(no title)
jimsug | 6 years ago
[1] it was in use long before the prescriptivist grammar movement (yes, I know you've raised that this has shifted but I just wanted to highlight that this is not a novel use): https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/328b/81dbcbeba4bf5c7210de59...
[2] If the gender of the antecedent/referent is not known, using singular they/them speeds up comprehension. If gender is known, it slows it down compared to using the known gender pronoun: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293036/
[3] Some nice examples of less ambiguous referents: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1993.11...
To address your points, though:
1. Not sure where these passengers came from, but sure, if you can insert entities into the referent then any pronoun is potentially invalid.
2. Of course you can, but (a) context will fill in the gaps and (b) if that doesn't work, you can usually interrogate the author/speaker (and (c), if you can't interrogate the author/speaker, then yes, they've failed in their composition - but that doesn't necessarily mean that singular they/them is the problem, or is infeasible in all contexts.
3. Sure, there are many things that are acceptable colloquially and not professionally, and vice versa. Does writing on an internet forum fall more in line with formal or informal writing? I don't think it's clear.
4. See the above; sometimes it "confuses" people, sometimes it doesn't (and the unqualified assumption that it does is perhaps an indication that there's some motivated reasoning at play)
5. I don't myself have any issues with writing to avoid pronouns, however if you pointedly avoid pronouns with one person and then use them with another (let's say you use them with a cis-female and then avoid them with a non-binary person) that's not really welcoming or sensitive, and it seems apt to brand them as such. If you're avoiding pronouns equally in all situations, that's different. But if you're selectively avoiding pronouns where they don't line up with your personal viewpoints, then you might be seen as insensitive or hateful, and you might not be welcome everywhere. That's kind of how life is, and you just need to deal with it.
jimsug|6 years ago