Feminists

I work for the guvmint and I constantly have to deal with documents that have a note at the beginning that say, in English or French, that for ease of reading blah blah the masculine includes the feminine. No it doesn't.

The govt here had long had a policy of not using exclusionary pronouns generally in any of the various kinds of gazillions of documents it generates, and that led to various solutions: some situations of alternating between he and she in a text, a lot of "he or she", and so on. Then some time back, the federal govt began using the third person plural for the third person singular in legislation. "Where a person ..., they shall", like that. My pedantry (and knowledge that it was formally disapproved) had won out over that practice in the past, and I had always used "s/he" informally, and "he or she" formally. But I finally just made the decision that the grammatical rules weren't good enough anymore, and since nobody had come up with any better proposal ever, "they, them, their" it would be from now on. It was liberating.

It can create confusion occasionally, and sometimes I end up repeating the noun rather than using a pronoun, and I'm sure some people who aren't used to it aren't pleased. But you get used to it, and at least in my case I have precedent to cite: federal legislation; what better could one want?

Try it! And if any pedants say nay, tell them the Canadian government says otherwise.