ABSTRACT
Transgender persons identifying as neither/nor with respect to the male/female gender binary and those who understood gendered identity as a journey or state of flux preferred using the singular they (TST) instead of he or she. TST presages a variation of subjectivity for which there are no pronominal words in the English language. The TST's syntactic contingency is linguistic incongruity, an etymological void that draws attention to the (im)possibilities of the language system and its rules as they are. TST functions as what Mikhail Bakhtin terms an alien utterance [that] begins to sound like a socially alien language, where the orientation of the word among alien utterances changes into an orientation of a word among socially alien languages within the boundary of one and the same national language. Bakhtin outmoded his structuralist contemporaries because his ideas were purposely plasticized constructs as opposed to rigid categorizations.
