my latest windmill to tilt at

[rone]

English already has perfectly useful gender-neutral pronouns: it, its. Use them. Do not use they, them for singular objects. Do not use the abhorrent, artificial 'hir', 'zie', 'blim', 'gur', or whatever. Yes, people can be called 'it'. Deal with it.

Comments

Re: Ah, the once legendary cry of the IBM information developer

[jwgh]

I think it's not necessarily that realistic to expect people to do this sort of rewriting on the fly during speech, though (although it certainly becomes easier and more natural with practice).