The BBC reports (my emphasis):
A new law which will end discrimination against women in the line of succession to the British throne has been published. The Succession to the Crown Bill means the first child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will become monarch, whether they are a boy or girl.
I don't like it. I understand the reasoning behind it but it still jars. I am perfectly happy with they forms referring to pronouns such as anyone or someone, which are grammatically singular but imply a plural concept in meaning, but I feel that this is a bit too far. It has been common to use the pronoun it for babies and unborn children. I can't see that its use is any more illogical than they.
In English, words such as it and its genitive form its have been used to refer to human babies and animals, although with the passage of time this usage has come to be considered too impersonal in the case of babies, as it may be thought to demean a conscious being to the status of a mere object. This use of "it" is also criticized when used it as a rhetorical device to dehumanize their enemies, implying that they were little more than other animals. The word remains in common use however, and its use increases with the degree to which the speaker views an object of speech as impersonal. For example, someone else's dog is often referred to as "it", especially if the dog isn't known by the speaker, or if the dog's gender is unknown. A person would rarely say "it" when referring to his/her own cat or dog. Examples:
- The baby had its first apple.
- They are taking their dog to the vet, as they said it looked ill.
"It" is still used for idiomatic phrases such as Is it a boy or a girl? Once the gender of the child has been established, the speaker or writer then switches to gender-specific pronouns.
That seems fair in reference to a particular living baby that is know but often the sex of a stranger baby is difficult to determine and in the case of an unborn one may well be unknown.
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