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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lorehead" data-source="post: 2890397" data-attributes="member: 40086">If you're about to say, "And just imagine how this must make male nurses feel," then I congratulate you on a splendid piece of satire.  You are of course the sole and arbitrary judge of what "is ungrammatical in my idiolect," but you can hardly expect anyone else to take that seriously as a debating point.  Change "idiolect" to "Weltanschauung," and you'll have an all-purpose license to belive anything.As for the larger question, I would answer yes.  When this usage caught on, his was also the singular neuter genitive, and the word its hadn't been invented.  You are attempting to redefine words that hundreds of millions of people have continuously used for hundreds of years, and then insist on that basis that we really mean something other than what we said.Let's look at a real-world example instead of a contrived one: "<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0606120170jun12,0,7546765.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed" target="_blank">Leslie Pinney, a member of the Arlington Heights-based Township High School District 214 board, didn't deserve the tarring she got when she tried to exercise board control over what students are required to read.... When a teacher makes up a required reading list, he is making a judgment about what is good for his students.</a>" (Chicago Tribune editorial, June 12, emphasis added)  It is not plausible to me that the author believed that all schoolteachers are male, thought of schoolteaching as a characteristically masculine profession, or had a mental image of a man when writing that editorial.I'm glad, then, that we agree that their is not an adequate replacement for the generic his in many contexts.That is not what the generic he signifies, any more than the subjunctive "If I were ...." signifies the past tense.  What you find pleasant is a matter of opinion and not subject to debate; most native speakers, I think, would disagree and consider that particular sentence nonstandard.  (Edit: More) "logical" it is not; the antecedent is grammatically singular, semantically singular and a specific individual, so even the authors who did use singular they centuries ago would not have used it here.  No one seriously proposes reviving Early Modern English, even where it would indubitably make the language more expressive, consistent and logical (by bringing back thou, thee and ye, for example).  But, if we're going to selectively cite tradition and logic as a justification for our own prescriptive edicts, shouldn't we at least get the details right?</blockquote>

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