What's in a name?

A lot, as it turns out. Words matter enormously. The language we use shapes reality in the mind of the person receiving the message. Words can make an idea clear, or obscure it.

Some people might remember the struggle over the simple title "Ms." which came into wide use during the feminist revolution of the 1970s.

Until then, women were addressed either as "Miss" (which meant they weren't married) or "Mrs." (which meant they were.) That custom ensured that the first thing you would learn about a woman was whether she was married or not.

For some women it was even worse, and they would be addressed by their husband's name: "Mrs. Tom Riley." What a terrible way to be made invisible.

During the 1970s, as more women demanded to be treated equally with men, the term "Ms." started to be widely used instead. Like its male equivalent, "Mr.," it told you about the person's gender, but not his or her marital status.

At first, there was resistance. But in 1986 the New York Times finally agreed to use the term for those who chose it. Women were in a better place.

I raise this because of the emotional response to my earlier column, saying the public school board shouldn't be using the terms "they" and "their" to speak of a person whose gender is felt to be "non-binary."

For the board, "Gerry did well on their test" is a perfectly acceptable sentence.

But it's not. It's grammatically incorrect. And although my critics have tried to point out that language evolves, and therefore I must be some fusty Victorian relic struggling to save the horse and buggy, I beg to differ.

Language does evolve. So does science. But that doesn't entitle people to make up stuff in either discipline, just because they're lazy. When you mix up a singular (Gerry) and a plural (their), your meaning is not going to be clear. You would think an educational institution would be concerned about that.

There are lots of ways around the problem, such as "Gerry did well on the test," but we are living in strange times. Finding a better way isn't as important as policing other people, apparently.

Orthodoxy is alive and well in our institutions of learning, but it's an orthodoxy of attitude, not of understanding and applying well-established rules. The demand to conform is unrelenting, uncivilized and damaging to the spirit of open inquiry. If you disobey, or even ask questions, you risk being labelled a bigot.

A professor at University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson, is under intense political and social pressure because (like most of us) he recognizes only two genders, and chooses not to use made-up words in his classroom for those who reject the binary view of gender.

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Most of us think of people as either male or female, based on the genitalia they were born with. Some transgender people feel they're in the wrong sort of body, and identify with the other gender. That's OK. Just pick a gender and we'll all work with it.

As for the more elusive "non-binary" people, knowledge about their situation is not widespread, making dialogue difficult. I'd say this: Come up and make your case and choose your pronoun. Not everyone is going to use it. But if there is a solid case, in time it will take its place. Just as "Ms." did.