I recently found this sentence shouting at me in capital letters from a reasonably serious magazine: “When some idiot yob drapes themselves over the Cenotaph … they are inadvertently reminding us of Lutyens”.  Yes, the Cenotaph in Whitehall was designed by Lutyens; I don’t contest the point. But the grammar of that sentence makes me want to scream. I realise that the use of the formulation is becoming so common that I ought not to notice it anymore. But no amount of use or over-use will alter the simple fact that a plural pronoun – “themselves” – cannot refer to a noun in the singular – “some idiot yob”. The fault is so glaring, and produces so harsh a sound in one’s head, that one feels as if assaulted by someone with all the characteristics of an idiot yob. This, in grammatical terms, is physical violence. 

To analyse the error, as I’ve just done, doesn’t amount to justifying or condoning it. It looks, sounds and most categorically is: ugly and wrong. It is a shocking example of a prevalent wish to avoid using a masculine pronoun, even though a masculine pronoun would be entirely justifiable. The writer is aware (it seems) that an idiot yob might in fact be female, and perhaps we should be grateful for the concession. The appropriate pronoun would be “himself or herself”, which is a formulation we try to avoid since it’s a trifle long-winded. In the past, it would have been correct to say “himself”, but that term, once generally understood to comprehend both masculine and feminine, has been ruled out by the hyper-political dictates of feminism.

I say “hyper-political” because there is really no reason why a general grammatical point should be decided on political grounds. But as in so many areas of life now, language is used aggressively to control how we think. Feminism (and it is a heavily politicised feminism) pursues an agenda of laying down new rules by which society is to be organised.  We see the same process at work in a flourishing new subject, gender studies. Here too, simple assumptions are brushed aside in favour of political interpretations, and these are insisted on with ferocity as though huge moral consequences depended on them. 

It’s noticeable that the moral coercion applied is somehow greatest when the real issue is most debatable. No area of moral debate, surely, is less clear than the status of people who elect to “change sex”, or assign themselves an alternative gender. They are entitled, of course, to fair and considerate treatment; but it is their critics who are now discriminated against. The use of the term “gender” instead of “sex” itself introduces a bewildering range of ambiguities which those most concerned are still arguing about. Whatever the debatable points, certain aspects of the subject are surely well established, and they are those physical facts that exist separately from the psychological issues in which individual perceptions and preferences come into play.  

Several people have drawn attention to the simple, verifiable facts of physical sex and have found themselves attacked for stating the obvious. For those who wish to alter our fundamental assumptions about the physical world, including our own bodies, verifiable facts must be questioned.  Everything is to be put in doubt. There is a political agenda in play here, surely. When a sequence of words sets our teeth on edge, as my “idiot yob” has done, it’s time to start giving the whole thought system a long close look.  

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