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Catnip comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - LessWrong
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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...
If you dislike zes, xes and eys and find them horrible little abominations that have no place among good and decent words, and suspect they were meant to trick us into unknowingly saying things that count as worship of Cthulhu...
...oh, wait, that's me. Let's try again.
If you dislike zes, xes and eys, then using "they" seems to me the best solution if you care about being gender-neutral.