Facebook phases out singular "they"

Also, publishing alternatively-worded stories for genderless users is a little bit of a pain for third-party developers. Customizing gender in a feed story is as trivial as typing "<fb:pronoun uid=/user id/ [+ optionally possessive/reflexive/objective=true, depending on context] />", customizing stories based on gender or lack thereof is as nontrivial as 1) registering a feed template for the new form 2) making an API request for user's reported sex (or perhaps keeping information from an earlier profile info call) 3) selecting which template to populate and publish based on the results of that poll. Nothing outrageous, but potentially annoying for developers with many newsfeed integration points who want to adhere to first-party publishing standards.

Also also, [it's been a bit since I've taken linguistics courses, but] there are going to be situations in non-English languages where you simply cannot write a sentence without encoding some gender information, wherein reforming an item to be completely genderless (and grammatically not inelegant) wouldn't be possible.