this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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seriously, when i see questions like OP, my instinct is to be like 'because you're a dumbass'.
but usually it's because their a prescriptive, and they think their use of their language at this particular time, is and always was the only legitimate form of it. and all past or future uses, including their own, are faulty and wrong.
god i remember being in like 5th or 6th grade and arguling about the colloqual use of 'they' with my teachers and getting failed. then in college i got 'lectured' about using 'he' as a pronoun for a singular person was sexist and awful you must use 'he/she' no matter how stupid and weird that looks. and now if you don't use 'they' you're awful because he/she is binary exclusivity or something.
and i bet in 10 years it will be different, yet again, and people will tell you whichever of the previous pronouns or singular pronoun you use are 'highly problematic' because it's not whatever what people have deemed to be 'least problematic'. as if it really matters that fucking much, especially compared to the actual broader themes of the novel in question.
I have seen so many English linguistic trends and fads come and go I just don't take them seriously any longer. If someone wants to be called any number of hundreds of special pronouns just for themself, fine. No skin off my nose. If it's a stupid one (e.g. poppy/seed) or one that I'm just not going to waste my time bothering to clutter my brain with (e.g. xae/xaem), I'll just refer to said person by name (if at all). Otherwise I'll use the one they want me to use, knowing that within five years the fad will be behind us and a new fad will be plaguing users of English
As an irrelevant side note, the whole problem of gendered pronouns would go away if we, you know, just didn't. Use gendered pronouns, I mean.
Persian (Farsi) has existed for ages without gendered pronouns of any kind, indeed without grammatical gender of any kind. So has Chinese until the humiliation of the Opium Wars made them adopt gendered pronouns ... but only in the written form ... as a form of aping their colonizers' grammar. This leaves us with the irony of the Chinese making their writing more complicated because it diverges from their speech to please their foreign colonial overlords, only to now have those colonial overlords agonizing over gendered pronouns and making up hundreds of them for no good reason. So China imported a non-solution to a non-problem to appeal to colonizers who now think gendered pronouns are icky. This is hilarious to me.
I'm pretty sure (but not positive) that Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns as well. Turkish too, I think. There may actually be more languages without grammatical gender (or at least weakly gendered) than languages with.
Well English has "it" but apparently it's impolite or something... Coming from French we don't even have that