It would be great if we had a gender neutral third person singular pronoun that didn't also coincide with the third person plural, maybe that will evolve.
I’m sure I read about ‘hem’ a long time ago, used especially for this purpose.
Yes, ‘they’ is often used to refer to an individual, but it’s usually when the person’s sex isn’t known, saying ‘he or she’ is a bit long-winded and is obviously much more polite than using ‘it’ when referring to a person (although some people do exactly that with babies, especially when they’re not yet born, which I personally hate). It’s not meant to be a judgement of your identity, just an accepted way of referring to somebody rather than using their name several times in a sentence.
As for the ‘raising a baby gender neutral’, you don’t raise a baby to have a gender – gender (for those who care one way or the other about it) refers to their identity as they grow older, which is their choice to make and not yours. You might as well say that you’re not raising them to be a teacher or accountant, to be single or married, or to live in a flat or a semi-detached house. If you have a baby and call her Emily, it’s your job to raise her to be Emily - as to who and what Emily will be and become is up to Emily herself as she lives her life.
I’m not a particular fan of Boy George (don’t dislike him), but I think he has it right. He is a ‘he’ because he is a male person with a male body, but he lives his life and wears clothes and make-up somewhat differently from the way that most male people do – but that’s OK and entirely his choice, as he is living his life as George O’Dowd/Boy George and other males are living their own lives as John, Tim, Rob or whoever they happen to be.
I realise that not everybody will agree with me, but I think that insisting on a pronoun that doesn’t fit your biological sex is actually self-limiting and giving pronouns a lot more importance in your life than they actually merit as a mundane grammatical part of verbal communication and nothing else.