cognitive loads are undesirable because they produce information processing errors and have been found to increase stereotyping. The poor carry a much heavier baseline cognitive load than those with higher incomes. This disparity is one of the great traps of poverty.
In a million ways large and small, modern life taxes our mental resources. There's no way around this. At the same time, there are always important things to learn about the world and how it's changing, which productively engage these resources. Some might consider the introduction of they to be one of these things. But I'm convinced they does more harm than good. It's cognitively burdensome and the universal integration of they into society seems exceedingly unlikely.
Perhaps I'm mistaken and they really is the best way forward for us. If you think that's the case, please explain in a comment.
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