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

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know what he was getting at. Arguments about symbols matching referents aside, I was being silly. Isn't everyone already aware that there is no gender-neutral third person singular pronoun in English, though? The alternatives are not adequate, even Ron's. You don't call a person an 'it' - that doesn't imply that the person possesses unspecified gender, it implies that the person lacks gender.

'Hir' is not a word (and suffers by being phonetically too similar to 'her'), 'he and she' is cumbersome, 'he' arguably sexist, 'she' also arguably sexist but arguably less so. 'They', by usage, already carries the implication of unspecified gender, because it can refer to men and women together; but, as Ron points out, it is incorrect to use it to refer to a solitary person.

In casual writing I use 'she', in serious writing to be published I use 'he' or 'they'. In speech I almost always use 'they'. I am aware of the problem and don't find a better solution.

Also: tab damage has not yet made the deserts bloom. Some of us are getting impatient.