Granting, however, that English speakers do think there's a social justice element to this dispute, it need never result in bad grammar. Michael's specimen sentence would better have been written "Why do people ignore their passions?" That would have been clearer because the real point is that people in general do, not that a sequence of people in particular do. When the sentence concerns the particular, even the particular indefinite, it's appropriate to use singular pronouns, both subjective and possessive. When the sentence concerns the general, it's good style (for clarity as well as grammar) to use plural nouns and pronouns, subject and possessive.

People are amazingly committed to their non-prescriptive grammar, I must say. I don't know where the idea originates that your standard of expression is the average of what people are sloppy enough to try to get away with. If you are hearing people make agreement errors, that's because you are hearing uneducated people. We are not part of the "write like they talk" vernacular culture: we write as educated specialists in the use of words are trained to do. Your grammar should be impeccable, not merely capable of escaping conviction by a random sample of nonprofessional speakers, as your ethics should not be measured by whether you've violated the criminal law. Your writing needs to be better than correct; it needs to be forceful, supple, and attractive. If you settle for less you are shortchanging your clients and your causes.

So far as the use of "everyone ... she" constructions is concerned, I decided years ago to use them in regular alternation with "one ... he" constructions. You listened to me use them in class for fourteen weeks, and almost all of you barely noticed they were there. You heard me say sometimes "the judge ... he" and sometimes "the judge ... she" and everyone just took it as normal. I think that's something we all ought to train ourselves to do, because that's not about grammatical gender: it's about how our use of metaphors and hypotheticals creates a narrative of what's possible in our world. We should use our speech patterns to imagine everyone doing every sort of job, and all people marrying whomever they want. By doing so we prevent the usual forms of our expression from making assumptions against which we want otherwise to contend.

-- EbenMoglen - 20 May 2008