‘They’ as a singular pronoun for an identified person? Aunty, it’s not going to happen; and trying to make it happen just makes your journos look incompetent – and exasperates your audiences. Case in point: a recent gender-identity puff piece that’s wormed its way onto the ABC News website.
We’re told:
So who’s doing the organising? Zo and her two kids, all of whom are mentioned in the previous sentence? Or who?
We’re told:
No wonder it was gradual, with Zo and her kids all involved.
Whose sexuality? Hers and the woman she’d fallen in love with in 2019, who’s the subject of the preceding paragraph?
A two-woman effort here.
Another two-woman effort. There they both are in the photo. Great that they had the same psychiatrist.
Another joint effort – there’s two of them in the photo, but the ‘they’ presumably covers their psychiatrist as well.
The use of improper pronouns isn’t the only annoying and confusing and professionally incompetent thing about this article. In the (unlikely) event that a reader hasn’t, by now, given up trying to understand what information this article is attempting to convey, she or he is now treated to this mind-bogglingly euphemistic description of double mastectomy of healthy breast tissue:
Readers also have to endure this confusing and misleading headline to a paragraph that’s entirely about sexual orientation, not gender identity:
And finally, persevering readers – supposing there are any – will be prompted to fury by a celebration of Zo’s ‘community-building’ efforts that entirely omits any mention of the fact that it is illegal in Australia for lesbians to organise any public events for the lesbian community.
Zo’s story ran for several days in late September-early October in a subsection of the ABC News website called ‘Mood Booster’.
There’s an entirely other conversation to have about why a gender-identity propaganda puff-piece like this is on the News site at all. At our latest pizza lunch, Emma P was adamant in slotting it home to Ita Buttrose’s influence: once a Women’s Weekly editor, always a Women’s Weekly editor. But we could also point the finger at current Chair Kim Williams, who castigated staff for the prominence of ‘lifestyle stories’ on the News page but allowed them to still pop up there after his much-hyped revamp. Or at editorial director Gavin Fang, who met with total denial a well-documented call from a coalition of feminist and LGB groups for the ABC to re-evaluate its membership of trans lobby ACON’s AWEI program, with Fang famously (or infamously) responding:
The discussion on that continues.
Meanwhile let it be said that this particular scramble of nonsense and disinformation didn’t boost my mood one skerrick. Quite the contrary. When is the ABC gonna learn – or remember – how to Read The Room?