Journalists and essayists in recent years somehow formed the impression that the academic study of English grammar is partitioned into two mutually hostile tribes: descriptivists and prescriptivists. Both are portrayed in cartoonish stereotypes.

The descriptivists allegedly think that anything uttered by English speakers is ipso facto good English and can never be erroneous. So if people sometimes say, “It’s in the, the . . . the hall closet,” we must deem that correct, and posit noun phrases with three definite articles in a row. This insane view is purportedly associated with the political Left.

But the other tribe seems just as deranged. Its members won’t change their minds about the sacred edicts of grammar regardless of evidence. No matter how many great writers may have committed some solecism, they say, it’s still wrong if the rules of correct grammar say it is. This view gets tagged as conservative. Hence Joseph Epstein’s recent remark in these pages (“Pronouns Go Political,” November 30): “So political has our world become that nowadays to insist on correct grammar is to mark oneself a conservative, if not a right-winger.”

Well, I’m a believer in correct grammar, and I back neither of these politically pigeonholed factions. The everything-is-correcters are wrong for failing to distinguish sporadic unintended errors from systematic differences between dialects or languages, and the nothing-is-relevanters are wrong to sever the link between the sacred edicts of grammar and the English-speaking community whose practices they codify — if nothing about our linguistic practices is relevant to evaluating the correctness of the rules, by what right can they count as rules of grammar for Standard English?

Epstein leans way too far toward the nothing-is-relevanters. Nothing will convince him that they can accept a syntactically singular antecedent, as in Anyone is welcome to put their name forward. It seems to mean nothing to him that this use of they is common throughout the history of English, from Middle English onward: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and Orwell used it. Although Strunk and White condemn the usage, it occurs in White’s Charlotte’s Web. Even Oscar Wilde’s volubly pedantic grande dame Lady Bracknell uses they with singular antecedents: “Particularly at the end of the season,” she says, “when everyone has practically said whatever they had to say.” And there’s nothing left-wing or anything-goes about her.

Counterposed to the false notion that they cannot correctly be used as a sex-neutral singular pronoun is the old chestnut that he can be. Epstein believes that too, asserting that “the singular he generally refers to both men and women” in Standard English.

Many grammarians teach this, but it’s not true. They fail to notice the relevance of cases where it is made explicit that the reference might be to a woman: Nobody writes If either of your parents were alive he would be horrified at what you’re doing. There the sex-neutral meaning should naturally emerge; but instead, the sentence sounds utterly ludicrous.

And such sentences never occur (which is quite remarkable; usually almost any ill-formed phrase you might concoct will turn up in the chaos of the Web on some unmoderated chat forum or in some illiterate teenager’s blog; that’s part of what makes the everything-is-correct view so crazy). Search on the Web for a string such as “a boy or girl who behaves himself” (putting it in double quotation marks so as to search for the string, not just its words), and you get literally zero occurrences.

That’s because the sex-neutrality of he is just one of the multitude of myths about English.

Epstein claims membership in the worldwide fraternity of writers “who do not wish to slight women yet are not ready to abandon traditional grammar.” He doesn’t actually face that dilemma. But focusing on it makes him miss the big pronoun story, which is much more significant (the book Epstein was discussing, Dennis Baron’s What’s Your Pronoun?, seems to miss it too).

The big pronoun story is that transgender and genderqueer activists want us to use they not just with non-referential singular antecedents such as no one or anyone, but with referential antecedents such as personal names. That is truly novel. It goes against a constraint carefully identified and documented in a UCLA Ph.D. dissertation by Rachel Lagunoff in 1997: Singular they does not take singular antecedents that refer to a specific person. Sentences like Everyone has given their word have appeared for centuries, but never anything like Chris has given their word.

Wikipedia is up to the minute with the novel practice. Its article on the singer Sam Smith says that in 2014 “Smith went on their debut American headlining tour” and “made their American television debut.” And by their it means Smith’s. That really is a break with tradition.

Epstein simply drifts from talking about ordinary singular-anteceded they to citing a survey in which 80 percent of genderqueer and nonbinary respondents in England chose they as their pronoun. He misses the crucial point that those respondents are not just endorsing grammatical locutions like Anyone is welcome to put their name forward; they’re proposing that we should start using hitherto ungrammatical sentences like Kim is welcome to put their name forward.

What’s more, activists condemn those who won’t adopt this counter-traditional use of they not just as old-fashioned sticklers but as toxically transphobic. This (and it has happened to me) is grammar bigotry of a sort I have never seen before.

Epstein mentions Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who swore back in 2016 that he would never let Canada’s Bill C-16 compel him to use students’ chosen pronouns. Peterson claimed the bill could make it an actionable form of harassment to use dispreferred pronouns, though the story died when the bill re­ceived the assent of Queen Elizabeth and became law in June 2017. Qualified legal opinions seem to agree that faulty pronoun choice is unlikely to count as hate speech under the bill.

Curiously, Peterson misconstrues the issue himself sometimes. “I don’t recognize another person’s right to determine what pronouns I use to address them,” he said in a 2017 interview with Toronto Life; but the issue has nothing to do with addressing people. When addressing some­one, the right pronoun is you, uncontroversially. The people specifying pronoun choices aim to control how you should refer to them in the third person, even when they’re not around.

Notice, nothing I’m talking about here is intended to affect the rights or treatment of transgender people. I have at least three personal friends who are transgender, and we have no pronoun trouble. One of them, born female, now prefers to be regarded as male and referred to as he. No problem there. Another — loud male voice clashing wildly with feminine body shape and clothes choice — simply laughed at the issue when I raised it, telling me happily: “Call me ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they,’ I don’t care; whatever you call me, I’ve been called a lot worse!”

A third friend, a smart young person I will call “S,” confided to me privately about having decided on the pronoun they, but the issue of my using it never comes up. I address my friend with the pronoun you, naturally. And when talking about S in conversation with others, I use the pronoun that I always used before the recent they decision. You don’t need to know which pronoun it is, and S doesn’t either (and doesn’t ask).

Should you worry about being prosecuted for transphobic hate speech for letting a dispreferred pronoun slip out? Probably not; pronoun use alone is unlikely to support a charge of hate speech or harassment, even in jurisdictions such as Canada and England. (Maybe repeated and deliberate use of an objectionable pronoun choice in order to offend might count; but this is mere speculation about future lawsuits.)

The main worry for the future concerns being actually expected to say or write things like “Sam Smith should be proud of their new album.” The people who advocate that are asking us to override a constraint that has been a natural part of our unconscious grammar through­out our lives. That’s a big ask (as you’ll know if you’ve tried it).

I frankly don’t know whether I will one day be able to train myself to refer to S with they in casual conversation. Maybe I’ll try; maybe I won’t. But it’s deeply ingrained syntactic habits we’re up against here, not identity politics or etiquette; so I don’t want anyone to bully me about it.