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Comment by lbwtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Until 'they' got pulled into duty, English didn't have a non gendered pronoun, so if you were referring to someone where you didn't know the gender, you had a choice of defaulting to "he", randomly choosing "he" or " she", or using "he or she" or "the [descriptor like 'programmer']*

They at first sounded weird being repurposed this way, but I think now it works better than any of the list above. Once you start using it for people who's gender you don't know, it's a pretty small step to use for someone's gender you don't want to assume.

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> it's a pretty small step to use for someone's gender you don't want to assume.

Well that's the question, isn't it? How often do I have occasion to talk about someone whose gender I don't want to assume? In virtually every case, I am able to correctly ascertain the gender identity of a person I am going to talk about.

The Stanford rules would have me pretend as if I just have no idea, and use "they" instead of "he" or "she". This is utter foolishness. It ignores the offense and confusion that will result from "they-ing" someone who goes by "he" or "she". And it ignores the fact that it is generally very easy to deduce someone's gender identity.

All the time! When you don't know the identity of the subject, you also don't know the gender.

"Someone ate the last slice of cake. I wish they had considered me!"

"Phone for you" "What do they want?"

Yep, and I am happy to use "they" in that setting. The Stanford rules are silly because they also call for using "they" to refer to people whom you do know, if they've never specifically instructed you on their preferred pronouns. I am apparently supposed to refer to President Biden as a "they", since he's not told me otherwise.

That's not true at all, it was always ('always') 'they' when unknown. I was taught as much in school well before all this.

It's a big and bizarre step to throw out 'he' and 'she' completely for all known men and women until such time as they confirm that yes they indeed are men and women, just to satisfy the miniscule proportion of them who are not. The exceptional ones should be the ones to point it out and then we can just say 'oh ok sure sorry' and move on.

> someone's gender you don't want to assume

Unless they look like someone who 'might not want their gender assumed', I'm perfectly happy assuming peoples gender, because it will be correct in the vast vast vast majority of cases.

I was taught to use “he” by default in grammar lessons in ~2005.

For what it's worth, my experience (use 'they') was (not that long, but) before then, in the UK.

What really irks me (as a result I suppose) is the sort of passive aggressive use of 'she' for gender unknown, as though righting some wrong or making some sort of point that we don't know it's 'he' either - true, that would be wrong too!

Matt Levine does it an awful lot, recently-ish I even noticed one was actually a man; he was just using it in the general sense not having checked who the specific person was in the role that he was talking about - 'they' would have been fine, but 'she' was more incorrect than usual, a factual error.

they/them has always been a neutral pronoun in English. It's only now that it is a controversial topic that everybody is fussing about it. Imagine the following sentence.

"Someone is knocking at the door, can you let them in?"

Nobody would say "let him in", unless they knew a man was behind the door. This is utterly uncontroversial and boring.

>Someone is knocking at the door, can you let them in?

That is not a good example since there is presumably only 1 person knocking ("someone"), but there could be multiple people ("them") at the door waiting to come in.

Since you don't know the amount of people waiting to come in, using them would be appropriate.

What about : "I am expected either my father or my mother to come, but not both of them. Someone is knocking at the door, can you let them/him in?"

using him sounds silly when there's a 50% chance it's you mother doesn't it?

That is a better example for sure. I still think there are issues since it could be somebody other than one of your parents knocking (including multiple people)

I think the better example would be when you know there is only one person. Person 1: "I went to the movies with a friend". Person 2: "Did they like the movie?"

This still has the issue about talking about somebody who is not present. Many people are advocating for using they/them when the person is right in front of you.

Agreed. That said, ‘they’ has been “on duty” as a singular pronoun since at least the 14th century https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

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