‘Singular They’ and the balls of God.

Creating gender neutral pronouns in the English language has a long and inconsequential history; it is expectedly difficult to swap out the most commonly used words (shemself, hetself, sie, eir, cos never quite made it to market). Of the solutions that have begun to catch on though, there is one I particularly fancy that does not require the cumbersome ‘he or she’ game–the ’singular they’ form. When the gender is unknown you simply use the ‘they’ form: “The doctor had to leave because they were tired.” Not bad.

So, recently, writing gender inclusive liturgy and working with hymns, Scripture and other works of antiquity brought me to the following realization: referring to God using the singular they form is actually a rather profound acknowledgment of the Trinity. ‘They’ are many and ‘they’ are one and ‘they’ are beyond gender. Whether Christ’s penis made it into heaven or God is a Father, or the Spirit is female is not really the issue. Nor would we be better off abandoning God’s Fatherness, just as early feminism failed by annihilating gender difference. Neo-feminism has it right, the genders are indeed different and should be celebrated as such. To borrow from Reverend Wright, different but not deficient. The nature of the Trinity is complicated and diverse and mysteriously encompassing all-of-the-above genders. It may be awhile before I have the nerve to sing ‘They are exalted on high’, but I’m getting there. Zadok circa 2000 would have my head on a pike.

And yes, the title for this post is just horrible.

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