I guess I agree it's a form of pedantry, but once you're a bit used to reading singular "they" (and it's hard to escape nowadays) you get used to it, and the op

I guess I agree it's a form of pedantry, but once you're a bit used to reading singular "they" (and it's hard to escape nowadays) you get used to it, and the opposite starts looking weird. Also, it's pedantry that seems to actually be socially beneficial: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/05/he-she-or-gender-neutral-pronouns-reduce-biases-study https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/05/he-she-or-ge... (I don't agree with everything being done for "gender-neutral language", especially in German. But this particular case is simple and useful enough in English.) For whatever it's worth, the reason this tripped me up here was that I had to read the original post several times because I thought that "he" was referring to the attacker (as in the featured article), not to the target. Re-reading it now I don't quite see why I was thinking that.