He / She / They: it's madness!

Another year has passed since my last posting. I didn't expect to post again. But I feel compelled to write about the absurdity of gender-neutral writing.

I have been reading "Tasting Light", a collection of SF stories published in 2022. ISBN 978-1-5362-1938-8.

I found some of the stories interesting. For one thing, they were of Science Fiction instead of Fantasy, which nowadays pops up everywhere claiming to be SF.

But then, I started reading "The Cage", by E.C. Myers, and couldn't complete it. I found the use of "they" when it was clear that the subject was a boy too distracting. Here are some examples:

Still in bed, Nicky unlocked their phone [...]

Nicky was a boy, and "their phone" refers to Nicky's phone. Saying "their" in this context only slows down reading, and perhaps gives the idea that Nicky shared possession of the phone with somebody else.

Nicky was happy at the Freedom School. Something happened to them.

Saying "them" instead of "him" forces you to decide whether the authos is referring to Nicky or to the school. You have to read on in order to understand that the text actually refers to Nicky.

Nicky was up and showered by seven thirty, when they received a text message from Simon Shin: Are you sure you want to do this? Nicky responded five minutes later: No, but we're going to do it anyway.

So, "Nicky was" is OK, but "he received" had to be replaced with "they received". With all the pronoun replacement going on, I had to read the paragraph twice to realise that in this case, "we're" was not a replacement and actually referred to something they were planning to do together.

And, absurdly, the pronoun replacement was also used within dialogues:

Schuyler Montana: I have a lot of questions, but their mother and I [...][

Really? Can you imagine a father that says "they" instead of "he" when talking about his son? (or should I say "their son"?)

Anyhow, all these replacements took away from me any interest I might have had in the story. And, in any case, they are not applied consistently, which adds to the confusion. For eaxmple, in an officer's log, you find:

The subject paces in front of the structure, talking into his phone, gesturing wildly. He stops [...]

why not "their phone" and "They stop"?

The distinction between singular and plural pronouns is important. I am a man and will therefore never know what it means to be discriminated as a woman. I deeply respect women and will try to be gender-neutral when I will find it practical, but to twist the language to the point of making it difficult to understand goes too far.