Someone who, like me, is trying to eliminate gender-laden pronouns from their speech altogether can try to rely on the word "they", but they will find themself in quite a pickle as soon as they try to use any reflexive verbal construction such as "the writer will paint themselves into a corner", and what's worse is that no matter how hard this person tries, they'll find that they can't extricate themselves gracefully, and consequently he or she will just flail around, making his or her sentence so awkward that s/he wis/hes s/he had never become concious of these issues of sexism. Obviously, using "they" just carries you from the frying pan into the fire, as you have merely exchanged a male-female ambiguity for a singular-plural ambiguity. The only advantage to this ploy is, I suppose, that there is/are, to my knowledge, no group(s) actively struggling for equality between singular and plural.