Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-4189499-20190110103756

Shambala108 wrote: The following sentence comes from The Doctor's grandmothers:
 * "According to the Thirteenth Doctor, the Doctor had seven grandmothers in their youth."

Sticking my nose in here where it doesn't really belong (that snippet from T:DISCUSS is particularly relevant in my case as a long-time forum dweller), but I believe that any confusion coming from that sentence comes from the fact that that sentence is a poor sentence, not because of the singular "they".

Consider if the sentence was instead:
 * "According to blah, Rose had a grandmother in her youth."

(Note that I'm not sure that's an accurate statement, just one inserted for demonstration)

The exact same issue arises here from having two female characters, either of whom could be referred to by "her" and both of whom had a "youth". Given the context, you can take a good guess that "her" is referring to Rose in my sentence, just like you'd probably guess that "they" is referring to the Doctor in Shambala's sentence. While you can take a good stab at the intended meaning, if it were a question on DWA, it'd probably be tagged for deletion for being too vague (not that you guys are bound by or care about DWA, but given the many, many, many questions that need to be deleted for vagueness over there, it's fine-tuned my "vague" alarm quite a bit).

Some better ways to word the same sentence to remove the ambiguity while still using the singular "they" could be:
 * According to the Thirteenth Doctor, the Doctor had seven grandmothers when they were younger.
 * In this instance, using "when they were younger" instead of "in their youth" makes the last part of the statement less applicable to the grandmothers, therefore associating the "they" more closely with the Doctor.
 * When the Doctor was in their youth, they had seven grandmothers, according to the Thirteenth Doctor.
 * By moving the reference to the grandmothers after the "they", there is only one person available who "they" could apply to.

Or, you could sidestep the vagueness from having two "they"s by changing one "they" back into a "she" through context (given individual Doctor's have well-defined pronouns):
 * The Thirteenth Doctor mentioned that she had seven grandmothers in her youth.

These are only a few examples of grammatically correct sentences which would express the concept of Thirteen having seven grandmothers, none of which requires assigning a non-"they" third person singular pronoun to the Doctor as a whole. Yes, it can be more awkward, but it's the same as any sentence talking about two males or two females.

Unless we want to replace all pronouns with initials or some other non-standard pronoun substitute, we're going to be stuck with the ambiguity of having only 3 pronouns to refer to thousands of characters in who knows how many combinations. That doesn't mean that we should remove one of those pronouns; we just need to learn how to write less vague sentences!

Now let me crawl back into my hole to not appear again for another year :)