"Who’s ‘They’?"

"This registers as a modern problem, but gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed for centuries. In 1808, Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested repurposing “it” and “which” “in order to avoid particularizing man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently.” But only recently has mainstream pop culture entertained the idea of a neutral pronoun for referring to trans, genderqueer and even some feminist folks who either don’t identify as “he” or “she” or are interested in demolishing that binary in speech. A flurry of totally new constructions has emerged to bridge the gap. On Tumblr, it’s now typical for young people to pin their preferred pronouns to their pages: The writer behind a blog called “The Gayest Seabass” identifies as “Danny, xe/xim/xir or he/him/his or they/them/their, taken-ish, 20.”...

central to the appeal of the singular “they” is that it’s often deployed unconsciously. It’s regularly repurposed as a linguistic crutch when an individual’s gender is unknown or irrelevant. You might use it to refer to a hypothetical person who, say, goes to the store and forgets “their” wallet. That casual usage has a long history — it has appeared in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen and Shaw. It wasn’t until 1745, when the schoolmistress-turned-grammar-expert Ann Fisher proposed “he” as a universal pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that the use of “they” in the same circumstance was respun as grammatically incorrect...

In a very real way, accepting the fluidity of gender requires rejecting standards in general. It means opening our “closed class” of pronouns."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/whos-they.html?_r=1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%203/29/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All&referer=