Right-wing Christians are not usually associated with grammar disputes, but they seem to find themselves obligated to defend the position that the English language's third-person personal pronouns replicate God's decrees regarding sexuality. Those Christians, admittedly, have their own problems with pronouns, at least when it comes to referring to God. Fundamentalists and Mormons commonly use "he," since that pronoun seems to follow from the notion that God is "our father," either symbolically or actually, as well as perhaps from the assumption that Christ was male and somehow became one with God.

But for other Christians, whose doctrines regarding God's nature are more sophisticated, even if only marginally intelligible, the pronoun "it" seems the only third-person pronoun to use, however awkward, since, in their view, God is not a sexed being, or, for that matter, even a material one.

In any case, the pronouns of our language recognize only two sexual types among humans and animals: male and female. Of course, animals can be neutered, but that is due to a human intervention in the natural order of things. Otherwise, a division of humankind into just males and females seems to accurately reflect what God tells us about Adam and Eve.

But a great many people believe that our current pronoun resources are inadequate to accurately represent sexual reality. We find ourselves, they contend, stuck with a vocabulary that forces us to speak of sexuality, a biologically complex, many-faceted phenomena as though it were a simple dichotomy.

Admittedly, ordinary language often fails to capture the truth, and often that failure doesn't really matter, or, if it does, we can find other means (mathematics, for example), to achieve precision, or simply create new words to do the job.

In the case of our personal pronouns, their inadequacy does matter, for many people's lives have been unnecessarily burdened with troubles because our language fails to convey the fact that "she," "her," "hers" and "he," "him" "his" do not capture the whole truth about our species' sexual nature.

To be more precise, those pronouns convey the view that there are only two sexual identities, and those carry with them a stereotyped, value-laden view of which human behaviors and psychological states are appropriate to each. Any kind of sexual proclivity other than that which urges men and women to engage in sex and procreate is treated by many as deviant and morally repugnant. That judgmental stereotyping is church doctrine for fundamentalists and Catholics, who justify it by insisting that they are simply following God's instructions on the matter. They do not deny that other forms of sexuality exist, but treat them as either willful violations of God-decreed norms, or sinful urges that can, and must, be resisted in order to avoid God's punishment.

To understand how it is that pronouns can do harm, you must put yourself in the position of someone who does not experience sexuality as you do. Reading autobiographical writings by LGBTQ members can accomplish that (which is precisely why bookbanning rightists don't want such books in the library). Let me give you a brief sketch of one self-portrait; that of Maia Kobabe, who wrote the memoir "Gender Queer." I will use the pronouns that she (e) prefers, though they are not used by her (em) in her (eir) text.

Maia's parents did not enforce gender roles, and, from the age of 3 and a half, e dressed and behaved as a boy. E didn't feel comfortable around girls; they seemed to know things that e didn't. When e had eir first period, e knew what it was, but writes, "I never thought it would happen to me." E fantasized, at age 11, about having a penis. E disliked having breasts.

E experienced several crushes before and in high school; some on boys, some on girls. In high school e joined a Queer-Straight Alliance, discovered gay literature and David Bowie's music, which was the first music, e wrote that, "felt like mine." Eir experiments with masturbation led em to concluded that e had a low sex drive. E was baffled and very troubled about what eir gender identity was: : was e a lesbian, bisexual, asexual, nonbinary? Nothing seemed to be exactly right. E wrote in a diary: "I don't want to be a girl. I don't want to be a boy either. I just want to be myself."

Maia summed up eir problem in this way: "I feel like there are all these wires in my brain which were supposed to connect body to gender identity and sexuality but they've all been twisted into a huge, snarled mess."

That metaphor comes close to the truth. The biological processes by which a fetus forms sex organs and subsequently the brain is altered to be in accord with those organs, sometimes goes awry, producing a variety of disparities between the sexuality of the body and the sexuality of the brain. Just as the average fetus has 23 chromosomes, with either XX or XY, but a certain percentage have XXY, XYY, a single X, or XXYY, so the normal path by which, in a male fetus, the brain is masculinized, sometimes is altered, with variable consequences.

Maia describes being called "she" as like "getting scratched by the tag at the back of my shirt." It is an irritant, a constant reminder that, because e deviates from the sexual norm, e will be constantly misidentified (however innocently), in a way that is likely to produce awkward social misunderstandings.

At the time e completed "Gender Queer," Maia had come to think of herself as nonbinary. It's worth mentioning that this sexual identity is not one that even some LGBTQ members, much less conservative straight people, are completely happy with. Gay people, I regret to say, are often scornful of nonbinaries, assuming that they simply lack the courage to be gay. (Even among the discriminated-against, it seems, us-versus-them takes its toll.)

Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU's Oboler Library in 2006.