They/them pronouns in primary school workbooks

But, whatever age you are, you still don't magically know in many scenarios whether 'they' refers to one person or more than one.

Whatever is the point in deciding that your language is just too precise, so we must therefore make a concerted effort - starting with the youngsters - to deliberately make it more ambiguous and liable to confusion?

Exactly. Thank you.
For example:
Someone HAS left their coat behind. I hope they ARE going to come back for it.

Clearly singular throughout. Denying the use of singular they is obtuse. English is nuanced, you can switch grammatical conventions easily and fluently. Even young children.

Themself is also a perfectly acceptable use of English. The OED gives a very clear example: "the casual observer might easily think themself back in 1945".

Yes, because in English we use singular 'they' to denote a person whose name and sex we don't know. It carries more information, not less: I don't yet know who this person is.

RP is a form of pronunciation rather than grammar, but
RP speakers do use they in this way sometimes. It is perfectly correct.

I don’t really think it comes across well in the context of the book the OP is reviewing though.

They singular is perfectly fine grammatically.

This sentence that you've quoted however is so clumsy and far from natural.

Stevie likes their favourite subject at school which is science. They're really good at it.

Even if you change it to "Stevie likes his favourite subject at school which is science. He's really good at it." It's still a really badly written sentence. If it was written by an EAL learner I'd help them to correct it to flow better e.g "Stevie's favourite subject at school is science, they're/he's really good at it".

I'd be more concerned about the writer's lack of sense of flow in written English than use of they-singular.

OK, so why the made-up themself, then? The extant word is themselves.

And why make it so difficult to tell which 'them' snubbed the other 'them' - the single or the group?

As if fronted adverbials we’re not enough.

I’ve had this argument a lot on here including earlier today, but here goes again.

In many dialects in the UK, “they” is a perfectly grammatically correct pronoun for singular people where the sex either isn’t known, or doesn’t matter. This isn’t a new thing, or anything to do with non-binary people - my grandmother was born in 1913 and used that construction all her life (as do I, and everyone else I grew up with).

Just because you aren’t aware of it doesn’t mean it isn’t an established construction. It is grammatically correct within the dialect - we don’t all speak RP.

Finland have gender neutral pronouns. Han. People know who they’re talking about.

Perhaps it would cause a lot fewer problems here if we did too. Maybe that is a sensible way of doing things. Language evolves.

The pronoun matches the verb: they have.

Question for all you "singular they" fans - does this mean you're comfortable with They is going to school and They has seen their friend?

Or are we to pluralise everything, so They have seen their friends, but they didn't say hello? They don't know what to make of this. Who's being snubbed here?

There are two characters who are twins

I think using they/them as pronouns for individuals, given the individuals in this case are twins - so truly in a state of being they/them often enough - makes this book stupidly, and ridiculously confusing given the age it is supposed to be for.

Then it is adult political indoctrination in gender identity theory. Isn’t that supposed to be against guidelines?

If DS brought this home I would assume it was written by someone whose first language was not English. I would send it back to school with corrections.

Yes lots of things can maybe be perceived as 'clunky' when we're looking at it in direct translations. Words are not islands, and I find it so interesting how languages develop and change over time.

As you say, changes to language are easier for younger people to get used to. Much like younger people speaking English in the UK don't seem to have the same issues with pronouns at the same rate as their elders.

But WHY do we assume that a boy simply won't be able to enjoy or grasp the story if the main character happens to be a girl, or vice versa?

If, for some reason, a child is only able to relate to characters of their own sex, make the character one or the other (by all means keeping unisex/ambiguous names) and then the adult reading it to a little one can easily adapt it.

Do you know what a tiny percentage of people in the world identify as 'they' compared to those who are 'he' or 'she'? Why choose the teeny-weeny minority one as the default - especially when doing so necessarily introduces confusion and a lack of clarity in understanding (e.g. is 'they' referring to both twins or just one?)?

Take dolls for example. Historically, in the UK at least, dolls were always white, which naturally made black and Asian children sad and puzzled as to why they never saw a doll - a toy modelled simply on a human form - that was the same colour as them. The obvious solution was that you can now buy dolls approximating to all different racial colours. This doesn't mean that a child can only have dolls that are the same colour as they are, but a variety reflecting human norms is now available and many children will have several different dolls.

Referring to every character in a story as 'they' is the equivalent of making every single doll bright blue - so that no child can ever see one that remotely resembles their own colour - and thus considering it a universally appropriate solution!

The things is, though, that different constituent grammatical parts of a language don't grow in a vacuum.

We could just as easily tell the Germans that they only need one form of the word 'the', regardless of noun gender or case - but it would be a touch arrogant and, I'm sure, extremely weird for all but the very youngest to get used to.

Then again (not just wanting to pick on German as all languages have their quirks), but where something isn't quite as precise and unambiguous as it maybe could be, people naturally find ways around it which can sound a little clunky. For example, 'Freund' means a friend who happens to be male and 'Freundin' a friend who happens to be female - but because there's also a strong interpretation of the words likely meaning (romantic) boyfriend or girlfriend, if you're wanting to indicate a standard (non-romantic) friend, you have to say 'a (male or female) friend of mine' so that others understand you properly.

Away with your sensible reasoning, this is clearly propaganda from an evil cult don't you know.

Stevie likes chatting to their friends at school about their weekend

I would initially (and on second reading) expect this to mean that Stevie chatted about the friends' weekend. Well done Stevie.

But that is the opposite of what the text is trying to convey, so it's badly written. Even if wedded to ungendered pronouns, you could go with 'Stevie likes chatting about their weekend to friends at school', which is less likely to be interpreted as the friends' weekend.

In my mother's dialect (Philippines) we only use gender neutral pronouns. So only 'they/them/theirs'. There are of course words for man/woman/boy/girl etc, so using they/them isn't confusing for me. Maybe soon it will be the same in English. Can't see the problem tbh, we always know who we're talking about 😆

Stevie does things that might confuse people. They need to explain it's how they express themself.

Even when using 'they' for a single person of as-yet unknown sex, I've never heard of 'themself'.

Am I understanding this correctly? Are they claiming to be trying to help children to avoid confusion by teaching them in a deliberately unnecessarily confusing way? If so, people might be interested in my phone hotline which gives you valuable tips to avoid getting scammed - it costs £500 per minute to call

I do think it's sad if there's a perceived need to change the characters' sex(es), depending on the age of the children. It's one of the most basic facts in the world for children to learn: that there are boys and there are girls - and it really doesn't matter if the character(s) in a book has the same sex as you do, or indeed whether the author happens to be your own sex or the opposite one.

A good story is a good story regardless of the main protagonist's sex - and that really shouldn't be the only important or most interesting fact about the character.

You clearly don’t know what ‘norm’ means in any sense of the word statistically, factually, biologically, socially, legally… so on snd so on. 🙄

‘They’ in my mind is plural. It’s not a term you use for one person.

This doesn’t sound grammatically correct to me. I don’t know factually whether it is or isn’t but it sounds odd and not correct to my instinct ear.. I don’t know about ND children particularly but I still think we can use pronouns he/her in primary school or the world might go even more mad. I’d be saying it’s not really appropriate or accurate enough if I was in your shoes op

They are more hung up on norms than "binary" people! You can be a boy or a girl and dress/act however you like. By claiming you're "non binary" and "not like other people" you're reinforcing the very stereotypes you claim to despise.

Kids need to learn about he and she, and I'd go back and ask for one character of each sex.

It's pushing a belief system that not everyone subscribes to. If my autistic child was given a workbook like that I would not be happy. You can learn about others beliefs and learn to be respectful and fair without forcefully making children adopt those beliefs.

My daughter actually had an English workbook and within the definitions of proper nouns and common nouns was a section on pronouns with they not in the plural stated as fact. I was not happy. Teach some people use it that way of course but do not teach my children an ideology I do not consent to and consider incredibly harmful to women and girls