Singular "They" is literally almost as old as the word "They" itself.

People have gotten by using it for almost 700 years.

’Them' doesn't really cut it as it's not clear if it's plural or singular.

Beyond the other reply about the history of the singular “they,” we also have another prominent plural pronoun we use in the singular all the time. So often we don’t even think about it as being plural anymore. So much so that we’ve created new plural versions of this already plural pronoun.

“You.”

“You” was originally the objective case plural 2nd person pronoun in English, with “ye” being the nominative.

But “thou” was considered informal, like the German “du” or the Spanish “tú,” and the plural 2nd person was used as the formal. And this eventually supplanted “thou” completely.

And now we think of “you” as singular to the point where we make slang words like “y’all” and “yous” to have a plural.

I'm a native English speaker and I've used "they" as a singular third person neutral pronoun since before I even knew anything about trans or nonbinary people. It's commonly accepted and not at all unusual usage, at least in American English where I grew up.

I'd be happy with 'xe' for gender neutral single-person pronoun. And for awhile I was using that from time to time - but because its rare and people aren't use to it, using it is a distraction from what you actually are trying to talk about. I've stopped using it because I don't really want to talk about it over and over. Sometimes people find it confusing. Sometime people are just curious. And some people find aggravating (because they don't like the idea of degendering or changing genders).

I do mean that we Finns use "se" very often in everyday speech to refer yo other human beings, and "se" would translate as "it."

Ofc I'm aware how horrible using "it" when referring yo people would be in English.

But if someone asked me to translate a sentence like "mihin se [a person] meni", I would ofc not use a direct translation because of how offensive and wrong it would be.

I respect the distinctions languages have for genders, but I'm happy I grew up with one which didn't have them. Language shapes thought. We don't think of people as "it", it's just the colloquial form of the language.

In Finnish, if you had to give a formal speech or something, most people realise to default to "hän", the 3rd person singular.

And if you're doing customer service or addressing someone with the sort of respect you'd use titles with in English. Then you'd address the person in the second person plural instead of the second person singular.

Just like English did hundreds of years ago, and it worked so well that in the end, English left the second person singular out of the language altogether. It still exists, but isn't really used unless thou wants to pretend being from Elizabethan Britain.

My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people we usually use the even more general one

The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.

Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:

• Antti sanoi, että se tulee. (Antti said that someone else will come.)
• Antti sanoi, että hän tulee. (Antti said that he himself will come.)