[foldr]

It looks as though you're just looking for an excuse to go on a pre-packaged rant about gender and sex. I find it scary that an innocuous use of singular "they" (which has been in use as long as English as existed) would provoke such a thing.

[bsaul]

I'm not native english, so it could be possible that i overestimate the change to the english language using "they" as a default pronoun implies.

I'm extremely sensitive to ideology wanting to change a language to better reflect its theory. It's the first step to totalitarism, and it's almost always done with perfectly good intentions (until we start to see the damaging side effects).

[foldr]

Singular 'they' has been in use for hundreds of years. See e.g. this article that I linked to elsewhere in the thread: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/everything-yo...

Note that many of the historical examples involve contexts where gender would not even have been in doubt (e.g. all students at Cambridge would have been men).

[bsaul]

Thanks for link. So am i dreaming when i think using this term is (re)appearing recently following the whole gender neutral pronoun discussions ? Has it already been as common but i just didn’t happen to notice it ?

[foldr]

I think you're conflating the issue of gender neutrality with more recent discussions of non-binary and trans gender identities. People have always needed gender neutral pronouns to say things like "Everyone has their flaws", or to talk about individuals whose gender is unknown or irrelevant. The only question has been whether it's 'he/him/his' or 'they/them/theirs'. If you speak a dialect of English where 'they' can function as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, then there's really no reason at all not to use that pronoun to refer to Steve Wozniak.

The use of singular 'they' has been common for (at least) several decades, long before any substantial number of people were worried about trans issues.

[Accacin]

Can't speak for everyone in the UK, but at least in the area I live we use 'they/they're' a lot, and I don't believe it's a recent thing. We use he/she more, but using they isn't a rare thing.