People using 'they' to refer to any individual person is entirely new, as far as I know. Until quite recently, the options have been 'he', 'she' or 'he or she'.
There is quite a long history of using "they" when referring to an unknown person, though it was considered colloquial for most of that time. For example, in Shakespeare's
Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3, there's a "their" that matches up with "a man":
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend
So people online started saying "Shakespeare used singular they", sometimes mentioning
this blog post (
archive) by one of the authors of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Geoff Pullum, and saying things like "they is a gender neutral pronoun, don't use 'gender neutal he' or 'he or she'", in their old-fashioned feminist-pushed pre-troon pronoun sperging that the terfs now claim never existed and certainly didn't inspire the troons.
Then at some point "non-binaries" started promoting "they" for a definite person. Geoff Pullum ended up getting hoist by his own petard, getting into an argument online with a butthurt non-binary gayden PhD student. He started by writing that using
they to refer to a definite person was not grammatical (
archive) (even by the standards of descriptive linguistics, because it's a deliberate attempt to prescribe other people's grammar). The gayden (for it was she, see her
gayden glare), called him "
un-hip to the cool new language change in progress" (
archive) and said she would have filed a complaint against him if he had not called her a they "in a professional setting".
Now people are claiming the enby use of they always existed, using the Shakespeare example as a bluff. People are so browbeaten about grammar they aren't willing to stand up and argue against something that was totally unknown fifteen years ago, Eastasia was always at war with Oceania, etc.
Really, the existence of third genders are moreso evidence that homo/bisexuality and gender non-conformity have always existed, but that's one of the many things that troons seek to redefine and take away from gay people.
While some of them are names for what we might call gender non-conforming gay men, I have found another reason for these "third genders" while reading
an essay by the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton (and now you have to know about it too). That is, this third gender consisted of boys, chosen against their will, to be forced into sex slavery to a rich pederast:
"The most repugnant of all their practices is that of male concubinage. A Kadiak mother will select her handsomest and most promising boy, and dress and rear him as a girl, teaching him only domestic duties, keeping him at women s work, associating him with women and girls, in order to render his effeminacy complete. Arriving at the age of ten or fifteen years, he is married to some wealthy man who regards such a companion as a great acquisition. These male concubines are called Achnutschik or Schopans"
It really puts some perspective on the motivations of these people promoting "trans kids".
It's clearly something you receive with your troon starter pack, as uber cretin and utter failure Rhys McKinnon has also made this embarrassing non-argument in televised interviews.
Rhys actually had an academic career at some point, including a PhD thesis. In the abstract of
that thesis, he says:
Theres* a widespread conviction in the norms of assertion literature that an agents* asserting something false merits criticism. [...] Most writers on the topic have consequently proposed factive norms of assertion ones on which truth is a necessary condition for the proper performance of an assertion. However, I argue that this view is mistaken.
In other words, when Rhys is having a discussion, it's fine for him to say things that are blatantly false if he gets to "win" the argument. He even makes this into a game theory/gambling analogy later in the thesis. When Rhys says something, he doesn't give a shit whether it's true or false, he just wants to win. This "win at all costs, winning counts even if it's unfair and you cheat" mentality is the same thing that leads him to bicycle-race against women.
*The missing apostrophes are that way in the original. Maybe apostrophes are transphobic.
Sciences aren't actually socially constructed, even the social sciences. They're just manipulated and used by parties with vested interests because they're easily manipulatable.
The usefulness of "science" to these people is that it's hard to understand, so people get used to just accepting things without thinking to save mental effort (one can only expend so much in a given day, after all). For example, I don't understand how radio works (in proper detail). But I use it, so I've just learnt to put up with not knowing about it (maybe I'll understand it all the way from Maxwell's equations someday, but not any time soon - I've got a full-time job). For a lot of people, that's what "science" is, things you automatically believe in and have agreed to put up with not understanding because you just have to get through life.
This manipulation is similar to how troons use the notion of a "medical condition" and "healthcare" as well. People have to accept a doctor's expertise, so if they can get something considered a medical condition or healthcare people have to meekly accept it and ignore that it's something blatantly wrong.
(Edited to add archives of links)
