[philh]

I've sometimes used it (or ve) in the past, because there's no good gender-neutral pronoun and I don't like to assume. (This is partly a politeness thing and partly an accuracy thing.)

Occasionally when I would do so, people would get confrontational about it, so I mostly stopped. But now that means I sometimes waste time trying to find someone's gender even though that's totally irrelevant, and/or try to work around needing a pronoun at all, and/or use "they" even though I don't like it. None of these solutions is great.

(Btw, I don't parse you as confrontational. Comments like yours wouldn't have bothered me.)