To find the endless gender neutral attempts in posts annoying?

[TiredButDancing]

I know I'm probably going to be flamed for this but my word, it annoys me. "My DP said they didn't know what they wanted for dinner and now they're annoyed because I made spaghetti. AIBU?"

What is this trend? Do they really think it's a)not immediately obvious it's a man b) that it really matters? Do people ever speak like this in real life?

I talk about "dp" or "oh" as we are not married and they are my partner. Nothing to do (in my case certainly) not wanting to disclose their sex.

I'd write DP because he's not a DH.

I assumed the same of others.

I really couldn't bring myself to care about this.

I've always thought people do it because they don't want the responses to be swayed either way depending on the sex/gender/whatever of the person they're talking about. They are looking for an impartial response based on facts rather than bias.

People also do it with relation to their children to maintain anonymity if people were to do an advanced search on previous posts.

I was going to say the same thing 😂 I'm not married and I am not giving him that name until he puts a ring on it! So he's partner/dp/oh until then haha!

Yanbu but it is interesting to watch what happens when people assume the poster or the person they are posting about is one sex and it's later revealed they are the other.

They always fuck it up anyway

That's kind of what I thought. You couldn't possibly be He/Her or She/them because that would be incomprehensible in a conversation. He/Him is still one pronouns as is She/Her.

‘They’ has been used as a singular pronoun for hundreds of years - first written example is from the 1300s I think, which indicates that it would have been used verbally long before that. Nothing to do with gender neutrality - it’s just an informal way that people have spoken for centuries. I remember a whole lecture on it when I was studying linguistics at university, and that was nearly 30 years ago.

It’s only recently that people have started to notice and get stroppy about it, I assume because they’ve now realised it’s also considerate and helpful to a particular group of people to whom they don’t want to be considerate or helpful, for some reason.