Ah, I see what you mean. When I read it, though, it didn’t strike me at all as though OP went out of his way to use gender neutral terms. I guess it didn’t strike PG that way either, if he assumed it was a guy too?

I think they may be better described as a referentless third person pronoun rather than a genderless one in a lot of circumstances. The genderlessness is more of a consequence of having no referent.

That's funny. It totally jumped out at me that the OP kept using "they".

What's even odder is that Paul used "they" for the lawyer, apparently intending to be gender-neutral, but failed to notice that the OP had done similarly.

I don't mean to be making a huge deal out of this. It's just something we could probably all stand to be more aware of, myself included.