s/t/he/y

In a nice taking-apart of a bit of grammar-marmery, Geoffrey Pullum in this article: Language Log: Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof gets a lovely counter example in, which I must hold in reserve for one of my colleagues.

it is claimed that purported sex-neutral he ('a student who lost his textbook') 'has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.' White's claim seems to me quite untrue. Consider how weird this sounds:
Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for four minutes?
Why would it sound so weird if forms of the pronoun he could be sex-neutral? They can't. He is purely masculine in reference. The claim that it can be sex-neutral is not in accord with the facts.

In fact, I'd be surprised if the majority of English speakers didn't use 'their' at that point, like Shakespeare did (e.g. A Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene 3:
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend ). And Pullum links to examples of the latter and also of a very full listing of Jane Austen's usages of the same.

PS Nice post on the same topic at A Billion Monkeys Can't be Wrong And a follow-up at Language Log.