There’s definitely some additional nuance (like a pronouns in bio/username situation) but this should cover the broad needs of anyone who is approaching this with good faith.
There’s definitely some additional nuance (like a pronouns in bio/username situation) but this should cover the broad needs of anyone who is approaching this with good faith.
Wouldn’t it be much easier to use the grammatically well established singular they/them. That way you never run into an issue. Surely you’d do that when you encounter a name that can be used as both a female and a male name (Jessie, Les etc)
I mean, historically it’s well established, but you can’t deny that language has evolved in many places (at least in America) that they/them feels plural. I’m not saying they/them shouldn’t be gender neutral singular pronouns, but in the dialect I was raised, it only feels correct in indeterminate situations, like “whoever stole my bike, I hope they get arrested.”
Obviously language can continue to evolve where singular-they feels correct in any scenario, but if you’re talking about “much easier” then that includes the random rules people collectively hallucinate.
This implies you can not tell the person’s gender, which for most people is perfectly obvious. So often can cause offence. I realize not using they/them can also cause offence, but just much less often.
If were going from whats «grammatically well established» i would argue he/she is a lot more established
Tbh just saying they is easier, took a few weeks/months to train myself to do it and now I’m just cringing whenever I hear something that’s like “he or she could be doing this thing” when “they” is just more efficient anyway. They’re just as established. I think “they” is an older term but I’d have to look into the etymology on that.
So I’m not sure how reliable it is given the age of the data but it looks like there’s some indication that “they” fell in use up to the late 1900s but before ~1860 it was actually more common than now. I’m now curious if there’s any more info on this.
He/She is fine for when you know the gender of someone. When you don’t they is really well established - it was used by Chaucer. So they if you don’t know because they might go by something else, they for someone with a name like Leslie who could be a he or a she outside of any discussion about trans identities.