Iain Banks, in “Player of Games”, also expressed this sentiment pretty well:
“Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.”
It’s unobtrusive and it has a decent chance of actually catching on, unlike any alternative I’ve ever heard of. There’s something to be said for practicality.
Hofstadter has made an excellent argument on this topic called “A Person Paper on Purity in Language”.
Iain Banks, in “Player of Games”, also expressed this sentiment pretty well:
“Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.”
My preferred sex-neutral pronoun is “they”.
Yes, I also prefer “they”.
It’s unobtrusive and it has a decent chance of actually catching on, unlike any alternative I’ve ever heard of. There’s something to be said for practicality.