Honestly I’ve done mostly forgot, and with the proliferation of AI technologies and all the typos AI has read from in the training models, I bet AI isn’t always right about this either.
I usually just don’t care anymore, whether the autocorrect puts the apostrophe in or not.
The obvious issue with ‘it’ as a pronoun for a person (or in my opinion a mammal or other sentient animal) is that it’s literally objectifying them: The main use of ‘it’ is for inanimate objects. Sometimes that’s used for effect, for example calling a pedophile an it. But unless you really dislike a person of nonspecific gender, just call them a them.
Them was originally intended as plural though. When did people decide to jank up the defined language? They/them/those are meant as plural.
And I might have made a subtle mistake earlier. He/she/it are pronouns, him/her/it as well.
His/hers/its are possessive pronouns. Can we try to stick to some sort of standard in the language, with clarity and without offense?
Singular ‘they’ is centuries old. Apparently even older than singular ‘you’. It’s only recently that people tried to make it a rule that it should only be used as a plural, but really it’s used in natural language as a singular all the time like I did. (Did you notice it in the middle of my previous comment, not just the end?)
You never used the word they, you used the word them multiple times though.
Care to compare and contrast the difference?
It’s the same word in a different grammatical situation.