Better use "presenter" just to be safe.
The female counterpart is hostess.
It's mostly pandering to individuals with an inflated sense of self importance (everybody change the language to cater for our particular use case and "offence"), and it's disgraceful and hypocritical because it leverages previous generations fights for actual discrimination and intolerance (e.g. against gays and lesbians) by taking to extremes from people that have it too easy today (or don't even belong to said minorities, but just "fight the good fight" in their name).
For centuries, "they" has been plural and "he" has been used for gender-neutral singular third-person.
Now, some find that situation unacceptable and are trying to make everyone else change the way they speak and write.
1. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200700 Pastebin link for non-subscribers: http://pastebin.com/kZFpdTnV
"He" has been the _proper_ usage way back from its roots at the German "er", which has the same usage.
"Man" or "one" (German, "Mann" or "man") has been used in the indefinate case.
We are not talking about grammatical errors here. You're free to declare great speakers and writers through the centuries to be in error, but what are you even claiming at that point? You could declare that saying the word "bread" is a mistake and it would be just as meaningless.
As with most arguments against the singular "they", your argument from German etymology also precludes the singular "you". Do you say "thou" all the time?
> Do you say "thou" all the time?
"You" was not only the plural second-person but also the formal singular second-person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction#Englis...) -- similar to German "sie" and "Sie". So it was always correct.
Anyway, I'm sure the PC crowd will win. It's just an (in this case, innocuous) example how systemically they can change they way we speak and communicate.
The singular "they" has existed throughout modern English. Getting rid of it is an insurmountably awkward and drastic change. People have tried, and they can't even remove it from their own speech.
The generic "he" is a relatively newer affectation that has risen and fallen in popularity in formal writing. I guess you can find a "PC crowd" to blame for its current decline, but this decline supposedly started around the 1960s, so you're not really observing anything new.
The only thing that's recent is (as EdiX pointed out) that there are people speaking out to say that they, as individuals, would prefer to be referred to with the singular "they".
But both "y'all" and singular "they" usage has always been informal, and inappropriate/ungrammatical for more proper contexts, which should instead have the more formal, traditional equivalents.
> ...it has become common in speech and in informal writing to substitute the third-person plural pronouns they, them, their, and themselves, and the nonstandard singular themself. While this usage is accepted in casual context, it is still considered ungrammatical in formal writing.
- Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition
You probably use it daily without noticing.
It is at least a reasonable claim that could be investigated further, as opposed to the claim that singular "they" is always an error, which any corpus will show is false.
That's possible but I've never seen any historical example of this nor I have seen anyone do it (outside of a specific subculture) so I don't think it's true: after all it's usually easy to deduce the gender of someone you haven't met from their name and if you get it wrong nobody (outside of that same specific subculture) will get really angry because of that.
Do you remember flight stewards before they became attendants?
"terminology sensitivity"
"host may be insensitive, use presenter, entertainer instead"
"disabled may be insensitive, use turned off, person with a disability, people with disabilities instead"
"psychotic may be insensitive, use person with a psychotic condition, person with psychosis instead"
F--- that.
You guys are psychotic....er, people with psychosis.