I am reminded by the ai unboxing challengs where part of the point was that any single trick that gets the job done can be guarded against but guarding against all stupid tricks is not about the tricks being particularly brilliant but just covering them all.
In millgrams experiment poeple are wiling to torture becuase a guy in a white jacket requested so. Here a person is ready to nuke the world because a accounts name incuded the word “admin”.
I think people often overestimate the cost of plurality ambiguity with singular “they”. Most people don’t even bat an eyelid at the “you” plurality ambiguity. One can imagine how people would react to somebody trying to reintroduce “thou” to make the plurality ambiguity go away. I would expect that people would find it bothersome with too little upside. Agreeing to a strict upgrade is easy but balancing tradeoffs is less straightforward. The situation could be that those that gender dysphoria touches care a lot and those that it doens’t don’t care. Then having a situation that overall or on average would be less harmful is blocked because some party would go from no harm to slight harm.
As a speaker of a native language that has only genderneutral pronouns and no gendered ones, I often stumble and misgender people out of disregard of that info because that is just not how referring works in my brain. I suspect that natives don’t have this property and the self-reports are about them.
For crime related stuff, there is atleast some specialised vocabulary that needs finer lines. I don’t know whether enliglish has it but, “astalo”, a thing that could be a melee weapon or a firearm, which has uses in that an investigator can communicate that an implement capable of “grievious bodily harm” is involved while still benefitting from people having additional detail on which specific kind of weapon is involved (“Did they find the pistol?” could out you for knowing a firearm is involved). Similarly, appearances are way more appropriate to define even if they cut close to ethnicities. In that sense it is way more justified to have corresponding thing going for sex and gender. So defaulting to “they” makes more sense and steering away from he as “assumed male might be either” is justified.
I would believe a competent laywer would object that “It is not prejudicial to refer with ‘he’ to a person in an event that in that event was gendered man.”. Referring to the party in the court room with such would be bad form, but in the past that is not so. The education cap between wittness and lawyer is addressed in that both sides are represented with a competent lawyer. The other side is oblicated to to counterobject. So its lawyer vs lawyer rather than vs wittness (and with sufficient gap in the skills of the laywers would be grounds to mistrial because of incompetent advocate).