An Easy Solution

People on some campuses and a few other places have demanded replacing standard male and female English pronouns with a “gender neutral” substitute, often suggesting “ze” or “xe” as a replacement.  Others have found such monkeying with the language silly, offensive, or even subversive.  However there is a simple solution which should please all parties.  The English language already has a well established and  perfectly good gender neutral pronoun, the word “it”. Any man or woman who does not want to be referred to as a “he” or a “she” simply could announce that henceforth he or she wants  to be spoken and written of as an “it”.  That would achieve neutrality, and  the critics of this stuff likely would go along with such requests happily. None of this should be conflated in any way with Cousin Itt who is something else altogether.