This is just a very recent conditioning. Doesn't (yet?) work for all of us. I cringe whenever I encounter this strange use of plural they to designate a single individual. In fact, I consider the old convention of 'he' in certain context meaning 'he or she' far less a rape of linguistic integrity.

Singular 'they' is not that recent. It's first attested in the 14th century and has been a subject of linguistic peevishness since the 1800s. The idea that 'he' is preferable to 'they' for a person of unknown gender is actually one of those modern inventions like the prohibition of split infinitives.

Also, you should maybe consider an analogy less extreme than _sexual assault_ for people using grammatical constructs you don't prefer.

Okay, never knew. I shall have to look into that. Point the point stands, the useage does irk me, but probably more from its latter-day signal value than from any deepseated linguistic belief. I did sort of allow for that interpretatation with my paranthetical yet?.

As for the rape expression. Now that usage certainly has quite a history. I find it occasionally useful, and shall keep using it whenever it suits my fancy, currently heightened sensitivities notwithstanding.

English still has he / she, so it’s not fully gender neutral, it still has gendered constructs in its ‘runtime’. There are a few fully gender neutral languages, Turkish is one.

Chinese is interesting because the spoken form has no gender but the written form does (he/she/it are written 他/她/它 but all pronounced “tā”)

I recall reading somewhere that these separate written forms were devised fairly recently (like the 18th or 19th century), in order to accomodate translations of Western novels. Same with Japanese (彼/彼女). Sorry, I don't have a source for this at the moment.

Chinese of course has numerous dialects outside Mandarin. Do any dialects change tones when using that “tā” phoneme for a "he" or a "she" or an "it"?

I'm living in a Cantonese speaking area (Hong Kong) and my Mandarin teacher (from Taiwan) claims that the multiple written forms of the third-person singular pronoun were introduced a generation or two ago in order to be able to more faithfully translate foreign works into Chinese. She says that many people, particularly the older generation, always use the older character, the one that now means "he".

As far as dialects that might have different tones to distinguish he/she/it, it's possible. It's also possible for a dialect of Chinese to have wildly different pronunciation of those characters, maybe something like "ta" , "ki", "zu".

Chinese dialects differ by more than most foreigners expect. It goes far beyond "Texan arguing with a Brooklyn cabbie" or "Texan arguing with an Aussie" level of dialectal differences. Cantonese and Mandarin are less similar than Italian and Portuguese. Cantonese uses the same two characters for rooster as Mandarin uses (公雞 "gong ji"), but reverses the order (雞公 "gai kung"). "gong" and "kung" sound pretty similar, but "ji" and "gai" are totally different. (On a side note, the Thai word for chicken is also "gai".) Also, I need to be careful about mixing up the numbers between Cantonese and Mandarin... the Mandarin word for one differs only in tone from Cantonese word for two, and my Cantonese tones are terrible. (1 2 3 4 5 is "yi er san si wu" vs. "yat yi san sei ng".) I have a friend who (I have no idea why he was so crazily naive) is a native Cantonese speaker and thought he could just go to Shanghai and speak Cantonese with a Mandarin accent and be understood. He ended up speaking English his whole time there because Cantonese just sounded like gibberish to the Shanghainese and Mandarin speakers.

Gender distinctions in the Standard Chinese written forms 他 (he), 她 (she), 它 (it) are indeed a recent introduction. In Cantonese there's a single character for he, she, or it (佢, pronounced keúih). This is a different word entirely from Mandarin tā, not a different pronunciation of the same word like 雞 being pronounced jī in Mandarin or gāi in Cantonese.

Because, as you pointed out, there's no mutual intelligibility, Cantonese and Mandarin are considered by linguists to be separate languages.

Gender references generally disappear in the English plurals. So the above should read "Users should upload their photos". Then you can just restrict gender pronouns for reference to specifics.

That does not work when the plural is not appropriate. For example, you would have trouble saying: "the above commenter wrote about their experience", i.e. when talking about a specific person with unknown gender. I'm glad that English still allows this.

As I understand it, use of they/their is on the increase even for singular rather than plural specifically because it is gender neutral. The older alternatives often exclude women (by saying 'he') or require the writer to spell out 'he or she' or 's/he'.

The various forms of singular 'they' are not exactly well/broadly accepted in written English...