Here’s my rule: If the word ‘he’ will offend, then always use it

Isn’t it about time the English language got itself a gender-neutral pronoun? This was the clarion call from the Guardian last week — and when that particular clarion sounds, we must all stand to attention and cut out the sniggering. I assume the writer of the piece was moved to action having seen photographs of members of Isis pushing gay people from the tops of large buildings — and was deeply worried that each of the victims, tumbling to their deaths, might have been unhappy about being referred to as ‘he’ by wilfully unprogressive western journalists.

(Incidentally, with regard to these new acts of Islamist savagery, have you heard any complaints from the liberal left and the gay lobby — demands that something must be done, petitions, demonstrations, letters to the Times etc? Nope, me neither. The remarkable thing is that this viciousness from the dark ages has attracted no remarks at all from the bien-pensants. And yet tell them you’re thinking of going skiing in Sochi and they’ll be roused into a terrible fury, stamping their feet and gnashing their teeth, and Stephen Fry will come round to your house and cry in front of you, while gently stroking the floppy hair of his toyboy husband in a melancholic but consoling manner, and begging you, begging you, to go to Courcheval instead. But, hell, I digress.)

The gender-neutral pronoun is needed, we are told, for two reasons. First there are those among us, apparently, who do not consider themselves ‘he’ or ‘she’. As the Guardian writer put it: ‘There are people who self-define as neither, as gender-non-binary. To those who see gender as a construct, this makes perfect sense. But the English language fails to reflect it.’ Let me tell you, I have met people who say they see gender as the oppressive construct of a misogyn-istic society, and I have never got on with them terribly well.