I think it's important to note that grammatical gender and actual gender roles are not as connected semantically as you might think, grammatical "gender" only exists as such because of historical accident. There is no reason a mouse has to be feminine in French, except for the noun classes we call gender. Linguistically, animacy distinctions can also be considered "gender" for the purposes of grammar. In romance languages it tends to be pretty stark, but in German for instance an unmarried woman is neuter and a married woman is feminine. I would never be one to tell someone they can't use a pronoun other than they/them if they would prefer, but it makes me wonder if these kind of struggles arise in languages like Turkish where there is no grammatical gender whatsoever. I would guess that it doesn't arise, because "o" is universal. I would also suggest that "they" could become universal, if we used it as such. If you are a descriptivist, then saying 'they doesnt work for everyone' is fine, but saying 'if we all used they it would work for everyone' is equally true.