I originally liked this post because of its linguistic approach, but having read the exchange that followed, I think adding another voice to the mix may be beneficial.
Disclaimer: Though I find linguistics fascinating, I have no formal education in the field whatsoever . I know enough to contribute to conversations, but not to teach or the like.
@hotmess.exe’s last post is what finally convinced me to join the conversation — I understand both sides of the “argument”, but I think there’s a bit of context missing that would help everyone understand the topic a little better. The two relevant sections of the aforementioned post are:
I’ll state my opinion in bold so it can’t be missed:
- English third person pronouns no longer codify grammatical gender; their general use is therefore determined by social consensus, while their specific use is dependent on the subject (in this case, the person) for whom they are used — a pronoun may indicate social gender or may be purely aesthetic.
I’ll explain that in a less condensed manner shortly. First, I’d like to address the concept of grammatical gender itself. Another term for this is “nominal gender”, but conlanger and author David Peterson has suggested using “nominal species” as an alternative to avoid the confusion with social gender, though he admits it’s highly unlikely to be adopted.
The reasoning behind this is that in languages with grammatical gender, all nouns, without exception, must belong to one of at least two different genders. In French, you say “le garçon” and “la fille” (“the boy” and “the girl”), yes, but you also say “la voiture” and “le train” (“the car” and “the train”). Cars and trains have no need of social genders, so clearly, they can’t be described as feminine and masculine for that reason. Across languages, the spelling and pronunciation of a word is more likely the reason for grouping it into one gender or another.
Why, then, does grammatical gender exist? Redundancy. By virtue of a noun having gender, it forces the words around it (at least articles and adjectives) to agree with it. Gender makes a language harder to learn, yes, but it also makes it easier to understand what a person is saying even if you didn’t hear the full sentence.
Here's an example of what I mean.
Let’s say I’m with a friend in a noisy, Parisian street and we’re on our way to meet with two of her cousins. I remember her telling me that the one is French and the other English, and I can also remember that one is male and the other female, but I can’t remember which is which. (I also can’t remember their names.) So, I ask her and she replies, “Mary est anglaise et Marc est français.” However, because it’s noisy, I only heard “est français”.
If we were speaking English, I’d only have heard her say “is French”, which would obviously be unhelpful and I’d have to ask her again. However, since I know “français” agrees with a masculine subject and sounds different from “française”, which agrees with a feminine subject, I can deduce the male cousin is the French one.
Granted, this example makes use of nouns that have implied social gender, not just grammatical gender, but it nevertheless illustrates my point about the redundancy. Any kind of nominal or verbal inflection allows you to say more using fewer words.
A very good question to ask would be why so many languages use grammatical genders that appear to be modelled after social gender. Well, they weren’t originally: they were modelled after biological sex.
@hotmess.exe, you said this seems off to you, but the reason I say this is because of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor to all Indo-European (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, etc.) languages. The Proto-Indo-European people are accepted to have been nomadic pastoralists, which means their primary source of food was livestock. They probably used masculine and feminine genders to differentiate between bulls and cows, rams and ewes, and so on — it just happens that you can obviously differentiate between people that way too. (Note that they also had a neuter gender.)
Other gender systems include animacy (animate vs inanimate) and rationality (rational vs non-rational), and you can even get noun classes, which replace not just gender, but also number and case. (Swahili, for example, has fifteen different noun classes.) However, a very interesting occurrence is the common-neuter distinction of genders in Swedish and Danish, where masculine and feminine merged into the common gender. Wouldn’t it be so much simpler if English had done that?
In fact, some languages, like Turkish and Indonesian, have no gender at all. If Middle English had ditched its gendered pronouns along with the genders themselves, differentiating only between third person subjects in terms of plurality, this issue would never have occurred. Perhaps people would have been less protective of the gender binary, but alas.
Having said all of the above (this post has literally taken hours to write 
), I feel we can safely draw the conclusion that third person pronouns in Modern English serve whichever purpose its speakers agree upon — linguistics no longer has anything to do with the matter.
It’s funny how this topic has received more than a hundred replies, yet the conclusion of the first post is still the most relevant thing said:
As humans, we want to respect each other. Thus, as speakers of English, we want our language to reflect that. We can’t prescribe an individual’s first name — an expression of their identity — so neither can we prescribe which third person pronoun ought to be used for them.
