🇬🇧 It’s Not Going Away

Yesterday, I commented underneath a Guardian interview with Sam Smith.

The article was about Smith’s new music, finding happiness, falling in love and what it had been like being a young queer artist in the public eye.

My comment wasn’t particularly revolutionary.

I basically said: look at some of these comments.

Look at how angry people are.

Look at how personally invested complete strangers have become in somebody else’s sexuality, gender, appearance and pronouns.

And apparently I touched a nerve.

By the time I came back to it, my comment had attracted more than 250 reactions and a stream of replies.

Now, 250 Facebook reactions means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.

But the discussion underneath them was fascinating.

Because what started as a discussion about Sam Smith very quickly became something much bigger.

But first: talent

There’s another comment I’ve seen repeatedly underneath this discussion:

“They chose to go into showbusiness.”

Well, yes.

But that sentence rather conveniently skips over the thing that enabled Sam Smith to have a showbusiness career in the first place.

Talent.

Sam Smith didn’t become famous because he—

Oh, shit. Sorry.

They.

There you go. Somewhere on Facebook, 37 people have just won an argument. 😂

Anyway…

Sam Smith didn’t become famous because they won a television talent show or because somebody manufactured a celebrity and then went looking for a voice to attach to it.

The voice came first.

And that’s rather important.

A lot of people heard Sam Smith before they really knew anything about Sam Smith.

The breakthrough came singing on Disclosure’s Latch in 2012.

Then came Naughty Boy’s La La La.

Then the solo career exploded.

Dance. Garage. Electronic music. Soul. Gospel-influenced pop. Ballads. A Bond theme. Contemporary pop.

You don’t sustain a career across all of that because somebody in a record-company office decided you should be famous.

Underneath it is something remarkably difficult to manufacture:

a distinctive voice.

You hear Sam Smith sing and you know it’s Sam Smith.

And this is where I think some of the comments become particularly silly.

But none of those things retrospectively remove the talent.

Sam by the numbers

And because some people appear to have confused “I don’t like Sam Smith” with “Sam Smith isn’t particularly talented or successful”, it’s worth putting some numbers around the career.

Five Grammy Awards.

An Academy Award.

A Golden Globe.

Guinness World Record recognition.

In the Lonely Hour spent 69 consecutive weeks in the UK Top 10.

Writing’s on the Wall became the first James Bond theme to reach number one on the UK Singles Chart.

And years after the original breakthrough, Unholy produced another Grammy.

That isn’t somebody who accidentally wandered into showbusiness.

That’s a career.

And you don’t have to like any of it.

That’s the wonderful thing about music.

Turn it off.

You can hate Stay With Me.

You can think Unholy is dreadful.

You can decide tomorrow that you’re never streaming another Sam Smith song again.

Taste is subjective.

But there’s a strange tendency in these discussions to work backwards from:

“I don’t like what Sam Smith represents.”

to

“Therefore Sam Smith isn’t talented.”

Those aren’t the same argument.

And I suspect some of the hostility comes from something even more basic.

Sam Smith has done extraordinarily well.

They’re wealthy. Famous. Successful. Internationally recognised. Awarded at the highest level of their profession.

And they’re doing all of that while increasingly presenting themselves exactly as they want to.

For some people, apparently, that’s the most offensive bit of all.

Visibility matters

And actually, that photograph matters.

Because Sam Smith is also a trailblazer.

Not because nobody before Sam Smith ever played with gender, sexuality, fashion or identity.

Of course they did.

But because Smith is doing it while occupying one of the most mainstream positions imaginable: an internationally successful British pop star with Grammys, an Oscar, number-one records and billions of streams.

That visibility matters.

And there’s another discussion underneath this that deserves an article of its own.

Creativity.

Artists have always messed with boundaries.

Throughout history, women and LGBT people have repeatedly occupied some of those creative spaces and pushed against conventions that the mainstream was much slower to question.

That is a much bigger conversation.

Sam Smith is almost beside the point

Smith has been famous for more than a decade.

They have Grammys, an Oscar, a catalogue of enormous records and the sort of international career very few British singers ever achieve.

They also happen to be non-binary and have publicly used they/them pronouns since 2019.

Smith has previously spoken about the ridicule and hostility that followed that decision.

And apparently, in Britain in 2026, this remains absolutely irresistible to some people.

And that’s what struck me.

A musician they will probably never meet has asked to be referred to using a particular pronoun.

And somehow this has become an existential struggle.

Why?

Then Andrew arrived

One exchange crystallised the whole thing for me.

Andrew told me that writing something like:

“Sam put themselves out there”

was grammatically incorrect English.

Except it isn’t.

Singular they isn’t some invention dreamed up last Tuesday by the woke department at The Guardian.

English speakers have been using singular they for centuries.

We use it constantly without even noticing:

“Someone has left their phone. I hope they come back for it.”

How many people am I talking about?

One.

So I explained that.

And Andrew came back with something revealing:

“Even if it’s still technically correct, it’s not how we speak.”

Stop there.

Read those first seven words again.

There it is.

The entire problem in one sentence.

The original claim was that the English was grammatically incorrect.

When shown that it wasn’t, the argument didn’t end.

The argument changed.

Now it didn’t sound right.

Now it wasn’t how we speak.

We had travelled from:

“This is factually wrong.”

to

“OK, it might technically be right, but I still don’t accept it.”

And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about Sam Smith anymore.

I was thinking about Brexit.

We’ve seen this movie before

I don’t know how Andrew voted in 2016.

That’s not the point.

I’m talking about a way of thinking that Brexit exposed — and perhaps accelerated — in British public life.

An expert explains something.

Evidence is produced.

The original claim collapses.

And instead of:

“Fair enough. I didn’t know that.”

we get:

We’ve confused the democratic right to have an opinion with the idea that every opinion has an equally valid claim on reality.

Those are completely different things.

You are perfectly entitled to believe that two plus two equals five.

You are not entitled to demand that mathematics treats five as an equally respectable answer.

Brexit didn’t invent this

And this is important.

Brexit didn’t create British anti-intellectualism.

It didn’t invent distrust.

It didn’t invent tribalism, resentment, culture wars or the British press.

But Brexit gave us perhaps the biggest modern demonstration of what happens when enormously complicated questions are compressed into identities.

Once an argument becomes part of someone’s identity, changing their mind becomes psychologically much harder.

Because you’re no longer asking them merely to reconsider a fact.

They feel as though you’re asking them to reconsider themselves.

And that is exactly what I could see happening underneath a bloody Facebook post about Sam Smith.

This isn’t really about pronouns

That’s why I find the outrage more interesting than the actual pronoun.

People are perfectly capable of understanding singular they.

They already use it.

The difficulty suddenly appears when they becomes associated with gender identity.

Then grammar becomes a battlefield.

And the fascinating thing is that many of the same people screaming about being told what words to use simultaneously want to dictate how somebody else is allowed to describe themselves.

There’s a contradiction sitting right there.

If individual freedom matters, surely one of the most basic freedoms imaginable is the ability to say:

This is who I am.

But somebody else’s existence isn’t an instruction manual for your own.