I was writing an email and a friend pointed out that I should stop using "he/she" and instead always use "they" to refer to a person of unknown gender, since "he or she" implies there are only two gender, which is very insulting to people who don't identify as either male or female.
I've never heard of anyone being insulted by "he or she". Should I make an effort to change my writing habits, or is my friend wrong?
Best Answer
I'm a grammarian pedant by nature, I'm in my very late 40's, male, cis-gendered and so on.
That said: the force gendered he or she has been a construction to avoid in technical writing for quite some time. It's not necessarily offensive per se, it's just uninclusive and clumsy.
They as a pronoun is not incredibly new, it's been brewing and in use for some time, and is in fact in pretty broad use: it's most typically the accepted pronoun of either non-gender-binary folks or some who effectively decline-to-state.
The context in which a he or she can be directly offensive is if a given individual or group has informed one of their preferred pronoun, and one is explicitly ignoring said preference, and forcing a he or she upon said individual or group unwanted, whether that be due to one's inner grammarian pedant, one's political views or even just plain cussedness.
To re-iterate my earlier point: in general writing, technical writing etc, it's been long been considered poor practise to gender language unnecessarily.