My answer to the question: "How do you feel about the use of the singular 'they?'"

The singular "they" has become quite broadly accepted in many fields as a way of avoiding repetition of they, (for "he" or "she,") and "them" for "him or her"). You can replace the masculine first person singular with something like "(s)he," but you run into a wall when you get to him/her or his/her and so are still pushed back toward the singular "they, "them, "their" and so on.   There actually was a reason for the use of the collective masculine (present in many languages) other than the desire to promote patriarchy, it actually facilitated compactness of style. You can achieve the same thing now by using "she" and "her" instead of "he" and "him". That is certainly good and valid, so long as you keep two things in mind, one the latter of which second of which flows form the former. In the first place in doing so you aren't really communicating a true generic feminine that is fully on par with the more historic generic masculine, just as the term "womankind," would not serve as effectively as an alternative for the generic "mankind," as some other term such as "humanity" or "humankind." As the term "womankind" would still be generally taken to refer specifically to the female of the species, so too whether we like it or not "she" and "her" and "hers" as an alternative to "he" and "him," and "his." still tends to communicate the idea of a particular female rather than a less defined generic person. And this leads to the second thing to keep in mind. Since the use of she is still heard as referring not to a person in general but to one woman in particular, it can become a little tricky when you are describing behavior generally understood to be more common of the male of the species, especially when that behavior is undesirable. In my dissertation which was written in the gender sensitive context of the University of Toronto. I tried an experiment in this latter connection. I generally used the singular "they" or some other linguistic contrivance unless I was describing undesirable behavior, in which case I would resort to the traditional collective masculine with the expectation that it provided a satisfactory solution to a problem of description and would pass unnoticed. Which it did. The general rule is that your attempts to negotiate the issue of gender in your writing is that in as much as possible whatever you do passes unnoticed, in other words does not distract the reader from what you are actually communicating. Some contexts are more conservative and some more liberal than others, so its good to get a feel for your particular context as well. In some contexts using a generic masculine would destroy your credibility, in another using the generic feminine would do the same. (I was surprised to read an English translation of a relatively recent book by the Pope only to find that the term "mankind" was still being used where human kind or humanity has pretty much become the standard elsewhere). In each case you need to ask yourself whether you are willing to adjust your usage in such a way as to facilitate being able to successfully communicate what you want to say to a particular group of people in a particular context. This is why the "singular they" is quite useful, because it is not generally found distracting except for grammar snobs. But people who really know their grammar also know the difficulties involved in this particular case.