I was asked, at great length, a question yesterday that I tried to read as other than "I get that nonbinary people want to use their pronouns of choice, but do the rest of us have to honor that?"
And I couldn't.
So: Yes. The rest of us do.
"But it's confusing!"
Pronouns are always confusing. Try copyediting a sex scene between two men.
AU: Not sure whose penis "his penis" is here. Can you clarify?
Joking quite towardst one side:
Yes, the use of they/them/their for one person at a time poses an editorial challenge in terms of clarity.
So just toss it onto the pile with the rest of the editorial challenges you have to rise to.
Indeed. And for the non-fiction editor, there is no possible way that using they/them could be more awkward than having to enforce “he or she” or “his/her” or “s/he”—all of which are journal house styles I had to follow earlier in my career—and then argue with the author about it.
And, happily, all the "he or she" variations are now the deadest ducks.
And if you're still using "he" as a pronoun for unspecified theoretical single people whose gender is either unknown or irrelevant:
Knock it off.
When I started copyediting in the early 1990s, authors were in the thick of avoiding the epicene "he" with all manner of "he or she" variations.
Because I was trained so strictly not to use the singular "they," I often edited to dispose of a pronoun altogether.
Which is not that hard.
Of course you'd pluralize a noun whenever you could so you'd have "Students should study whatever they want" rather than "A student should study whatever" etc.
But sometime in the last few years we (departmentally) agreed never to challenge or edit around an author's use of the singular "they."
P.P.S. In one of my prize possessions—an etiquette book from the early 1920s, in case you want to know how many servants you need to properly staff your apartment—the pronoun of choice for a single infant or toddler whose gender is irrelevant to the conversation is:
it
Oh still. Looking at graveyards makes it clear there was a lot of money, you often see multiple children die in the same outbreak. Money did not protect people from infectious disease in the same ways it can now.
For good or ill, an etiquette book published by Vogue doesn't even go into adult sickroom etiquette, much less dead babies, and though it's more than happy to talk about how long one remains in mourning after one's spouse dies, it's disinclined to talk about the death that precipitates the mourning.
"It" as a pronoun for babies and small children is extremely common in the late Victorian & Edwardian books I read as a kid -- E. Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett, etc.
That's how it works in German. I was proofreading a translated pamphlet about how a children's hospital is focused on centering the child and "it" was used to refer to this respected child throughout. (I did change it to be less jarring for English speakers.)
Oh, that was still common enough usage among people of my grandparents’ generation until at least the early 1980s. Not quite sure when the “it” became a he or she (when it started to walk? When it started to smoke? Don’t remember).
I can only say that it certainly wasn't she, because I don't know her.
Beyond that, I have zero recollection (and maybe I'm sorry I didn't make a note).
