[mattkrause]

If it is good enough for Austin, Byron, and Chesterfield, not to mention Shakespeare, then it is good enough for me.

The catch is that it sounds best when there's no specific antecedent: "Every user of the workshop must be responsible for their own safety."

It sounds odder when it is deliberately used to avoid (mis)gendering a specific individual: "Pat does not discuss their* gender." I think this is the niche that 'ze' is supposed to fill.

[stordoff]

> It sounds odder when it is deliberately used to avoid (mis)gendering a specific individual: "Pat does not discuss their* gender."

I suspect it depends on dialect. "their" just sounds more informal to me, "his"/"her" sounds slightly more formal.

[mattkrause]

Hmmm, interesting idea.

I looked at some older examples of singular-they and they almost exclusively refer to an unknown or unspecified person ("Everyone loves their mother"). Using it for a specified person seems to be fairly new: Time Magazine had a piece describing how their (in this sense) was the 2015 word of the year.

http://time.com/4173992/word-of-the-year-2015-they/

[caseyohara]

I've heard of 'ze' as a gender-neutral pronoun, but I've never really seen it used. How would you substitute 'ze' in that sentence: "Pat does not discuss their gender"?

[dragonwriter]

“Ze” (like “they”) is a subject pronoun, it has been suggested with various object pronouns (like “them”), possessive determiners (like “their”) and possessive pronouns (like “theirs”), including at least these patterns: ze/hir/hir/hirs, ze/mer/zer/zers, ze/zir/zir/zirs; ze/zem/zes/zes.

So, the “their” could change to any of “hir”, “mer”, “zir”, or “zes”, depending on which “ze” pattern was used.