Pronouns: singular they

Something I come up against quite frequently - for a variety of reasons - is people arguing about singular they. I find this frustrating and exhausting.

It irritates me in academic terms: for starters, deprecation of its use is a relatively modern phenomenon, has never been universal, and is inconsistent with usage of the pronoun you. More positively: they is simple, readily understood, and elegant - or at least no more inelegant than any other part of language.

For seconds, try this list of links:

• Wikipedia, of course, has a lot to say. Note particularly the section on usage.
  
• Language Log has a category on the subject [trigger warning for some of their case studies], including discussion of the circumstances under which it is inelegant.
  
• Everybody loves their Jane Austen: a history, with exmaples.
  
  
  ... but that is not all (said the Cat in the Hat...). This is personal, too. The issue of gender neutral language is a thorny one - in large part because large swathes of the population reject singular they out of hand. I don't feel any great need to rehash the usual arguments against the alternatives (you can find them by link-hopping from here, but there's an additional point that isn't often raised by style guides: "he or she" erases people of non-binary genders.
  
  This is the case whether using the pronouns in the generic sense or in reference to a particular person of unknown gender: specifying a set of genders in this context implies that all possible genders have been covered, which simply isn't true.
  
  
  So: this is why I prefer singular they for the generic - including over deliberately non-binary pronouns like the Spivak pronouns and the hir/zie set - and to some extent why I prefer it for myself: it's a blank slate. It makes no assumptions, about either the gender of the person to whom they refer, or about the range of possible genders. And, you know, that's cool with me.