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bensen-daniel In reply to labgnome [2013-03-21 06:09:43 +0000 UTC]

Officially it's "they," but nobody actually says "Bubba are sad because they lost their cookie." People use "he." The same is true for the pnamns, who are also hemaphrodites.

It comes from the fact that the center of Human/alien contact is in Europe, where "he" (or the equivalent in German, French, etc.) is acceptable as a gender-neutral pronoun.

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labgnome In reply to bensen-daniel [2013-03-22 03:53:29 +0000 UTC]

Well I will say I like a sort of he/him for male, or the male-equivalent sex h, she/her for female, zhi/hir for hermaphrodite or some biologically inequivalent sex, and they/them for neuters and persons that are non-individuals.

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bensen-daniel In reply to labgnome [2013-03-22 06:14:29 +0000 UTC]

That sort of thing works alright on paper, but you will never get anyone to talk like that.
The closest thing we have in English is "they" and "them" or, in the case of a particular high school in Baltimore, "yo" ([link] )
All other efforts to create gender-neutral pronouns in English, as top-down impositions against the natural structure of the language, and as fundamentally pointless, will never achieve widespread use in speech.

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labgnome In reply to bensen-daniel [2013-03-22 16:12:57 +0000 UTC]

It's fairly easy to pick up. I know a couple of they/them's and zhi/hir's each in real life. It's surprisingly easy to get use to.

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