I'm still having this conversation with you in my head, so I thought I'd put a bit of it on paper (respecting your buttons, of course).
The singular "they" is hard to wrap one's mind around. I made it a New Year's Resolution in 2015, and by 2017 I'd gotten pretty good at it though, like Sasha's parents, I still screw up.
What I notice though is that the younger people I know screw up less than I do, and the younger they are, the more it seems natural to them. My niece, for example (26 years old and firmly in the "she" camp for herself) has a lifelong friend who prefers "they," and it trips off my niece's tongue with no hesitation.
Many college students are now in schools where pronoun preference is regularly asked at various times, and (presumably) mostly respected once determined.
I think that the difficulty may be pretty generational (and regional/political), but that folks like you and me and Sasha's parents are not the best indicators of how difficult this shift will turn out to be.
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Date: 2018-02-17 03:23 am (UTC)The singular "they" is hard to wrap one's mind around. I made it a New Year's Resolution in 2015, and by 2017 I'd gotten pretty good at it though, like Sasha's parents, I still screw up.
What I notice though is that the younger people I know screw up less than I do, and the younger they are, the more it seems natural to them. My niece, for example (26 years old and firmly in the "she" camp for herself) has a lifelong friend who prefers "they," and it trips off my niece's tongue with no hesitation.
Many college students are now in schools where pronoun preference is regularly asked at various times, and (presumably) mostly respected once determined.
I think that the difficulty may be pretty generational (and regional/political), but that folks like you and me and Sasha's parents are not the best indicators of how difficult this shift will turn out to be.