School board: Don’t say he or she, it’s ‘xe’

“Finally, our schools are doing something important.”

That was KIRO Radio host Dori Monson‘s response to reports that a Vancouver B.C. school board has approved a number of new alternative pronouns to refer to students in place of he/she, him/her, and his/hers.

The Vancouver Sun reports the new pronouns the school board settled on are “xe,” to replace he/she, “xem,” to replace him/her, and “xyr,” to replace his/her.

Dori Monson Show producer Jake Skorheim says he doesn’t really understand the new options. “I’m surprised by the pronouns they settled on. Xe doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

Even typically generous KIRO Radio Anchor Ursula Reutin says this idea has its problems.

“The whole thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” said Ursula. “This is going to be something that’s just for this school district, so they’re going to have explain now every time they say xe and xyr.”

Jake pointed out people outside the school are likely to think these new words are typos.

Dori said he’s with the opposition on this and he’d never encourage his kids to use such language.

“If somebody told my kids that they had to start using nonsense made up words to appeal to a bunch of brain-dead politically-correct zombies, there’s absolutely no way my kids would be forced to use these pronouns.”

He wished Vancouver good luck, and said we’d better watch out because Seattle could be next.

“Seattle schools are probably jealous that up in Vancouver B.C. they beat us to the punch on this.”