‘I regard this as a single-sex space,’ said my husband as I perched in his study, on the arm of a chair which was piled with books, trying to find out if he’d eat monkfish if provided with it.
I doubt the Supreme Court will come to his aid, but gender frenzy has left some puzzling wreckage in the language. The Times recently reported that a drunken architect took a meat cleaver and pursued a teenager, ‘who locked themself into the bathroom’. The writer did not want to specify the teenager’s sex, but did want to keep him or her singular. Another author in the Guardian wrote about ‘how an abuser finds themselves classified in this way’.
On the wilder shores of the Sun, a piece explained that ‘Someone who calls themself a “starseed” is a human who believes they were aliens in a past life’. Grammatical number there is a bramble patch. It could have been: ‘People who call themselves “starseeds” are humans who believe they were aliens in a past life.’ Perhaps we should have stuck to it as the sexually unspecific pronoun. Babies had long been called it, even when their sex was known.
Surprisingly, the chaos of themselves and themself has been going on for 800 years. Of themself, the OED remarks that it is ‘somewhat rare between 16th and 19th centuries’. Walter Raleigh, writing in 1618 of the Moors, called them ‘the progeny of such Arabians as after their Conquests seated themself in that part of Africa’. Shakespeare, on the other hand, used themselves to refer to one person, as in The Rape of Lucrece: ‘Everie one to rest themselves.’
One can see subtleties. A magazine in 1905 quoted a woman saying that ‘Every one at breakfast, she added, in an awed voice, “had a finger-bowl to themself”.’ It wasn’t just for all in the group.
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