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I've also added She and It as gender neutral pronouns.
Gender neutral she is very common in American academic writing. I've been encountering it for years while reading journal articles in philosophy, for example.
However, as an Australian, I'm aware of a usage of she with a much longer history in colloquial speech -- "She's a beauty!" This has nothing to do with sex, gender or even animate or personal. She's a beauty and many very common and similar expressions can be applied to gold nuggets, cricket balls, the weather, houses, cars... In fact, a very Australian response to "How do you do?" is to take it literally, and reply you are as well as it is possible to be -- She's a beauty! Ergo, she is a gender neutral pronoun, in some of her usages. ;)
Gender neutral it raises the implicit assumption that we are talking of personal third person forms, which would normally rule it out (sorry about that one). However, Is it a boy or a girl? is a question that has been asked on at least number-of-native-English-speakers times circa-half-a-dozen occasions. Surely this is enough to demonstrate that it too has a fine tradition of gender-neutral usage.
I will include these in the relevant articles, so the justification for their existence on the template is explicit to readers. G'day to y'all! Alastair Haines05:05, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]