Pronouns???

[Kolsykol]

The funny thing is that in Sweden we've had a more specific gender neutral term since forever, but no one except for basically one newspaper who wants to sound progressive ever use it.
And it gets pretty ridiculous at times because they even use it when describing the perpetrator of a crime that the police are looking for and they know the gender.
They just REALLY insist on ALWAYS using it.

I think that '' they '' is a bit different, it never made sense as a gender neutral pronoun to me because it's used more like '' someone ''.
In Swedish the gender neutral pronoun is '' hen '', han ( him ), hon ( her ), hen ( gender neutral ).
That is the actual purpose of it.
They = de/ dom, it's used the same way as in English but doesn't make any sense to use as a gender neutral pronoun.

English isn't my first language and I dunno the history of it, but I somewhat doubt that '' they '' was actually used as a gender neutral pronoun?
By that same logic '' someone '' is the same because it's not directly gendering.
But the point of it isn't to be gender neutral and using it that way can just end up being confusing.

Whenever someone refers to themselves as '' they '' my first thought is always '' who? ''.
It sounds like you're talking about someone else or about yourself in third person.
Which wasn't uncommon either and I think had more to do with the old usage of it.

Especially considering that we're talking about people with even more rigid gender norms, I have a hard time believing they were using the term in a gender neutral fashion.