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g_pepper comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong
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I have a style question. Are there less grating ways to write gender neutral texts?
I, to my great surprise, was irritated to no end by "ey" and "eir". I always stumbled when reading it. I dislike it and think "he/she" or "they" may be more natural and cause less stumbling when reading the article.
So far, I am against all the invented gender-neutral pronouns. Most of them sound strange ("ey" and "eir" look like a typo or phonetic imitation of deep southern accent, "xe" and "xir" use "x" sound and are simply painful to pronounce)
As of now, I am willing to sacrifice gender neutrality in texts in favor of readability.
Technically, "he" is perfectly acceptable for gender neutral texts. Merriam-Webster states that "he" can be "used in a generic sense or when the sex of the person is unspecified".
However, to avoid the appearance of non-neutral text, I usually use "he/she", "his/her", etc. "They" or "their" can be used, but these are not really appropriate referring to a singular antecedent, so I quite often use "his/her" rather than "their". Another technique that you see frequently and that I sometimes use is to use "he" sometimes and "she" other times. As long as these more-less balance out in your text, you should be OK from a neutrality standpoint.
Any of these alternatives is preferable IMO to "ey" and "eir".
The Eir of Slytherin has opened the Chamber of Socrates...