Solving the Mystery of "You"

So in February of 2020, I opened a Tiktok account, for the simple purpose of wanting to check out the hype and being around when it's predecessor Musical.ly was the rage. In May, I made one silly little video, and eventually I made more. After a while I got into Cosplay, and made lots of friends. I also met a lot of wonderful people who had different pronouns, including the neo-pronouns such as Fae/Faer.

However, one day I came across a video from a mutual of mine, who was asked by one of their followers why "you" could not be used as a pronoun. My mutual responded with a video comment, explaining that they had thought about it and talked it over with some people, and nobody had any clue as to why "you" could not be a pronoun. And as an English Major/Writer who essentially has years of the English language under her belt, I felt inclined to find out.

Now, to clarify first and foremost, the word "you" is classified as a pronoun. However, the subject is why "you" cannot be a gender pronoun. At first I simply tried to Google it. However, I found absolutely nothing as to why it couldn't be used as a gender pronoun, which astounded me. Surely, someone had had the idea or the conversation before, right?

So, I looked up different pronouns, remembering that things like "me" and "I" also counted as pronouns but were obviously used differently from pronouns such as "he/him", "she/her", and even "they/them". So, I wondered what made them different, and what made "you" different from them, and after a couple of hours of scouring the internet, I finally gathered the answer for my mutual (and made a 3-pt video explaining the answer!), and people seemed to be surprised by such knowledge.

The difference between pronouns such as "me" and "I" and pronouns like "he" and "hers" is point of view. Now, we all learn about Point of View in school, it's usually taught early on. However, most schools only teach 1st person and 3rd person! Now, not many people care to ask, but some people have to wonder, what happened to 2nd person? Why did they skip it and go to third?

They didn't.

2nd person is where the pronoun "you" falls into. Point of View is all about what is being addressed or what you're addressing. So, in first person, you or yourself is being addressed. Therefore, you would say "I lost my pen". In third person, somebody else that is not you is being addressed. For example, Tommy lost his pen". The thing about 3rd person is that it's the only point of view where the subject you are addressing doesn't have to know they're being addressed. If you're talking to yourself even about yourself, using first person, you know you're addressing yourself and that you're being addressed. If you're using 3rd person point of view, and you and Mark are talking about the speech Mindy gave in class that day, Mindy doesn't have to know she's being talked about. She doesn't have to be in the room for you to address her person.

So, what happens if you're not addressing yourself, but the subject being addressed still knows they're being addressed? Well, either Mindy is in the room while you and Mark are talking about her in 3rd person and that's going to lead to a very awkward confrontation, or you're talking directly to somebody else. That's the thing about 2nd person point of view. 2nd person is the point of view in which you're speaking directly to the person or people you're addressing. For example, if you're speaking to Mark, you would say, "I heard you lost your pen".

So, what makes "you" so difficult to fit into a gender-pronoun narrative? Well, you'll notice that all of the "gender pronouns" are listed in the 3rd person category. People don't typically use "I" or "me" as gender pronouns, primarily because there's no way presently to make it work grammatically. The same issue applies to "you". For example, if you and Mark were talking about Mindy, you couldn't refer to Mindy as "you". It would sound like you were talking to Mark, "You gave an excellent speech today". Mark didn't give the speech though, Mindy did.

When it comes to "you" the subject you're addressing has to know in some capacity that they're being addressed by you. They don't have to be in the room. You could say over the phone to Mark, "I heard you lost your pen", but at the very least Mark knows you're addressing him. The tricky thing with a pronoun like they is the fact that the person doesn't have to know you're speaking of them. "You" as a pronoun simply doesn't fit that narrative in the same way a pronoun like "they" does.

And that's how I discovered and explained just why "you" cannot be used as a Gender Pronoun!