The Economist Asia - 20.01.2018

72 Books and arts The EconomistJanuary 20th 2018

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OT so long ago a man could be jailed

in Texas for sex with another man. In

2015 a county clerk in Kentucky was jailed

for refusing to certify the marriage of two

men. Gay rights in America proceeded at

an extraordinary rate between Lawrence

vTexas(2003), in which the Supreme

Court struck down sodomy laws, and

Obergefell v Hodges(2015), which made

gay marriage legal across the country.

Transgender rights came next into

public view. “Transparent”, a successful

television show, has put trans people at

the heart of a complex universe. The case

of Caitlyn Jenner, who had been an

Olympic gold medallist as Bruce Jenner,

helped bringnot just visibility but greater

acceptance. In liberal circles, being open-

ly transphobic is becoming unacceptable,

proceeding along the same trajectory—

but much faster—as attitudes towards ho-

mophobia or racism.

With mores around sex and gender al-

ready on the move, it is little surprise that

non-binary people are on the frontlines

of a rights revolution. The grammar of the

English language is part of the battlefield.

Gay rights involved a small linguistic

shift—people getting used to saying

“Steve’s husband”. Treating people who

have transitioned to another gender with

respect required another adjustment:

swapping “he” and “she”, and often learn-

ing a new name and avoiding the old one.

But non-binary people, who may

identify as of no gender, both, fluid or

something else, ask for a change at the

very guts of English. Many ask to be re-

ferred to either by an invented pronoun,

such as “ey” or “ze”, or, more commonly,

as “they”.

This is hard for many others, because

pronouns are a “closed” class of words,

according to linguists. Adjectives, nouns

and verbs are “open”: they can be coined

at will. Tell a tiny child that a kind of bird is

called a “wug”, and not only do they im-

mediately accept the existence of the wug;

they work it into their grammar, knowing

that the plural must be “wugs”. Adults may

be more conservative, rejecting words they

do not like, but they still accept new nouns

and verbs all the time. Long-term changes

in the meaning of nouns, verbs and adjec-

tives are also routine. Few words mean ex-

actly what they did centuries ago: “bux-

om” once meant “obedient”, for example.

But grammatical intuitions are more

deeply disturbed by the addition of new

pronouns, which is why invented ones like

“ze” have failed to spread widely. Singular

“they”, though, is different. “They” is an

old English word. And contrary to the com-

mon myth, it can have single antecedents,

as in the case of “someone left their um-

brella here.” This is not a concession to

modern feminism (avoiding “someone left

his umbrella”). It goes back to the 14th cen-

tury in English, and has appeared in fine

literary sources continually ever since.

But this use of“they” isunusual: tradi-

tionally it can refer back only to an indefi-

nite antecedent. “A student must have left

their umbrella” is uncontroversial. But

“Steve must have left their umbrella” is

jarring. So is “mybest friend must have

left their umbrella”: even if the hearer

does not know if the friend is male or fe-

male, the speaker presumably does. So

those non-binary people asking to be

called “they”, as in “Taylor left their um-

brella”, are up against the ingrained gram-

mar of many listeners.

But just how ingrained is that gram-

mar? Lauren Ackerman, a fellow at New-

castle University, conducted a small

study. Forty people rated the “natural-

ness” of sentences like “Someone dressed

themselves” and “Chloe dressed them-

selves”. (She also tested “themself”.) Few

were bothered by “someone dressed

themselves”. Contrary to Ms Ackerman’s

prediction, responses were all over the

scale for “Chloe dressed themselves”.

Moreover, Ms Ackerman found that of

the subset(nine) of the test-takers who

regularly interacted with someone trans-

gender, acceptability was higher on aver-

age—and it increased with the frequency

of the interaction with that person.

The study is far too small to be defini-

tive. As academics always say, more re-

search is needed. But it is clear that some-

thing is afoot here. It goes hand-in-hand

with a rising belief that the gender binary

is a social construct. Mostmembers of

“Generation Z”, aged 13-20 in a poll taken

in 2016, agree with statements like “gen-

der doesn’t define a person as much as it

used to” (78%), and 56% know someone

who uses a nontraditional pronoun,

against 43% for those 28-34. Pronouns may

not be such a closed classafter all.

Johnson Unlocking pronouns

Personal pronouns have been hard to alter. That is now changing fast

enterprise, neglect and dilapidation,

“bashed and bedraggled by the times”, the

solitary heroine summons other rivers

from her atlasof memory. She revisits wa-

terways not only in Germany butCanada,

Croatia, Hungary, India and Israel.

Although rooted in the author’s own

long residence in London, “River” is a nov-

el, not a documentary expedition. Epi-

sodes of satire and fantasy, such as a stint

broadcasting for a Kafka-like version of the

BBC World Service, push it towards eerie

German gothic fiction rather than the Lon-

don-bred “psychogeography” of Iain Sin-

clair or Peter Ackroyd. Light on plot, rich in

atmosphere, “River” meanders like its liq-

uid locales. It also traces a path into the

past, which leads back to the narrator’s

much-travelled father, and the “post-war

condition” of his ravaged continent.

The woman who has fled her own hin-

terland for the ragged fringe of London dis-

covers a dreamlike city of melancholy

magic. This spiritual nomad meets in this

“capital ofchameleons” Hasidic Jewish,

Croatian, Kurdish and African neighbours.

With these encounters, Ms Kinsky nods to

the waves of settlement that have stitched

a score of migrant narratives into east Lon-

don’s tattered fabric.

Yet the perpetual flux of London, where

“Nothing began...and nothing ended”,

cannot lay the past to rest. Regret and relief

mingle as she packs again for another new

life in eastern Europe. From her enigmatic

photographs, or the half-buried historical

traumas that haunt these “landscapes of

bereavement and implacable homeless-

ness”, readers of the great W.G. Sebald—an-

other self-exiled German—will suspect

that his shade has strolled with Ms Kinsky

by the Lea. Iain Galbraith, who has also

translated Sebald, gives“River”, and all its

“lumber of cumbersome jetsam”, a special

English poetry of grunge and grime. 7