I would just like to put my 2¢ into the indeterminate gender thing. I think alternating between ‘he’ and ‘she’ more or less at random through a text (I’ve been reading about babies and this is done A LOT in these texts) is both annoying and unnecessary. I’d be happy for indeterminate to default to feminine. If that doesn’t work, we could have a year on and a year off, so 2004 could be “she” and 2005 could be… no, wait that’s even more stupid.
Anyway, I’m sure there are good reasons for the practise, I just think the end result isn’t working…