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.
I was genuinely shaken when I saw Gore Vidal, in one of historical novels, use “he” as a pronoun to describe two people, one of whom was a woman. It just manifestly doesn’t work.
As I was digging around in this subject once, I noted that Anna Freud and (of all people) Peg Bracken both used the epicene "he."
It was incredibly engrained back then in the twentieth century, and people who assert now that it wasn't are not paying attention to reality.
When I was in theology school in the 1980s we were required to write using gender-neutral framings or we would fail. Something something all God’s children.
