In the controversy over Grantland contributor Caleb Hannan’s outing of transgender golf-putter inventor Essay Anne Vanderbilt, who committed suicide while the story was being reported, Hannan was also criticized for referring to Vanderbilt as "he" rather than "she" in a passage about her previous identity as Stephen Krol. As Grantland editor-in-chief Bill Simmons wrote in his apology, "Our lack of sophistication with transgender pronouns was so easily avoidable, it makes me want to punch through a wall." It also makes one wish English provided a way of avoiding mentioning Vanderbilt’s sex at all.

Many people have proposed all sorts of creative solutions to the problem, and, in fact, most of the world’s languages don’t have separate pronouns for males and females. Even in English, they already applies to both men and women. Yet to invent a new gender-neutral pronoun hoping for any change in English As She Is Spoke is a waste of energy, despite even the most enlightened of intentions.

Make no mistake: the current situation is lousy. The grand old idea was that he could stand for both women and men, but it never made much sense ("Sally prided himself on his penmanship"?), and studies prove what we all know: that he is readily interpreted as male. As early as the 1950s, when E.B. White was revising William Strunk’s The Elements of Style into the version we know today, White suggested avoiding the whole business by using plurals and other tricks, such as changing The writer must address his reader’s concerns to As a writer, you must address your readers’ concerns. Yet even he admitted that this might leave one’s prose “general and diffuse.”

And never mind the distracting alternation between he and she, which has been shown to come off to readers as favoring she—or the unpronounceable smudges s/he and he/she. This is where the idea comes in, so reasonable on its face, of a brand new pronoun that does the job of he and she both. Such as hesh—he plus she—or a 1970s attempt, co. The latest attempt is ze, proposed by LGBT people who seek a pronoun that doesn’t shore up conventional assumptions of gender identity.

Ze is a great idea in itself, but that it is too easily confusable with he in casual speech—The problem is ze doesn’t live close enough—is only the beginning of the problem. Ze, like co, hesh and thon (from “that one,” a nineteenth-century attempt), can’t truly catch on. In language there are open-class and closed-class words.