Actually English does have a widely agreed on gender neutral singular pronoun. That pronoun is “they”, and it is used all the time and has been used for hundreds of years. A certain percentage of people for some reason insist that “they” can only be used as a plural, but then they’re fine making up brand new bespoke pronouns for themselves? “They” can be used as singular, which is easily proven since I do it all the time, and so do lots of people. And nobody gets confused and thinks you can’t possibly be referring to a single person and think you must be referring to some group that they’ve never heard of. Doesn’t happen. People understand it, and use it.
Bespoke pronouns are the stupidest gender-neutral idea I’ve heard of in a long time. If you need a particular word to refer to yourself that someone would only know if they learned that custom word, we already have that, it is called a name.
This sort of “go around the room to learn everyone’s bespoke pronouns” is a form of status competition among some groups. Look how enlightened we are! We don’t even know what gender you identify as unless you tell us! We don’t see color and we don’t see gender!
Either use the gender-neutral singular “they” or stay away from pronouns altogether.
Yeah, but when there’s just one pronoun it doesn’t matter what gender or sex you are, you get called “hän”. Or in spoken language usually “se” which is our “it”. I’ve seen some of the weirder gender-related pronoun stuff and yes it can be fascinating but I wouldn’t want to deal with it in my own language.
Of course, what we Finns win in just having one pronoun as far as gender/sex confusion goes, we probably lose with our sauna culture. I don’t have any personal anecdotes about it but I can imagine social sauna evenings could be a pain for people who aren’t boring cis-heteros like me.
“They” is fine when you’re talking about a hypothetical, representative, or unknown person (e.g., “The volunteer should bring their own pen and notebook to each meeting,” “The coordinator has 15 minutes to do whatever team building exercise they want to do.”). But it sounds really, really jarring when it’s used to refer to a specific individual (e.g., “Robin is in charge of the forms. At the end of the day, make sure to give them all of your paperwork.”) just sounds weird. Overusing proper names also sounds weird. A quick check to find out what pronoun to use seems to be a better solution.
That doesn’t sound jarring to me at all shrug. I know one or two people who prefer to be referred to in gender neutral terms, and it stops sounding odd quite soon.