Matt Parker is a lost cause

I have written quite many blog posts about this particular subject, but here's a summary if you haven't read them:

Matt Parker is a very popular math popularizer on YouTube (with over 1.2 million subscribers, which makes him one of the biggest if not the biggest youtuber of this kind). I have been following his channel for quite a long time (over ten years now) and have always been a big fan.

It became quite a pet peeve of mine, however, when some time in the latter half of 2019 Matt started some kind of personal campaign of trying to make the "they" pronoun the universal "gender-neutral" third-person singular pronoun. I indeed checked when this change happened, and it was around that time: Prior to late 2019 he pretty much never used "they" to refer to a single person, and there are countless examples of him using "he" and "she" without any problems.

Then, some time in late 2019 not only did he suddenly and completely change this, but he became extremely obnoxious about it. Not only did he try to replace every single use of the third-person singular pronoun with "they" (although in a couple of his first such videos he clearly sometimes slipped up and accidentally used "he" instead), but moreover in many videos he actually used the pronoun more frequently than would have been necessary.

For example, instead of saying something like "then they went away and thought about it for a long time, and came with a new idea", he would instead say "then they went away and they thought about it for a long time, and they came with a new idea".

I have no idea why he started this campaign. My guess is that some far leftist activist, or activists, convinced him to do so. Maybe he attended some speech or presentation by such an activist, or maybe he had a talk with some activist friend, or perhaps he watched some YouTube video about the subject, and for some reason got convinced. If I had to guess, I would guess that he participated in a talk or presentation about the subject at some random math conference, university campus event, or similar. Watching his video history, however, is quite clear that the change was sudden and total: Pretty much overnight he went from using normal pronouns to using exclusively "they", just like that (other than a few slip-ups in a few of his first videos when the change happened.) It's very clear that something, or someone, convinced him to start this all of a sudden.

Every time he would refer to a single person as "they" it was very cringe. However, one particular instance genuinely angered me, and that's when he referred to Albert Einstein as "they". If I had been there with him, I would have angrily told him "that's Professor Einstein to you, asshole!" I don't know why that particular instance angered me so much, but it just felt so obnoxious.

It may well be because I have always felt that referring to someone as "they" is dehumanizing. Using "he" or "she" feels more personal, while "they" feels more distant, and not in a good way. It feels like rather than referring to a particular person, he is referring to some nebulous unknown "they". And that's not even to talk about the fact that "they" is inherently plural, so it's outright grammatically incorrect to use it to refer to one single person.

I am more willing to forgive the use of the pronoun when talking about a person whose gender is unknown, such as an anonymous person online. It still doesn't sound very good, nor is it grammatically correct, but I am willing to give it a pass. However, it feels extremely obnoxious when referring to a known person with that pronoun.

For something like a year he was very obnoxious about it, littering his videos with the use of that pronoun.

However, after a year or two of this something changed again, perhaps a bit more gradually. I noticed that he wasn't littering his videos with the pronoun so much anymore. He didn't stop completely using it to refer to a single person, but it almost felt like he was half-avoiding using it unnecessarily, even going so far as repeatedly using the person's name rather than using the pronoun. He would often refer to the person by name three or four times over the course of just a few minutes, when a pronoun would have sufficed just as well. I don't know if he was trying to avoid over-use of "they" and instead preferring to use the person's name, but it felt like it.

And, perhaps quite unusually, some years later he actually occasionally referred to a particular person, especially if a friend, as "he" or "she". Very, very occasionally, but it did happen a few times. For a time I was actually hopeful that he was actually abandoning this campaign of his.

But no. As hopeful as I was sometimes, that never happened. He still, to this day, is using "they" to refer to a single person.

One of the most cringe examples of this was when he referred to an AI bot as "they" (when there's already an existing perfectly acceptable pronoun to refer to a computer program: "it".) In a different video Matt is talking with a historian, and they are talking about some guy from thousands of years ago: The historian keeps referring to the guy as "he", while Matt keeps referring to the guy as "they". The contrast is very cringe.

But yeah, even in his latest video as of writing this he's still using "they" to refer to a single person, even when referring to a known named person.

After over five years of him doing this, and showing no signs of stopping, I think it's pretty safe to say that he's a lost cause. By this point he has trained and conditioned himself so deeply, so profoundly, to use that pronoun that it has probably become deeply ingrained into his brain, so it's extremely unlikely that he'll ever change back. Any hope that he will stop being cringe in this regard, any hope that he'll stop dehumanizing people by using that pronoun, is naive. It's clear he isn't going to stop.

Even then, I myself am showing enough respect towards him that I'm still using "he" to refer to him. I see that as a show of respect. I'm not going to dehumanize him by referring to him as "they".