Congrats, Seska!! How exciting. You guys are beautiful!!

In other news, I totally got to hold, snuggle, and play with a freaking 6 month old capuchin monkey this morning. A freaking monkey. He was awesome. His name was Seymour and he totally snuggled my neck, inside my fleece, and NIBBLED MY FACE. It was brilliant.

For what it is worth, a lot of publishers have the standard of alternating between "he/him/his" and "she/her/hers" as gender neutral pronouns. That is the first time you make a gender neutral reference it is author's choice. But next reference you have to make the opposite choice you made last time. So if you start out with "she" as a generic reference to human beings of both genders, next generic reference has to use "he" (Or "him" or "his" depending.

you can no longer make the assumption that (to use Burrell's example from way above), "The pregnant woman should talk to her doctor," is correct

Heh. Glad I am not the only one thinking of the many pregnant men of my acquaintance.

A fair number of sociologists use 'she/her' most or all of the time, when it's obvious that the reference is generic ("If the student hands in her paper on time, her grade will reflect this.")

For the medical paperwork and studies I've helped edit (and participated in), the preferred option seems to be, for anything that could conceivably be written as a set of instructions, to do so and address the reader as "You" (entire grant proposals have had to be resubmitted because the patient bill of rights and informed consent forms were written in the third person instead of the second). Obviously it won't work for a lot of academic writing, but for mundane-world uses it's often pretty handy.

fair number of sociologists use 'she/her' most or all of the time, when it's obvious that the reference is generic ("If the student hands in her paper on time, her grade will reflect this.")

My preference. But my publisher told me to alternate.

They! Their paper! Their grade! It's perfectly cromulent! I swear! I read it on the internet. No choosing, no alternating, no revelation of biases or stereotyping. Just good old not specifying.

"They" and "Their" is great when it fits. But sometimes the sound is just too awkward for me to bear. "A good soldier takes care of their rifle" historically is perfectly good grammar if you go back far enough. And by leading edge standards is again today. But the sound just grates on me, so I use "A good soldier takes care of her rifle". No doubt as "their" and "they" becomes more standard I'll get used to it.

Good soldiers take care of their rifles.

I agree - I hate the sound of phrases like "The student should hand in their paper on..." Making the subject plural works slightly better for me, but not as well as using a singular pronoun.

My photographer friend Andy just posted his set of photos from the wedding, and they're really beautiful. Anyone who's not sick of the sight of me yet can see a few more here [link] !