Before I meet Judith Butler, I am, for the first time since my teenage French lessons, genuinely anxious about pronouns. Gender identity has been perhaps the most vicious front in the culture wars. To mess up anyone’s pronouns can be modern-day heresy. To mess up Butler’s would surely also be grossly ignorant — because Butler (they/them) is perhaps the key figure in gender theory.
Their work has questioned the grouping of humans into either men or women. It helped inspire the category of non-binary. Yet embarrassingly, it seems easier for Congress to update the US Constitution than for my brain to update its grammar.
I needn’t have worried. “I err all the time with pronouns,” Butler shrugs, in a Japanese restaurant overlooking a rainy London avenue. “People tell me they’re they or he or whatever, and I forget and I have to scramble and apologise . . . We all stumble, and we are learning about new realities.” Do people forgive such slips? “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Grmph, I told you before.’ It’s like, ‘OK!’”