You will brook no complaint from me on the first issue, and I will roll my eyes at the second, but the third? Oh, my friends. Let's journey back, to the time of Shakespeare and Quakers, to an explanation of why your—pardon me, thine—gatekeeping is wrongheaded and also spiritually impoverished.
First, a quick walk through the garden of pronouns as they exist today. When there's only one referent—the entity to which the pronoun is being applied—we call that singular; more than one, and it's plural. My grammar is a little rusty, but let's dive in anyway.
- I and we are both first-person pronouns, used when the speaker is referring to his or herself, or a group that he or she is part of. I go grocery shopping, we went to the Taylor Swift concert.
- You is a second-person pronoun, used when I am addressing someone directly. Have you had lunch?
- He and she are third-person pronouns, used to refer to another person not directly addressed; they does the same thing for a group. He eats a peach, they went camping.
But you wasn't always the only form of the second person. Anyone who's read any Shakespeare knows that those texts are littered with thou, thee, and thine: all singular forms of you. Thou art an idiot, pick up thine socks!
It's a little more complicated that just singular and plural. Royalty were routinely addressed as you (a construction that we still use today in "the royal we"), in order to demarcate the idea that royal people contained the multitudes of their countrymen, allowing that single person a plural pronoun. Over time, this pronoun trickled down to nobility and general fancy-pants people. Thou was used broadly for people on your own social level or below; those above would get addressed with ye or you. We still see this in other languages: French, for instance, has both tu and vous, used with social equals and authority figures, respectively. If a cop pulled you over in France, you'd best address that person as vous, but you'd call your wife or your co-workers tu. In olden times, you'd probably address the King/your priest/your lord as you, but call your kids and neighbours thou.
Over time, as English and American society (sort of) equalized, the boundaries between high-class and low- or service-class people blurred. People started using you to refer to their social equals, and that slowly become everyone—or it was impossible to tell, and you didn't want to insult someone by calling them thou when it should have been you. Thou stopped being relevant. This happened in the last 150 years; it's not ancient history. Your great-grandparents probably used thou and thee, especially if they were from the the outland parts of the British Isles.
Now, why do I bring this up? Because folks who insist that they can only be used to refer to groups, and not, say, trans or non-binary individuals? I spit in thine eye!
English has a rich and relatively recent history of sea change in pronoun usages, and one that was driven primarily by the desire to be connected and respectful. What better reason, then, to adopt they, as requested by some of the trans/NB community? If they word feels clunky in your mouth, that's fine: imagine how much out of practice you are with all the various verb tenses for thee and thou, and count your blessings. If you are going to be such a pedant about they, then I expect thou wilst fight the good fight to stamp out you usage, too.
Oh, not interested in doing that? Your bigotry is showing.
In all seriousness, this grammatical history lesson just goes to show that words only mean what we all agree they mean. Names are another area where people get their their noses out of joint when it comes to trans or enby folks, but accept it from cis people, who choose and change their own names all the damn time. Why readily accept the concept of a married name or nickname, but resist when someone renames themselves in a gender-affirming way? Oh, right: that bigotry again.
To be honest, I shouldn't need a whole blog post to explain why they and you and we are malleable. Just use the pronouns people want you to use! That spiritual impoverishment I mentioned before comes from the idea that rules are more important than people's feelings and emotional health; that the ability to be right and be a language cop comes at the expense of someone else's comfort, safety, and right to self-identify and self-determine.
In identity politics, there are lots of ways that rules are used to oppress. Grammar resists being enlisted in this particular project because those who try to deploy grammar in order to gatekeep gender identity and affirmation aren't doing so out of respect for the language—otherwise, they'd be all over the thees and thous. They're doing so out of discomfort with the actual living, breathing people who use they.
If you have the privilege of being called you instead of that low-down dirty thou, then extend that courtesy to those around you. Even if it feels clunky in the mouth, even if it's "wrong." You is "wrong," too: grammatically, of course, but also philosophically.
