Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun
with singular nouns in their writing, William Safire says in his 15th rule for
writers.
If he were writing this today, though, his statement might
not get any attention. Using third plural pronouns as gender neutral solutions
is becoming more and more accepted. A couple of factors come into play. One is
discrimination by always using the male pronoun, another is that not everyone
is comfortable with their gender.
For a while, there was a movement advocating using new,
made-up words, such as ze, ne, ve, and some others. I haven’t heard anyone
mention them for at least two years now, though.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/09/ze-or-they-a-guide-to-using-gender-neutral-pronouns/407167/
Another solution might be to call everyone “it” instead of “he”
or “she.” That doesn’t seem right, though, does it?
Whoever invented the English language (all those millions of
people over hundreds of years) just plain forgot to put in a neutral third
person singular pronoun, and that makes it hard! Okay, that’s inaccurate.
English used to have them, but they’ve fallen by the wayside. “Ou” and “a” are
mentioned in this article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Historical_and_dialectal_gender-neutral_pronouns
So, since we DO have a neutral third person plural pronoun,
it’s getting used more and more when we want to leave the pronoun
non-gender-specific. I’m a fan of English language evolution so it doesn’t
bother me. In fact, I like it!
