Non-native English speaker here. I was appalled to learn that English conjugated for animacy, and could swear “it” was the gender-neutral pronoun because that’s what was used in Pokemon for example. I’m also not a fan of toggling conjugations mid-sentence, so I prefer to construct sentences with the plural “they”, the expression “that person”, or even the singular “one(self)”, whenever I can
Which is why I was appalled to learn it late in life that “it” was reserved exclusively to non-humans, for some reason that didn’t exist in my native Spanish. The rest of my explanation would be better written on a longer blog-post of mine.
Non-native English speaker here. I was appalled to learn that English conjugated for animacy, and could swear “it” was the gender-neutral pronoun because that’s what was used in Pokemon for example. I’m also not a fan of toggling conjugations mid-sentence, so I prefer to construct sentences with the plural “they”, the expression “that person”, or even the singular “one(self)”, whenever I can
It’s not. In academic writing the gender neutral is they/them.
Which is why I was appalled to learn it late in life that “it” was reserved exclusively to non-humans, for some reason that didn’t exist in my native Spanish. The rest of my explanation would be better written on a longer blog-post of mine.