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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 7443092" data-attributes="member: 57112">I do attribute the resistance primarily to malice, yes, given the extreme lack of tolerance non-gender-conforming people still often face, and I don't think it unreasonable to expect a certain amount of evidence to attribute the resistance to some other, less nefarious reason. At best, we are talking about a callous disregard for the respect and dignity of fellow human beings over... what, exactly? Digging ones heels in regarding language that is constantly morphing and shifting? I'm not saying that the malice is always intentional, but this is one of those instances where the impact matters more than the intention behind it."They" is pretty much already a regular English third-person singular pronoun, as it has been for centuries (despite a comparatively brief period of falling out of favor). The arguments that it is "unclear" or "clunky" are patently absurd, given that the most commonly cited alternatives are the generic "he", which blessedly fewer and fewer people seem to be in favor of for reasons that should be obvious; and "he or she", which is just as likely to be unclear, is definitely clunkier, and is more likely to be inaccurate. There can be no sensible reason to continue to resist singular "they" other than a defense of either the patriarchy or the gender binary, depending on one's favored "neutral" singular pronoun. I don't deny that there are people that continue to cling to that resistance for entirely nonsensical reasons; the "backfire effect" is a thing that exists, and not too long ago a small but significant subset of the American population was treating a change in light bulb design to be a serious threat to their way of life, so I can't say I don't understand people throwing up resistance over something a little more serious as language. But I can fault them for it, and suggest that there might be some bias, either conscious or unconscious, underlying it.As for "xe" and its ilk, well, no, I don't expect to see a new pronoun hit the common parlance, at least not until the community comes together a chooses a single set, which seems unlikely now but whose to say what will happen later? Of course, I'm talking about neither formal English dictionaries nor informal English vernacular. I'm talking about a living, breathing, human being, asking others to refer to them, a single individual, as "xe" and "hir", because those are hir preferred pronouns. And rather than those same people, rather than realizing that treating this individual with the respect and dignity costs them literally nothing, as Sunseeker above just pointed out, they instead go into histrionics about {free speech.. grammar}. Not according to this <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2016/01/gender-politics-generic-he/" target="_blank">article</a>, though I realize that etymology is often disputed:"Generic he first derived its authority from a rule about Latin gender that was applied to English even though gender in Latin, which has to do with word classes and suffixes, has nothing in common with gender in modern English, which is based entirely on chromosomes and social construction."</blockquote>

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