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She did her best ok?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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We referring to teachers as "it" now?
Damn. Underpaid and dehumanized all at once. That's gotta be rough.
As a non-native speaker, referring to a single teacher as "they" is not very intuitive (although correct)...
Yes it is. It's completely intuitive. Native English speakers do it all the time every day. The singular "they" is used literally without conscious thought. The only time it becomes controversial is with transphobes talking about specific people who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. Even transphobes use singular "they" without thinking in contexts like this OP where the gender is unknown. (Which is why their "but it's bad grammar!" arguments fall flat.)
I'd say what's intuitive is very subjective. Most of a language tends to be intuitive to its native speakers, no matter how unintuitive it seems to someone else.
To me the intuitive genderless option for "he/she" would be "it". Coming from Finnish, it seems much more natural to have "it" include people instead of using "they" for both singular and plural. Or if using "they", it would feel intuitive to say "they is" instead of "they are".