— Shakespeare: and every one to rest themselves betake’
— Jane Austen: I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly;
— W. H. Auden: it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy;
— Shakespeare: ’tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech;
— W. M. Thackeray: a person can’t help their birth
— G. B. Shaw: no man goes to battle to be killed. — But they do get killed;

- From Merriam Webster

All this to say, using “they” as a universal singular pronoun is not bad English whatsoever, nor is it grammatically problematic. Strangely then, it seems to me that the only reason for rejecting a grammatically-appropriate gender-accurate pronoun in favor of a male one would be…ideological.

Byron, Austen, et al wrote after Fisher, so their usage of “they” only illustrates that it never died out, but that’s not central to the article’s premise.

I’ve always advocated inclusive pronouns. It just bugs me when journalists reduce a complicated issue to a simple story.

Because that’s not a straw man.

And the article also seems to mention “Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope” as well.

Newspaper articles rarely use footnotes. I suppose its possible that the author made it all up, but I’d have to see evidence to make me view it with immediate suspicion.

The greek pronouns in this verse are singular masculine, but Jesus’s statement here was clearly inclusive of females. I don’t know whether the KJV’s translators were following convention or trying to stay true to the original Greek; my point is, Anne Fisher didn’t singlehandedly introduce this rule to English in 1745.