For a few years now I have been having this pet peeve of mine of some people out there being in this kind of quest to artificially force the use of the "they" pronoun as the gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun. Mostly my gripes have been about the youtuber and math popularizer Matt Parker, who contracted this disease some time in late 2019 and has never really stopped it (engaging in it sometimes to extreme egregious levels, sometimes to much lesser extents.)
Time and again when I think that I have seen the most egregious form of trying to push this "they-pronoun fetish", someone (Matt Parker or someone else) just succeeds in surpassing all previous expectations.
For example, when I thought that Matt Parker couldn't outperform himself in this front, he surprised me by using "they" to refer to a computer program (rather than the perfectly fine and correct "it").
But to surpass even that level of cringe, some time ago I watched a video which very subject matter is first, second and third person points of view, and the pronouns used in each case, and at no point in the 19-minute video are the words "he" or "she" (or any of their inflected forms) uttered. Not once. Moreover, the video outright states that a (singular) third person is referred to with the pronoun "they". Period. That's it. No other pronoun is mentioned, not at that point in the video, not anywhere else. It almost felt like the video creator was trying to erase the words "he" and "she" from existence.
Ok, surely it can't get worse than that? Surely those are the most egregious cases possible?
Well, once again I was wrong.
I recently saw a YouTube video of someone talking about some guy, and referring to him as "they". What's so egregious about this, by this point?
The fact that while the video author was referring to that guy as "they", the video was showing the Twitter profile of said person, and that profile listed the preferred pronouns of that person, and they were quite clearly "he/him".
I literally laughed out loud. Not even the very profile of the person being talked about very clearly listing his preferred pronouns, "he/him", was enough to have this youtuber use said pronouns to refer to him, instead using "they". Those preferred pronounce were even clearly shown in the video while the author was saying "they".
(From a leftist perspective, wouldn't that be offensive? The author was not using the person's preferred pronouns. But I suppose pushing the "they-pronoun agenda" is more important than their own principle of respecting people's pronouns...)
Every time I think I have seen it all, someone proves me wrong.
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