Except I am not, they has been used singularly for centuries now.

Let me put it in a way that will make sense for you. Singular "they" is, more often than not, used when people do not know the gender or amount of a group. Whenever you speak of a corporation or company, it is extremely common to use "they" instead of "it". E.g. "they are the ones in charge of making that decision". In the example, you are speaking of a company or similar group, a singular entity by itself. However, since the speaker does not know who or how many people make this decision, the speaker uses a singular "they".

This is but one example of how they has been used as a singular pronoun for ages, but let us digress a little bit. Why the fuck is the royal "we" allowed, but not the singular "they"? They both follow the same structure but inverse of each other, where the royal we is a way to say "I'm speaking of myself as a part of a bigger entity/community". You can make an argument that both of these carry plural connotations, but my point is that grammar rules and language as a whole is way more nuanced than black or white.

So, please, save your spit and time with a counter argument that only pushes forward discriminating thinking and stop being a pussy about language change.

Btw, I'm not a native English speaker, which goes to show that I was actively taught about singular they, instead of picking it up intuitively like most native speakers do.

Edit PS: don't even think of using my non-nativeness as a point against me, I know for a fact I have better grammar and care more about orthography than the average native speaker.

I'm not the one disregarding the grammar rules. You are.

You are.

You, in this case, is singular. Why are you using are?!

It turns out, "the issues this causes for clarity in language" don't actually matter, and it doesn't cause any issues. It's perfectly clear "you" and "they" here are singular, despite the plural grammar. It is not confusing, as you clearly proved in your own comment by using "you are."

Huh? I'm a dummy--teach me this arcane English rule that i wasn't aware of until now. For what it's worth though: Have you always held such righteous standards for dialogue? Hard to follow what people are saying when they (oops!) speak with the wrong perspective? You must struggle in the modern world, the way people eviscerate our language publicly pretty much 24/7. I'd feel bad for you if you seemed like a decent person.

As opposed to arguing about fake rules that don’t even exist in modern English, maybe just apply the slightest bit of logic. Language doesn't work the way you are insisting it does, it’s not math.

No, you dummy. The reason we use "are" with "you" is because it was originally plural. However, language is mutable and ever-changing. You is almost exclusively used as singular now, yet it keeps the plural "are". The point being, your statement that "they is" is wrong doesn't prove anything. We use the "wrong" grammar for words all the time and we don't care, until you can do it to hurt someone.

You might want to work on your grammar, my friend.

'Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o'erhear the speech."— Shakespeare, Hamlet (1599);

Caesar: "No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed." Cleopatra: "But they do get killed" —Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901);

In an 1881 letter, Emily Dickinson wrote "Almost anyone under the circumstances would have doubted if [the letter] were theirs, or indeed if they were themself."

George Eliot (1859) – Adam Bede: “It is too late to spare anyone when they are dead.”