...it is singular, they are plural; he or she are interchangeable artifacts of language and it's overtly sexist to take exception to either...
...individuals have agency; collectives are mindless emergent systems...
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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It's a real shame that bigots have historically used "it" to de-humanize people.
Personally I use male pronouns because it's easy and obvious and I don't really care enough. I don't love constantly identifying with a gender. But I also don't want to be identified as plural. And yeah, I know that singular 'they' has been around for hundreds of years, but you can also find grammar authorities speaking out against it for hundreds of years. For exchanging information efficiently, I think single vs plural is a much more important distinction in our modern world than which gender someone identifies as.
I wish I could identify as "it" without freaking people out. I also wish people respected objects, without having to give them gendered pronouns or faces or human names to do so.
I respect all my they/them homies, including one of my partners, but it seems to me like a linguistic bandaid on a bad system.
I chose to be autistic before it was cool.