An Extra-Long Response To Similarly Read At One's Leisure

This is a response to Pete's post about gendered pronouns but it outgrew the comments section. Not quite up to post-of-its-own standards in terms of clarity but here it is.

It doesn't surprise me that a publishing house doesn't like "they" and "their". If there were a graceful and stylistically consistent fix for the language we would have it already.

I half-remember Steven Pinker (?) writing that using "they" as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun used to be acceptable, before a bunch of rules ("don't end a sentence with a preposition" and its friends) were invented to create a more upper-crust English language. But I would have to track that down to confirm.

"They"/"their" causes some jarring disagreements between the singular and plural but rigorously using "he"/"his" creates some dissonances too. Pinker (again, I think) has a good example or two of how you can effectively launder a person's gender through that rule, such that you end up referring to them as "him" even though you know they are female.

My examples are a weaker tea, but as Kyle and I were talking about this last night we found these sentences can illustrate the sort of insidious effect of gendered pronouns. They're grammatically equivalent but note how they're not all equally comfortable to use, due to how "obvious" it is that the subject is male:

* It's every doctor for himself.
* It's every bus driver for himself.
* It's every nurse for himself.
* It's every cheerleader for himself.
* It's every spouse for himself.

So you wouldn't necessarily want to walk around saying (or at least formally writing) "It's every person for themselves" (or "themself"). But since we mostly just avoid sentences like the above already (again, for most people only if they feel odd) I would probably advocate for a more formal acceptance of "they"/"their" in combination with a possibly more strenuous policy of avoiding awkward constructions made possible by that. I'm not prepared to prove a grammatical Incompleteness Theorem but I don't think any rule you cook up for pronoun use is going to be consistently graceful in every single case. And given that we have strong, unhelpful biases in our culture around being male/female but not around being singular/plural, I think the latter confusion is the lesser of two evils.

So there are my thoughts, jumbled and lacking citations. To summarize, though:
1. No rule of language use will sound right all the time, so that's not a useful expectation.
2. It is bad that our current language rules suggest that the default state of being is being male (and that being female is an exceptional, less intuitive case) so the prospect of change shouldn't be rejected on the grounds that there's nothing wrong with the status quo.

And I may as well tack on
3. I have no idea how one, or one's culture, would go about fixing this, but I think it's a minor moral imperative for any writer to try to make their work gender-neutral (as does Hofstadter, more gracefully than I am doing in here) regardless of whether the Anglophone world's style guides ever change.