The actual problem here is that English has become an essentially gender-free language, with its vestigial gender closely linked to sex. He doesn't necessarily

The actual problem here is that English has become an essentially gender-free language, with its vestigial gender closely linked to sex. He doesn't necessarily indicate a male person in English; it just usually does. (Sex and gender are not interchangeable terms. European languages tend to get hung up on masculine/feminine/neuter, but it could just as easily have been human/animal/food/etc., or long/flat/round/etc., as in other languages.) They, them and their are the closest thing we have to sex-neutral third-person pronouns (if one does not wish to engage in the grammatical acrobatics required to consistently use one), but then there's the prescriptivist idea that those pronouns can only be used as plural forms to deal with. (Shakespeare used them in the singular.)