Can you give an example of such utility? Frankly, I don't see it - in my opinion, the best options are either not having genderized pronouns at all (and that's the option I'd actually prefer), or expressing the whole range of identities with them. Going somewhere in the middle is nothing more than just asking for dissonance to happen, which isn't useful.

Sure, the current utility is that most people do currently comfortably fit into the binary. We should introduce language to account for people that don't, and if demographics shifted such that most people didn't feel like the current binary fit them then we should adjust, but currently the majority of the population is happily self identifying within the binary and it's a great shortcut for them to communicate some assumptions about their identity. Only assumptions, not hard rules, but there's still utility in that.

It's true that most people fit into binary, but I don't really see how that's relevant.

1) If we assume that it's essential to genderize pronouns, it doesn't really matter what the majority fits into because existence of other options does not influence that majority at all. The only case where it matters is when someone doesn't fit. The utility remains unaffected (in fact, it actually is increased because of better expressivity).

2) If we assume that it's not necessary to genderize pronouns, then it may be argued that we're losing some information that the vast majority of people was comfortably fitting into - but I don't really understand why do we actually need that information. When I refer to other people, it's extremely rare that I do it in a context that requires me to mention their gender identity (or even what do they have between their legs). In those rare cases where it's actually relevant, I wouldn't mind having to express it explicitly at all, so overall the utility seems dubious.

> It's true that most people fit into binary, but I don't really see how that's relevant.

It's relevant because it's efficient more than 99% of the time and removing it introduces ambiguity 99% of the time. The person you're responding to even said they didn't have a problem with adding more pronouns, just not making it worse by removing them.

> and removing it introduces ambiguity 99% of the time

My whole point 2) was about how it does not (most of the time it just removes irrelevant noise), so I'd appreciate a counterexample.

Your second point is wrong. Obviously it narrows specificity by half the room on average. I don't know why you'd argue against that obvious fact. It's basic math: If you have a set C that is the union of two sets A and B where A and B have the same cardinality, referring to "a C" gives you twice the possibilities than referring to either "an A" or "a B." So it's measurably twice as efficient to do the former. Since so many unrelated languages in the world ended up with such a system (or very close), it's reasonable to think that that efficiency was worth it. Since most of those systems are not much more specific, it's reasonable to think that being more specific wasn't worth it (one can always specify further using more words.)

Of course it narrows down specificity. My point is that in today's society, it seems mostly useless to me. Most of the time I don't need to narrow it down this way at all. This may have been different in a world where people were segregated by sex so intensively that half of the population didn't even have the right to vote, but today I fail to see the usefulness of it.

> but today I fail to see the usefulness of it.

Then you fail to see the usefulness of specificity and efficiency in speech, which is both weird and explains why it took you so many words to say that.

If I'll want to refer to you and this conversation when talking to someone else, I don't need to refer to your gender at all. Just like I don't need to refer to your race, your social class or color of your hair. Stopping to consider whether I should use "he" or "she" (or maybe something else) is the exact opposite of efficiency in speech.

It seems to me that it's actually you who misunderstands the usefulness of specificity. It's not useful to be overspecific.

Obviously it depends on your goals and the context. Both specificity and generality are useful. To ban one is foolishness. They coalesced into short words for a reason: people use them, a lot.

We can exchange truisms all day ;) But that doesn't change the fact that in my experience specificity related to gender pronouns is needed (or even helpful) only in a very tiny minority of everyday contexts.

For the record, my native tongue is much more gendered than English (it has gendered nouns, verbs and adjectives; not just pronouns) - I don't understand how it's useful at all, I don't miss it in English.

I think you're underselling the importance people find in their gender.

Personally I agree, for me gender holds little importance, if I'm being most true to myself I identify as non binary simply because I don't really identify with a gendered label. That motivation has also lead me to being ok with being gendered male, because it just doesn't matter to me.

I understand I need to look outside of my own experience to see the importance people place on gender though. You can say all you want that most people don't care, but I feel if you misgender people, a lot of them would be very upset. Trans people are very vulnerable to suicide because of this, to diminish the importance of gender (this includes the binary, of which many trans people want to fit into) to these people is to be at best lacking in empathy.

Now if you're approaching this from a gender abolitionist angle where you believe all this attachment to gender is socialized and that we should push to de-emphasize genders role in society, then I believe that's a far more defensible position, but I feel you need to at least recognize the importance gender has to people today (socialized or not) if you're to have any hope in bridging that gap with people.

To the contrary, I believe that people's gender is usually extremely important to them. What I find less important is having to specify their gender whenever I'm talking about them just because of language constructs. In English it isn't actually that bad, since it's limited to using correct pronouns; but in some other languages I have to be careful to not misgender anyone pretty much whenever I talk about them or to them - regardless of whether their gender is relevant to what I'm saying or not.

So I'm only a grammatical gender abolitionist :) I don't see the point of gendering people when I talk about them unless I talk specifically about their gender. As a happy side effect, this would also massively reduce the risk of accidentally misgendering someone.