I was loudly corrected on this subject (that is, I had used "it," and he asserted that I was wrong) by a drill instructor in Marine Corps basic training a little more than a decade ago.

I'm not quite sure how much credence to give his opinion considering that his expertise was in pain, misery, and shooting guns rather than linguistics and grammar, but he certainly had strong beliefs on the subject, and I wasn't going to try to convince him otherwise.