There is a theme that keeps coming up in my research and conversations — people are really worried about whether some form of nonbinary language is efficient or optimal in some way.
I’ve seen a lot of stuff about this in discussions of English pronouns, but also a lot about languages like Spanish, French, and German: there’s this idea that nonbinary language needs to be just right.
For English pronouns, this results in sort of comical contradictions. I’ll sum up / paraphrase two types of really common comments I got in one of my recent large studies on English neopronouns: