While I don’t object to the overall statement that gender pronouns are likely to be net harmful, I do find sentences without them a lot harder to read, and the switching cost has proven to be quite significant to me (i.e. I think it takes me about twice as much time to parse a sentence with non-standard pronouns, and I don’t think I have any levers of changing that faster than just getting used to it, and in the absence of widespread consensus on a specific alternative I expect that cost to mostly just continue accruing because I can’t ever get used to just a small subset of non-standard pronouns).
Depending on your values it might still be worth it for you to use them, but I do think it roughly doubles the cost of reading something (relatively short) for me. I am much more used to singular “they” so if you use that, I expect the cost to be more like 1.2 or, which seems much less bad.
Off topic but… Is there something I don’t know about Einstein’s preferred pronouns? Did he prefer ey and eir over he and him?
Oh, I just use the pronoun “ey” for everyone. IMO the entire concept of gendered pronouns is net harmful.
While I don’t object to the overall statement that gender pronouns are likely to be net harmful, I do find sentences without them a lot harder to read, and the switching cost has proven to be quite significant to me (i.e. I think it takes me about twice as much time to parse a sentence with non-standard pronouns, and I don’t think I have any levers of changing that faster than just getting used to it, and in the absence of widespread consensus on a specific alternative I expect that cost to mostly just continue accruing because I can’t ever get used to just a small subset of non-standard pronouns).
Depending on your values it might still be worth it for you to use them, but I do think it roughly doubles the cost of reading something (relatively short) for me. I am much more used to singular “they” so if you use that, I expect the cost to be more like 1.2 or, which seems much less bad.