Singular "they" has been around for a very long time, and used naturally without anyone noticing it as unusual, until recently when there's been more gender discussion and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)
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You're right - that has been around for a long long time. But I feel like I've seen a general increase in its usage that can make writing more ambiguous to parse. Like we already know the gender of someone being written about in a sentence, but they become referred to as "they" at random - it's a subtle effect. I'm talking about examples unrelated to "gender stuff" but perhaps that's what's made the usage more popular among younger writers.
Maybe young (and/or non-sexist) writers just don't care or aren't obsessed with knowing and explicitly talking about someone's gender, when it has nothing to do with the message.
I just find it annoying that English is almost entirely gender neutral except for pronouns. It feels like a weird and unnecessary special case (I really don't need to be telling everyone what I believe their gender to be every time I address them!), so getting rid of that makes the language more consistent and uniform overall.
I just wish it didn't conflate singular and plural. But the convenience of broadening an existing pattern rather than inventing a completely new one still wins in the end.
German seems even more obsessed with gender than English, and the exceptions (der Junge -vs- das Mädchen) seem to reveal its underlying assumptions and disrespect for reality in the ways it doesn't align with natural or biological gender, like refusing to assign gender to young females while imposing manhood on young boys, and bizarrely insisting on assigning arbitrary gender to inanimate objects.
Gendered pronouns and nouns are just a bunch of useless sexist baggage and linguistic friction that make languages much harder to learn, and uselessly complex, with more trivial arbitrary details to memorize or get wrong.
But all those gender-critical sex-obsessed people who make a big deal out of getting performatively offended and pretending to be confused by neutral pronouns, angrily insisting that every word possible explicitly defines a gender, are just weird.
The person doth protest too much, methinks.
German has grammatic gender for all nouns, so it is consistent in that regard, at least. I also don't like novel ungendered forms for languages like Spanish ("latinx" etc) for the same reason - they stick out like a sore thumb because they don't fit the overall feel of the language where gender is already a pervasive concept. It's kinda like taking a statically typed language and introducing completely new syntax to omit the type in one very specific case, but not all the others.
But English nouns are already ungendered with very few exceptions. Pronouns are also all ungendered except third person singular, so there's a much stronger case here for eliminating the exception in contexts where it really doesn't contribute anything useful.
As far as getting offended, I think one has to distinguish between the person getting misgendered being offended themselves vs people getting offended "on behalf" of others (who might actually be rather offended at such misrepresentation of what they actually want). E.g. with Spanish it's far more common for native English speakers to be adamant about "-x", while many native Spanish speakers actively dislike it.
Good point - maybe you're right and just I'm a gender-obsessed sexist. Thanks.
Tbf so many instances they don't use "they" but "he or she"...where my thinking is, not only is it more inclusive but it's actually easier to just use "they"?
> and people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)
They weren't recognizing genderless people just because they used "they" when the gender was unknown ;)
Yes, you're correct. I think I was trying to find a succinct way to say "everyone was happily using 'they' without concern until gendering became a hot topic and suddenly they noticed their usage of 'they' and didn't like that it was already an acceptable and in-use solution for including genderless people" or something like that :)
> people suddenly realizing they were already recognizing genderless people without knowing it ;)
Not true. It was used in the past to refer to an unknown person. I.e. "When a candidate arrives given them the test." You don't know what sex the candidate is before he arrives and instead of saying "he or she" you say "they".
But nowadays people use it as a superclass of he and she: "I asked my boss for a raise but they refused". It doesn't make any sense. You know very well what sex your boss is, but "they" is used for virtue signaling. It's a way of saying "I know my boss is a man, but I'm going to use they because a woman could do just a good a job and he, sorry, they does."
> You know very well what sex your boss is, but "they" is used for virtue signaling.
I doubt it's virtue signaling. I'll use they to refer to the position not the person. Sometimes it's deliberate obscuration. Other times it's a form of laziness. I don't have to think about which pronoun to use if I just use the generic one.
In my case, once I got used to seeing people as people first instead of their gender, it's been easy to slip up on the pronoun.
Your sentence is the perfect example for proper use of "they", per the wikipedia article "It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent" - "boss" is non-gendered and so "they" is grammatically correct.
There's no virtue signalling, you're reading too much into it.
No, it is used to signal the person's gender doesn't matter. Being angry about other people not fixating on gender by demanding everyone always explicitly define it with every pronoun is used as sexism signaling, which is what you're doing.
You don't know why other people choose to use the words they do, yet you presume the worst and accuse people of being insincere and lacking virtue despite (and because of) their polite behavior, regardless of their true beliefs, when it's actually none of your business to police and judge their grammar.
I'd rather work with someone who purposefully signals they have virtue than someone who purposefully signals they're a sexist asshole, any day.
What a comment...
The person you responded to is right. If you start mixing in "they" you're just confusing the listener, because they will assume you're now talking about some different people. I wouldn't have the patience to listen to somebody who speaks in that matter and deliberately makes their words cryptic.
Sexist assholes who become performatively confused and impatient and pretend they can't understand you and stop listening are just signaling that they are sexist assholes.
Do you think anybody at all wants to listen to you if you speak in this way?
I do know what sex my boss is, but why should I be forced to restate it every time I reference them in a conversation? It feels rather less polite to the speaker to impose that need on them.