“I was with Dan (they/them) and Steve the other day. They hadn’t brought a poster they needed and went back to the car to get it.”
This demonstrates the semantic problem with using “they” as a pronoun: it isn’t clear who went back to the car, (1) just Dan or (2) both Dan and Steve. Nor is it clear who needed the poster and who hadn’t brought it.
You’re going out of your way to create a problem that doesn’t exist. Just Dan? Say Dan went back to the car. Both Dan and Steve? Say they both went back to the car.
If you just don’t respect people’s identity then admit you’re bigoted instead of hiding behind faulty logic.
You’re going out of your way to create a problem that doesn’t exist.
The problem does exist, that’s why you’re making suggestions about how to work around the problem. I’ve been confused before by people using “they” as a pronoun in exactly this sense. I’m not going out of my way to create a problem, it’s a problem that I’ve experienced IRL. Please don’t try to invalidate my experience.
If you just don’t respect people’s identity then admit you’re bigoted instead of hiding behind faulty logic.
You’re jump to conclusions.
It’s equally unclear if both Dan and Steve use “he”, it’s just the the options are “Dan / Steve” instead of “Dan / Dan and Steve”
I don’t understand what you’re trying to express. I can’t make sense of what you’ve written.
If the Dan in your example used he/him pronouns and so did Steve, then it is equally unclear
“I was with Dan (he/him) and Steve (he/him) the other day. He hadn’t brought a poster he needed and went back to the car to get it.”
There’s no way to know whether the “he” is Dan or Steve. The they/them pronoun isn’t the problem in your example, the structure of the sentence is.
If you’re with Dan (they/them) and Dan (he/him), you would also have the problem when saying
“I was with Dan and Dan the other day. Dan hadn’t brought the poster, so Dan went back to the car to get it.”
So to avoud confusion, people should not be allowed to be called Dan anymore. In fact everyone gets a UUID so there is no more confusion.
you would also have the problem when saying …
You would have a problem but it would not be the same problem as in my example. The problem here is not because of the choice of pronoun.
Well it kinda is. Pronouns are like names, in the sense that we use them to describe to whom we refer.
They are a non injective function on the name set.
The restriction you would like to make is that the function is not multivalued. But it is. As an example, Andrea is a name that is usually associated with a female person, but it is a normal name for male people in Italy.
We allowed people to be named whatever they wanted (or their parents wanted), so why not also let them choose whatever pronoun they prefer?