I’m not in all possible discourse-related spaces about Russian, but the surface level fight went around not pronouns, but nouns. Almost everything in Russian is gendered or inherits gender from the subject of the sentence, unlike English. So the questions liberals (non pejorative there) asked were about feminization of usually masculine-coded words describing most professions.

They/them would be они/их, and although I want to put it here and there and do so, it doesn’t seem to work as smooth due to completely different gendering system.

Swahili has 10 different “genders,” called “noun classes” or “ngeli,” and none of them correlate with sex. Instead, the third-person singular pronouns are:

• he/she and him/her: yeye
• his/her: wake

“Ő”. Everyone is “ő” in Hungarian, we don’t have gendered pronouns.

Instead of having different words for plural of pronouns, in Chinese we append a character after single pronouns to make them plural.

• 我 (me) -> 我們 (us)
• 你 (you) -> 你們 (you all)
• 他 (him) -> 他們 (them (male))
• 她 (her) -> 她們 (them (female))

You get the idea. We also have pronouns for animals (牠), inanimate objects (它) and God (祂), and you can similarly add 們 to make them plural (except for god, I haven’t seen the character being used in plural). Using they/them as pronoun for a person doesn’t make sense in Chinese.

Chinese used to have no gender pronouns. Everyone is referred to as 他 (Mandarin) or 佢 (Cantonese). It’s in last century when 她 (“she”) is “invented”, and no new gender pronouns in Cantonese. However, in terms of speaking, they are all pronounced the same way (ta1 in Mandarin, keoi5 in Cantonese), so it’s literally impossible to use the wrong pronoun if you’re speaking or typing in Cantonese.

they/them user here! in my lwmguage, its they/them (im english.) hope this helps!

English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

In German there is nothing established. The most common one I have heard which is still unknown by most is “en/en” (not sure if written correctly).

Swedish isn’t exactly “my language”, but it is the language I know best after English. Plural they is de and singular they is hen (to contrast with hon for she and han for he). It’s been in use for decades, but only got officially added in the 2010s.

And Finnish just uses hän for everyone, which is supreme.

In Italian it’s not really used. There’s an extremely fringe group of people who use singular pronouns “Io” (I) but plural adjectives and participles. “Io sono andati” instead of “Io sono andato” or “Io sono stanchi” instead of “Io sono stanco”.

These are regarded as people who spend too much time on Tumblr and consume American media even within the most militant corners of the transfeminist movement, so it doesn’t have much traction.

Most of the discourse is about gender-neutral language rather than pronouns.

To add to the confusion, Italian has no neutral gender, only male and female, but it retains neutral pronouns: esso/essi. The problem is that by ending in “o”, most people think this is an alternative masculine pronoun and use it interchangeably with the masculine pronouns “egli” or “lui”.

There’s no real consensus on it yet in Dutch, but the most common are either hen/hun or die/diens. Both are known words that can be repurposed, but both have some disadvantages when it comes to certain grammatical rules.
There’s also some initiatives on new words, but they haven’t really gotten much traction yet.

There’s a rather lengthy article here in Dutch that explains it in depth:
https://taaladvies.net/taal-en-gender-verwijswoorden-voor-vrouwen-mannen-en-non-binaire-personen-algemeen/

My language Persian doesn’t have gendered pronouns at all

In French we have “iel”. It’s a mix of the male and female pronoms “il” and “elle”.

I don’t think Croatian has it, and it is very gendered language. But some ideas

3rd person singular “ono” is literally translated “it” in English might work, but it feels dehumanizing when referred to one specific person, at least to me.

In my opinion what might work are 3rd person plural “oni” idk kinda hard when language is gendered.

I’m not Chinese, but in Mandarin, he and she are both pronounced “ta” (first tone, flat intonation), even though they’re written differently.

The language I know best besides English is Spanish, but since it’s not my culture, I decided to look it up, and there’s actually an interesting Wikipedia article about gender neutrality in Spanish.

There’s a separate page for a proposed single nonbinary pronoun “Elle” (pronounced A-yay) which I really like.