I don't like the options that are usually given in the "gender-neutral pronoun" debate. The singular they offends my prescriptivist sensibilities. His/her constructions are clunky and look terrible. The generic he is simple and I find Strunk and White's (3rd edition, 1979) defense of it persuasive, but many these days consider it unacceptable. The generic she is still better to me than the singular they, but it seems retaliatory and besides has problems similar to those of the generic he.
I recently noticed a fourth option: use he and she as generic pronouns on an alternating basis. For example, if referring to a student, use she the first time. After completing the section of the discussion, referring to this imaginary student exclusively as she, the next paragraph or page introduces a second example student, and for this example the pronoun used is he.
The author intends that both examples be understood to refer to students of any gender, and carefully avoids gender stereotyping, such as regularly using "she" when referring to an art student and "he" when referring to a science student. The author also never switches the pronoun in the middle of an example.
This method has its drawbacks, of course, but I'd like to know if it has been recommended by any published style guides. If not recommended, has it been considered a viable option?
This question is different from the many others on this subject because a) I am asking about a gender-neutral option I have not seen discussed on ELU, and b) I am asking for style guides, not merely "is this acceptable?"
Best Answer
I've worked as a copy editor with numerous in-house style guides at different publishing houses, as well as with various style guides intended for a wider audience (Chicago, AP, MLA, Oxford, Words Into Type, Harvard Blue Book), and I can't recall ever having seen one that imposed an alternating-gender-pronoun approach. I have occasionally encountered this approach in books and periodicals, and have supposed that the author or publisher adopted it to emphasize the randomness of assigning gender to a person in a particular occupation or to a generalized human being, but I've never seen it required as a matter of house style.
The reason that it hasn't caught on as an approach to gender neutrality, I suspect, is that it has the effect of making gender more prominent in the course of a book or article. Whereas "he or she" or "she or he" or "(s)he" or "they" declines to assign a single gender to the hypothetical or representative person in a narrative, and indeed disposes of the issue of gender specificity by assigning both genders or neither gender to the working pronoun, the alternating-gender approach insists that each such pronoun—and the person it points to—is either male or female.
Rather than emphasizing (as I imagine it intends to) the interchangeability of male and female pronouns in generalized or hypothetical settings, it emphasizes that this first person is female, this second person is male, this third person is female, and so on. The reader is presented with an endless series of pronouns with alternating assigned genders instead of dealing with a text where gender assignment is avoided because it is unnecessary and irrelevant.
Undoubtedly, the distracting aspect of systematically alternating the gender of pronouns applied to generic individual people would diminish if the practice became the de facto standard in speech and writing, but even then I don't see how it would offer any meaningful advantage over the gender-neutral alternatives that are currently more common.