I NEED A HERO! best healer singer ever!

Actually Dawn, it kind of annoys me as a girl. I'm a bit sick of people perpetuating the stereotype of "boys tank, girls heal". Just my two copper.

Hell, I figured that Dawn was using feminine pronouns because she herself is female. A little bit of projection in one's writing is perfectly acceptable in my opinion.

I usually refer to the general player as he or him, both in game and out. When have to refer to another player in the third person, and I am not sure of the gender, I will usually use masculine pronouns. That's not because I view it as a "neutral, non-confrontational" pronoun but simply because, well, most players are male. That's just a fact.

I agree that it's awkward to say they or their, English doesn't leave us much choice. I just see it as a bit annoying to see yet another healing column written as though women are the healers. Women heal, men tank. When I heal my female characters are usually referred to as "she," when I'm tanking on a female char I always get "he". It's irksome, but it's probably just a personal pet peeve, and I can understand that it's just as much a personal pet peeve to you to constantly see "he".

There really isn't a good solution to all of this, and mixing it up is probably the best you can do, which I do appreciate. I don't often read your articles I admit, but since my priest is almost 70 and I usually tank, I figured I'd give this one a read. So I can't say I noticed your switching the pronouns up, but I do appreciate that effort. I didn't notice it in this article, so I figured I'd chime in since the subject was already brought up :)

My favorite healer is a guy, but he's gay, so I think it's mostly platonic :P

I've only seen the statistics for WoW and they still put women far, far behind men in terms of population. According to the Daedalus Project (which I love) 84% of players are male. 16% are female. Ouch.

Now granted, that was just a survey of part of the population, and it's almost 5 years old now. WoW has become far more popular since then, for both men and women. Perhaps your numbers are more recent and accurate. One can only hope.

Dawn-

I hate to reply just to point this out and sound like a total douche, but "he" is in fact the neutral pronoun in english, and it is a true neutral pronoun. The issue comes in because many other languages have different ways of relaying gender information, and over the years political correctness has taken hold and so many believe and have begun to create this stigma that there are no neutral pronouns in english.

"He" as a neutral pronoun goes back to old english, where most of our modern day pronouns are derived from in the first place. "She" was not neutral, and did imply femininity. "He" was used to infer neutrality, with the context of surrounding discussion modifying it to be male. So then, a priest referred to as "she" is a female priest. A priest referred to as "he" is neutral until specifically stated that he is a boy. There is no rule in the centuries of english that has every said that "he" must be male, and quite a few that say otherwise.

Unless, of course, you're one of those same politically correct people that are really that hung up and misinformed on our language. After this great read, I hope that's not the case.

@Draniest

I believe it's more accurate to say he/his/him -were- neutral pronouns. Languages lose the historical and original meanings of their words all the time. Given the contemporary context of the significance of gender, I think it's an oversimplification to rail against "political correctness". The standards for both "neutral language" are evolving just as much as English itself is.

Backing Draniest on this one. Checking in dictionaries (I've checked Reader's Digest and the Oxford English Dictionary) it seems in both 'American English' and 'British English' the word 'he' either is the pronoun used to refer to last male mentioned / implied, or refers to either a male or a female if the sex is never stated.

So technically Draniest is right, however Terrants's point is equally valid.