&gt; I don&#x27;t think you have to be PC to balk at the use of &quot;he&quot; for the ambiguous case.<p>You&#x27;re right.  When I was a kid, I&#x27;d go with &quot;they&quot; for both ambiguous and the generic case, simply because it&#x27;s illogical to have an arbitrary assumption, which is maybe a post-hoc justification that I made as a teenager.  Eventually I ended up trying to train myself to use &quot;he&quot; in the generic case, because it seemed to me like my habit was just super-semantic nerdiness.  But for the ambiguous case, if it&#x27;s talking about a specific person, but whose sex you don&#x27;t know, it&#x27;d still be very weird to not use &quot;they&quot;.