I've found gender to be generally irrelevant to most of my social interactions. I'm, personally, in a committed relationship and not picky genderwise anyways so, as a habit, I've been trying to remove any and all gendered pronouns[1] from my speech. I find it pretty silly that gender plays so central a role in grammar. It, IMO, elevates it above how we should conceive of it - just one of many attributes a person has and a not particularly central one at that.
I'm sorry if this habit of mine caused you offense but it's a pretty silly thing to get annoyed by.
1. Edited - originally just pronouns (not gendered pronouns).
I've contemplated a sort of 'minimally offensive' register of language where you do remove any and all pronouns (that is, the ones someone might object to, along with all other language that might be objected to) while being as natural as possible so that no one notices your lack of usage of any bit of language (though someone analysing the corpus of your writing certainly would). Seems like a technique a corporation seeking to avoid controversy would employ, though I suppose by its very nature I wouldn't notice if one were successful in doing so!
I always find it interesting to consider other languages when discussing things like this. It's generally easy to eliminate arbitrary words from your personal dialect, but grammatical gender can't be so simply ignored in most Indo-European languages, nor can it be eliminated, the status quo of gender agreement (e.g., of adjectives and the nouns they modify) being a crucial part of the evolved flow of information in each natural language.
However, I still think there's an 'elegant' resolution, which is to consider grammatical gender as 'yet another noun class system'. You can then, in a language-neutral way, move all people (optionally also animals, etc.) to one grammatical gender (now we argue over whether the 'one gender' should be the existing masculine or feminine--not all languages have the neuter!). All other words would retain current their grammatical genders (and m/f/n might be renamed to something like class 1/2/3). Words for people (e.g., man/woman) could also be moved, but don't have to, since their noun classes would now be entirely orthogonal to people's gender.
This is still too large of a change to convince people to actually adopt, but it's certainly more reasonable than the drastic alternative and more elegant IMO than the other proposals I've seen. Plus, it was never the case that grammatical genders could be always be made to agree (take, for example, two nouns of differing gender in apposition or coreference), and there's already a case like this in the German 'Mädchen' ("girl"). As a diminutive, it's grammatically neuter, so words modifying it also take the neuter. Distant anaphors formally also do, but colloquially they're often feminine.
I think that would probably end up with us in a generally better place from a technical perspective than reusing the gender neutral pronouns but given how aggressive some people have been at misgendering folks I think it'd take a rather long time to actually gain adoption. Additionally, unlike say German, there isn't really any standard board of English and it's an international language so getting countries to actually agree to such a change seems difficult.
I also, honestly, don't think it'd be significantly more difficult to switch each gender over to he or she than to use one of the novel pronouns like "ye" or "xhe" though pronunciation would take a while to normalize.
Themselves/themself is a bit tricky (as pointed out in a sibling thread) but they are tools that exist today and are pretty serviceable - I really don't think you could put "And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found themselves a poet with a lot more name recognition among tech workers." in front of anyone and get genuine confusion about what I was saying back - it's perfectly legible, even if some of the grammar might be off.
> Seems like a technique a corporation seeking to avoid controversy would employ
I expect it would backfire quickly, as people notice their attempts at language modification and this rapidly becomes controversial in itself.
Sort of similar to the uproar over using purportedly gender-neutral language to discuss women's reproductive issues, as we've seen recently in discussions on Roe v. Wade - women being referred to as "birthing bodies", "pregnant people" and suchlike. Which of course many find to be offensively dehumanizing or an example of female erasure.
"Themselves" is, at least as far as I learned english, a proper usage in that context. I adjusted "pronoun" to "gendered pronoun" above just in case, in this modern world, the meaning wasn't somehow clear. This feels like an unnecessary amount of pedantry for a simple comment.
I'm suddenly very interested in the distinction here - as yea themself also works in both of these contexts but themselves feels like a very distinct connotation and not incorrect. I can't point to a specific grammatical rule or learning to base this feeling off though - I don't know why it feels correct it just does.
> A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers back to the subject of a sentence or clause. You can recognize a reflexive pronoun by its second half: they all end in -self or -selves. [...] Only the dual-purpose your* has two reflexive forms: singular yourself and plural yourselves. [...] But if you'd been typing in the late 1300s, themself would have been the default: it was the only version around until the mid-1400s. [...] Eventually, themselves became the only accepted form. But themself never fully disappeared.
I'd go with, "Someone I don't know came into this room and took everything," or even, "Someone came into this room. I don't know them, but they took everything." I'm not against a neuter pronoun where it's justified, but there was no need for "themselves" here, and it was worse than several alternatives.
Okay, I guess that answers my immediate sub-question, but it misses the point about the plurality of the pronouns.
> or even, "Someone came into this room. I don't know them, but they took everything."
"Them" would still be plural by your earlier logic though. Unless you're suggesting that you think "themselves" is plural and "themself" would be the singular?
