Agree about it being annoying for native English speakers as well, but I don&#x27;t think you have to be PC to balk at the use of &quot;he&quot; for the ambiguous case.  Brains work by association, and forcing &quot;he&quot; to do double-duty is simply confusing.<p>For example, let&#x27;s say you tell a story and refer to a generic surgeon as &quot;he&quot;, when some patient&#x27;s father is known to be far away.  Later, you have the surgeon saying &quot;I can&#x27;t operate on this patient; he&#x27;s my son!&quot;  People will feel deceived if it turns out the surgeon was a woman after you used &quot;he&quot; to refer to her, and no amount of lecturing about how &quot;&#x27;he&#x27; is a perfectly fine for ambiguous cases&quot; is going to change this.<p>Btw, Douglas Hofstadter (somewhere in <i>Metamagical Themas</i>) made a great point that the use of &quot;they&quot; vs &quot;he&quot; for the generic singular being an issue of whether people are more offended at being called a man when a woman or multiple when singular.  There are fewer interest groups looking out for the latter...