He/she really makes a good point...

Urgh, finals have taken over my life. But I'm bored with writing those, so I'll write something here instead...which makes the first time in a while.

I hate prescriptive grammar, and I think that attempts to impose change on a language--especially one as widespread and with as complex origins as English--are not only doomed to failure but also near-offensively paternalistic. There is one thing, though, that has started to drive me crazy about our fair tongue: the lack of gender-neutral pronouns. There are several reasons why this bugs me...

1) The classic problem of how exactly to refer to a neutral third-person subject. "He/she" is just...awful, and the singular "they," although I see no problem with it, is one of those prescriptively prohibited things that might get you in trouble on an essay. I often resort to just alternating genders between hypothetical people in an attempt to be even-handed, but then I start feeling like I'm populating my essay with a village of nameless specific people, which would just be weird.

2) The second one is a bit different. I am currently writing a paper on the concept of personal identity and its relation to bioethics. The author of the book I am basing it off of is named Jeff McMahan. Every time I speak of his arguments, I have to write something like...well, "his arguments." The point is...why in the world do I have to specify his gender every time I speak about his arguments if the arguments have nothing to do with his gender? There's a very deep idea in a lot of philosophy that who specifically is making the argument makes absolutely no difference as long as the argument itself is sound. If Hitler writes a book that makes a valid point, it's just as true as if Martin Luther King made the same point. That's what the term ad hominem means--attacking the person behind the arguments instead of the arguments themselves. Given that, I hate that I have to specify something as mundane as the writer's gender every time I make reference to a claim he makes. It's as if I had to refer to the writer's marital status or sexual orientation every time--I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't affect the arguments being made.

All that being said, I cannot bring myself to write a sentence like "McMahan claims that eir “embodied mind” account of personal identity..." It's unnatural, it's forced, and it's an attempt to impose outside change on language. In other words, it's everything I hate about prescriptive grammar.

What's a man/woman to do?