Two reasons: first, it contributes to general presumptions of male-ness as the societal default and female-ness being out of place, and second, using either gen

Two reasons: first, it contributes to general presumptions of male-ness as the societal default and female-ness being out of place, and second, using either gender as the default in English just plain sounds weirder and more jarring than "they" in a variety of sentence constructions. For the second factor, the example sentence presented first in the original article: > She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes. ...sounds pretty jarring when you make it 'he'... > She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in his clothes.