I am tired of having this argument over and over again on Twitter, and IRC, and mailing lists. ---- In gender-neutral contexts, use gender-neutral language. Use a gender-neutral pronoun. [Failure](http://techcompaniesthatonlyhiremen.tumblr.com) to do so is [hostile](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html). ---- There is no excuse for unnecessarily gendered language. Specifically, the lack of a good pronoun in English is not an excuse. English has a gender-neutral sentient pronoun: they/them/theirs. ---- Your inability to understand the subtleties of subject/verb/object agreement in English does not trump the fact that it is *offensive* to assume that everyone is a man. ---- Even if your grammatical objections were valid, they are not worth making someone feel excluded over. This is a value judgement: you are not excused for making someone feel marginalized, unimportant, unwelcome, and awkward just because some phrasing sounds odd to you. ---- But, let me assure you, those objections are *not* valid. They are based on historical misunderstandings about the differences between Latin and English, by overzealously prescriptivist grammarians, literally *all* of whom were men. ---- For one example of why the "problem" with "they" is not actually a problem - i.e. the fact that it is semantically singular but morphologically plural - consider that there's another word you're quite familiar with that has this property: English's *second*-person pronoun, "you". English used to have a distinct, singular second-person pronoun, ["thou"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou). ---- While [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they) does note that there is still "some controversy", that does not mean that the controversy is at all valid. The linguistic pedigree of the singular "they" is [near to a millennium long](http://papersbyjoantaber.blogspot.com/2006/10/singular-they-pronoun-that-came-in-from.html) at this point. [Far more famous, far better writers than you](http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html) have used this construction to great success. ---- As Joan Taber put it: > ***"[History] is not on the side of those who would ban singular they from written texts; neither is logic; nor is majority rule."*** ---- So, if you go on using "he", "him", "his" to describe a hypothetical person (and, given the audience here, probably a hypothetical programmer), you're demonstrating two things to me: 1. You've got no regard for the subtle contribution you're making to the [systematic psychic damage](http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/13623571633/false-equivalence) our society does to women, especially [women in technical careers](http://abad1dea.tumblr.com/post/48983346748/mansplained); or at least, you have less regard for it than you do for your sense of linguistic purity. 2. You are happy to let [a petty, self-important sense of correctness](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html) about language usage trump research and historical context. ---- Therefore, go, and sin no more: when want to describe someone (not "a man"), refer to them as "them" (not "him"). And, if it grates on your ear a little each time, just remember that, by doing so, you are *being nice*, and that is a better thing than *sounding nice*. ---- P.S.: If you still insist on pseudo-latinate prescriptivist grammatical dogmatism, but are still sensitive to the gender-neutral language issue and prefer to use some nonsense like [Spivak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun), I will still think you're a bit daft. However, that's a clear improvement upon the alternative, which is for me to think you're rude and inconsiderate.