Christen McCurdy isn’t convinced that epicenes – gender-neutral singular pronouns such as ou or ze – will catch on among English-speakers:
Linguist Denis Baron argues that pronouns are the most conservative part of speech in English, and that speakers are incredibly slow to adopt new ones broadly. The most recent one he counts is “its,” which appears in some of Shakespeare’s work (though Shakespeare uses other words, including “is,” to mean precisely the same thing), but not in the King James Bible. … If the first attempts at creating an epicene pronoun came from nitpicky writers and grammarians, it’s only been fairly recently – say, the 1950s and ’60s – that writers started proposing epicene pronouns as an argument for greater inclusiveness. Feminists trying to shift away from the generic “he” were among the first; transgender and genderqueer writers came later. Baron finds broad use of the Spivak pronouns – “e,” “eim,” and “eir,” coined by mathematician Michael Spivak – in transgender forums online and in science fiction, but hasn’t found an instance of a new epicene pronoun gaining traction in English.
The CW network has more faith that the epicene will emerge; it recently announced that its new drama about a transgender teenager would be titled Ze.
The Dish 