I’ve referred to enby friends and fam using singular they/them for over twenty years. I support them. Do not leave, I’m not about to reinstate Monica.
And I know it’s really old.
One of my best friends (co-owner of this VPS♥︎) even wrote a paper on the awesomeness and legitimacy on singular they waaaay back in the day—when I was studying for my linguistics degree I was mindblown to see his paper in our syllabus.
And it is indeed awesome.
But it is sometimes difficult. It just is. Even for a hecking linguist and poet like yours truly.
“Jordan went to the store to pick up their order” can still be misread as “Jordan went to the store to pick up the gang’s order.”
Ambiguous sentence constructs happen all the time with he and she too. “Johnny went to the store to pick up his order” can be misread as picking up some other guy’s order. But not only is “their” applicable to more people, it is also (and this is the way worse part) ambiguous on how many people we’re talking about.
Now, I struggle with words like “we” too; does it mean me and you but not Johnny, or me and Johnny but not you, or all three of us?
And people comparing singular “they” to singular “you” are doing the concept a huge disservice since singular “you” absolutely sucks! The thou/you system was much better! Being L2 in my anglophony I don’t have any qualms at all writing “y’all” which is a comprehensive solution to all the problems with singular you, and I do that all the time, but I can totally see how people coming from e.g. California or the UK might hesitate and might feel like it’s appropriative.
There are ways to make the writing clearer. “Jordan went to the store to pick up their own order”, or even making sure to place a “Jordan has an awesome order” earlier in the text so the “their order” anaphoric phrase later on becomes less ambiguous.
And with time there might be more style guides and practical advice on how to use these pronouns more clearly and unambiguously.
But I’m really happy Swedish prescriptively canonized a neo.