That’ll work really good when searching for a missing person. “Well Detective Johnson, Bill is gregarious and generous to a fault. Does the corpse you found in the drainage ditch match that description?”

But “they” has been used as the “generic they” or “singular they” for centuries: at least he 1300s. We don’t have any problem with “you” being ambiguous as both plural/singular, so there’s no reason “they” shouldn’t either.

It’s fallen into disrepute amongst prescriptionists of late, but hasn’t, other than in their minds and books, managed to magically become “incorrect”.

If it’s good enough for the OED (in body text as well as under they/their/them), the KJV Bible, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Nelson, Thackeray, George Eliot, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bowen, Lawrence Durrell, Doris Lessing, C. S. Lewis, Oscar Wilde, Johnathan Swift… then it is good enough for me.

These people were not illiterates: their writings are used to define the language in dictionaries. They FORMED our language.

It also has the support of significant portions of the feminist movement, along with the anon bi-gendered person at #29, glittertrash and their “global subculture of queers”, Camp Freddie, and also seems to be the prevailing term used on most places like blog comments, IRC, etc where gender is just unknown and irrelevant.

But hir does have history (Caxton, credited inventor of the printing press, used it, albeit as a nominative form of “they”), and Ze has the advantage of being audibly unambiguous. But both are completely ambiguous in meaning to someone who isn’t schooled in their meaning, so they currently tend to raise more eyebrows than not.

As a descriptionist, I’m interested to see how it pans out. I’m not expecting any complete resolution in the next couple decades, though I can see the anonymity of the internet making “they” become a de facto standard pretty fast.

I have no idea how one would even go about introducing a new pronoun into a language, whether written or spoken. Seems daunting.

From that evolutionary standpoint, language is never “deficient;” it always has the words and rules it needs. It “would be nice” if adorable polar bear cubs didn’t have to kill adorable seal pups to survive, but they do. English has always had the “deficiency” of not being able to refer in a gender-non-specific way to hypothetical third persons, a “problem” that has been irritating writers for centuries. It also has the “deficiency” of not having any gender-specific plural pronouns. Most of the Romance languages have the “deficiency” of having sex-specific versions of nouns for people, but using the masculine plural for mixed-sex groups. And so forth. Maybe some day these “deficiencies” will become so problematic that they’ll get “fixed,” one way or another. Maybe at that moment, the otherwise maladaptive set of pronouns “xe/xem/xyr” will flourish because they fit the selfish needs of English-speakers as a whole. But it won’t happen just because everyone decided it was “fairer” or “nicer,” any more than species go voluntarily extinct because predation isn’t fair or nice to prey.

This doesn’t mean that intersex, transgendered, and “legally androgynous” folk won’t influence the language in some way. For example, by the fact of their declared, out-in-public existence, which permits neologisms like “intersex” and “transgendered” to have some purpose, and therefore some traction.

I know a few people who are “confused” about their Gender, and I don’t mean this in the way that they are a man but feel like a woman or vice versa, but rather that they don’t like the idea that someone look at them as a man or a woman because they don’t like the associated connotations.

I admit it puzzles me a bit to try and understand what the big deal is with a Gender, there are two, male and female with some “oddities” thrown in from time to time to keep it interesting, but why my Gender (alone) would define me goes beyond my apprehension. Yeah I am a guy and there are certain stereotypes that go with this that I don’t subscribe to, but that does not make me want to be “genderless”, I can differenciate between my Gender and a Stereotype.

IMO growing up does not mean to “accept ones Gender” and what goes with it, but rather understanding that stereotypes are crutches that most people use to slot people into places.

If we had a large population of androgynous people I bet we quickly would get associated stereotypes for it too.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2010/831/42762

It bugs me in a big way because it shows how arbitrary this stuff is. You can adequately convince all the people who monitor this stuff, but then some conservative public servant goes “Oh no” and it’s all over. Even though the technical systems are in place to allow it.

“I trod on someone’s foot in the bus today, and you wouldn’t believe how they swore!”

My personal guess is that “they”/”their”/etc. will gradually come to sound right as singular in more and more contexts, as people have more cause to choose a gender-neutral pronoun. This seems much more typical of how language evolves than a few of us managing to introduce a new set of pronouns out of thin air. The slight “cost” is the loss of distinction between singular and plural; many European languages have a similar problem in that the plural and formal singular forms of “you” are the same (eg “vous”, “usted”, …)

[By the way, for anyone claiming that "they" is only correct in the plural, please read up a little further! The singular usage is traditionally called the "epicene they" and has been around for centuries.]

I wonder if having an identity card where one of the fields is optional is silly. Since it’s only one field, and one person it’s fine… this isn’t the thin edge of a wedge is it?

Moreover, it is part of the specification for machine readable passports that sex can be unspecified – in which case the sex character on the 21st character of the second line should be “<“: as the spec has existed for many years, I doubt that this is the first time it has been used anywhere in the world.

But the hell with cutesy-poo pronoun compromises like “hir!”

Birth certificates are issued at birth, not 20+ years after the fact.

The question I have is in regards to gender as determined by chromosomes and not choice. Do geneticists have a category for this yet?

Other than that, you go, giroy (boirl?)!!

Red squiggly lines under words typically mean that they’re not spelled correctly! ;)

Birth certificates are issued at birth, not 20+ years after the fact.

Not necessarily. When I adopted my stepdaughter at age six, the state of Florida issued her a new birth certificate with my name replacing the biological father’s. It’s like they rewrote history.

However, in my experience those things don’t really matter. I have a very clearly male friend whose passport says he’s female. (His girlfriend was filling out the paperwork for him, and checked “F” out of habit.) All the other details are correct. He’s traveled outside the country several times since then, and nobody has ever so much as raised an eyebrow.

But not always, children can be XXY (Klinefelter syndrome), XYY, or even single X (Turner syndrome). There are are also XX males for that matter (de la Chapelle syndrome).

It does seem somehow “untrue” to be constantly forced to select “M” as a designator.

(I signed up at one site, BME I believe, where I recall being both amazed and pleased that their choices were M, O, and F, with “O” meaning “Other.”)

Non-gendered pronouns without pejorative connotations are sorely lacking in the English language. Using interchanged he and she in reference to a bi-gendered person is not only completely disregarding hir identity, but is also grammatically incorrect and confusing. Why would a pronoun with only one gender assigned to it even apply to someone who is not that gender?

If our language is a system of differences with no positive terms, as early studies of your namesake would infer, “she” means “not he” and vice versa. This presence of a singular gender by the absence of another is clearly not the case for hir.

Any other time we have come across a situation that required expression through language where words did not exist before, we have created them — either through the formulation of new words, or by the amalgamation of existing ones. Gender-neutral pronouns follow in this same pattern.

Language evolves. It’s arbitrary. Let it grow. We define our world with our language. It shapes how we view others and ourselves. A little more inclusion and a little less segregation of differently-gendered bodies would be nice.

(NB: “bi-gendered” is my assignment of a term to hir based upon my reading of hir posting; only ze can verify the true accuracy of this assumption and I apologize profusely if I am incorrect.)