Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-5918438-20181003051244

As to that one voice here claiming singular they is not correct English, I'm sorry but that is simply not the case. We have been using singular they for longer than we've been using singular you.

At the time Shakespeare used singular they, "you" was specifically a plural pronoun (or a form of "ye", a plural pronoun), and many objected when people started using you as both singular and plural, in place of thou. Both they and you follow the same grammatical rules, in terms of conjugation.

For some reason, though, even though everyone uses singular they in common parlance, like all the time without realising it, there was some pushback in recent years. Just to note, some linguists were against singular they, and some others acknowledged that it is grammatically correct, and that it's been around for hundreds of years.

Now, it's taken some time, but it's finally been acknowledged, within the last year or two, by the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style, that singular they is very much a thing, and quite correct to use.

Don't believe me and the style guides? Take it from Oxford Dictionaries. Or Merriam-Webster. Prof Dennis Barron goes over the history here.

Singular they was literally declared Word of the Year for 2015 by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society.

And all that aside, there exist many people in the real world who are neither "he" or "she", and many of us use singular they in our day-to-day lives, or opt for neopronouns. That is literally the only correct way to refer to me, and I'm not even a Time Lord.

So. Singular they exists. It's grammatically correct, it's linguist-approved, it's in the dictionaries, it's in the style guides, and it has a long history, from the 14th century to the present day.

Singular they is our gender-neutral 3rd person singular (personal) pronoun in English. "It" is for objects, or concepts, and maybe animals. Do not call a person "it". Assuming that "he" applies to everyone is incredibly archaic, and reflects past views that told the story of human life from men's perspectives only, and which assumed maleness as somehow default. Just as none of those would apply to me, an actual human person who's nonbinary, we should follow proper gender-neutral language with regards to the Doctor too.