Gender-Neutral Translation difficulties

I just came across this article What's Wrong with Gender-Neutral Bible Translations? (in TheResurgence). It's written by Wayne Grudem and I admit that I approached this article skeptically. However, there is a good point made about the pluralising of singular third person pronouns in order to avoid using 'he/him/his' where gender is not at issue.
"The NRSV translators did not want to do this, so they changed the singulars to plurals instead:

Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.

The problem is that Jesus did not speak with plural pronouns here; he used singulars. Jesus wanted to specify that he and the Father would come and dwell with an individual believer. "
I have to agree that I find this pluralisation a little irritating too but we do have to ask what's the alernative? All translation involves compromises of this kind. Though in this case I feel that a wrong-headed notion of 'proper' English may not have helped the translators. They could have used the singular indefinite 'they' as in

whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.

It's a usage that is very common in spoken English and traces back to Shakespeare himself. In fact, Grudem points us to one place where this usage is taken up:

In Psalm 19, a familiar verse says, "But who can discern his errors?" (19:12, RSV). The NRSV changed this to, "But who can detect their errors?"

Grudem points out with some reason that this could be interpreted with 'the ordinances of the Lord' being taken as the antecedents. However, such ambiguities are already part of bible reading. It's why we engage in preaching and commentary, in part.

I think that the problem is that Grudem and others really don't get it that for many English speakers (but not all, so it's no good citing counter examples from contemporary English when it's not from the hand of someone who natively uses the other form; that's like citing A west-country accent to 'prove' the British English speakers really do pronounce post-vocalic r's), the generic 'him'(and 'man') has ceased to exist, it is a masculine pronoun and can only be heard in the way it was (presumably) in, say, Victorian times as generic with great difficulty and some training. In the meantime you have alienated hearers and readers who are conscious of the justice of gender equality. I think that they reckon its all a plot and that the rest of us are just pretending that the meaning has changed for us; like those English people who reckon foreigners really speak English when we are not around and just speak French to be awkward; they just can't imagine how different language really is. Add to that a radical lack of sympathy for trendy progressive identity politics and, well you get a grumpy article like this that offers no real alternatives.

In defence of my proposal I would use a piece of evidence Grudem mentions, albeit I make different use of it.

In Galatians 6:7, Paul wrote, "Whatever a man sows, that will he also reap" (RSV). Changing "man" to "person" would have been fine, since the Greek is not gender-specific. But to avoid "he," the NRSV says, "You reap whatever you sow."

I think that this may have been meant to use the indefinite 'you' (equivalent to 'one')? If we can use a more colloquial form in one place, why not another? Of course I may be wrong about how to take it, though I don't doubt that a number of readers will read it as an indefinite third person 'you'.

Perhaps we should recall that any translation that has dropped the second person singular pronoun 'thou' and its cognates throws up similar problems: all those 'you' in the epistles being interpreted as singular rather than plural is a common hazard for preaching and teaching the Bible in English but I honestly don't think that returning to 'thou' forms is the answer.

What I'm left concerned about is that the lack of acknowledgement that the kinds of things he criticises are already difficulties with other ('sound') translations albeit in different areas. I have lost count of the times I have heard or read expositors say something like, "The translation can be misleading here; what the Greek/Hebrew says is ...", I've even done it myself. Commonly the word 'righteousness' is not a simple translation in cultural terms, for example. I'm afraid, however, that insisting that ones own dialect of English (where it may still be possible to use 'him' and 'man' gender-neutrally) is the norm for the rest of us to follow is not going to be a strategy that will win friends and influence people. And indeed it will continue to alienate honest seekers and dialogue partners. There will never be a perfect translation and we will have to try to make the best of the various competing demands. However, I think that this gender neutrality thing will not go away however much the Grudems of this world wish it might, and so a better strategy needs to be offered than what appears to be on show here.