It certainly would. There have been numerous efforts to fix this defect of English. He-she and she-he, s/he and he/she and s/he/it are the least imaginative solutions. He/she, with a slash, is actually in the dictionary, dating to 1963. She/he is not; Webster’s goes straight from “Sheetrock” to “sheikh,” two potently masculine words. “She” contains “he,” just as “woman” contains “man,” but “he” doesn’t like that: “she” ain’t going nowhere without “he.” “Heesh” has the lovely property of looking as if it had been formed when “she” backed into “he” and spun around. It’s playful, as befits the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh and the sire of Christopher Robin.
The search has been on for a gender-neutral, or “epicene,” pronoun in America since about 1850, when someone thought ne, nis, nim would do the job. Alternatives come from all over the alphabet. Gathered together, they look a little like the periodic table of elements. Where there are too many choices, there is often no single good one, and that is the case with the suggestions for a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun. There is hse, which is splendid and economical—a minimalist acronym—but unpronounceable. There are also ip, ips (1884) and ha, hez, hem (1927) and shi, shis, shim (1934) and himorher (which threatens to develop into hemorrhoid) (1935). Someone suggested we borrow ta and ta-men from the Mandarin (yeah, like that’s going to happen). Shem and herm sound like Noah’s offspring; ho, hom, hos, if they ever had a chance, would have succumbed to the “ho” problem; se and hir are apparently used by an online group devoted to sexual bondage; ghach is Klingon. And the search goes on. How about mef (male e female?). Hu is for human, per for person, jee, jeir, jem for God knows what, but they would be useful in Scrabble. Ze and zon sound German. Most of the others sound intergalactic.
Mary Orovan, a feminist poet, suggested co, cos in 1970, specifically for use in, say, documents addressing human rights. (At a ceremony honoring Susan B. Anthony, Orovan feminized the sign of the cross: “In the name of the Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Granddaughter. Ah-women.” Holy Mother Church may be feminine, but she’s no feminist.) There is a scheme using e, em, and eir (1983), named for Michael Spivak. The Spivak pronouns build on the work of Christine M. Elverson, of Skokie, Illinois, who, in 1975, won a contest for best gender-neutral pronouns, run by a Chicago business organization. Her winning entry simply dropped the th from “they,” “them,” “their” to create ey, em, eir.
All these schemes are imposed. There is only one documented instance of a gender-neutral pronoun springing from actual speech, and that is “yo,” which “spontaneously appeared in Baltimore city schools in the early-to-mid 2000s.” “Peep yo” means “Get a load of her-or-him.” “Yo” also has the added advantage of already belonging to the language, so it may actually have a chance. The people of Baltimore have spoken.
Perhaps the most ambitious—and ridiculous—scheme was suggested in 2014 by a law professor named C. Marshall Thatcher, who set forth in great detail an argument for ee/eet. As English is continually evolving and expanding, he says, building his case, it should be able to accommodate something as desperately needed as pronouns “that refer . . . to antecedents of the male gender, the female gender, or the neuter gender.”
The grammarians would hop all over Thatcher before he even got started for confusing sex and gender: strictly speaking—very strictly speaking—the words “male” and “female” are nouns denoting sex, and “masculine” and “feminine” are adjectives meaning of or for men and women: feminine wiles, masculine bearing, etc. Furthermore, until recently “gender” was strictly a grammatical term. Fowler wrote, “To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine g., meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.”
Thatcher declines his novel pronoun, beginning with the nominative ee/eet (he or she/he, she, or it). For the possessive, he proposes hisers (rhymes with “scissors”). (“Example: When a divorce decree awards marital property to one of the spouses, the property becomes hisers.”) The objective (accusative) pronouns would be herim and herimt. (“ ‘Herim’ would rhyme with the first two syllables in the word ‘perimeter’ ”—sounds like someone clearing hisers throat.) For skeptics, Thatcher points out that the Swedes invented a gender-neutral pronoun (hen) to use in preschools, to free children from gender stereotypes. And look at the success of the honorific “Ms.,” he says.