When They is appropriate. ?

“If an owner participates in the first set, they can make an election, rather than being forced to either participate or relinquish their interests,” Johnny said. “It also protects the rights of small producers by giving them unprecedented safeguards.”

I suppose there is no point anymore in getting upset about how the pronouns 'them', 'they', 'their' and 'theirs' have been shoehorned into the singular neuter tense as well as plural neuter.  Historically, those pronouns have always been reserved for the plural case, but since English only contains 'it' as singular neuter, and English speakers do not like being called 'it', we are stuck with resorting to 'them', 'they' and 'their' when we don't want to say 'he' or 'she' without a definite male or female subject.  This can be done without borrowing, of course,  with the ubiquitous but disruptive he/she (she/he).  In most other cases, though, a rewrite is needed in order to convey the idea naturally.  The first sentence above, for example, can be repaired by making everything agree:

“If owners participate in the first set, they can make an election, rather than being forced to either participate or relinquish their interests.”

Now all verbs and subjects agree.  Why did the original writer not do this?  I do not know.  Maybe because of laziness, or because an editor caught the phrases "he can make an election", and "relinquish his interests" and changed them to "they can make an election", and "relinquish their interests", without considering the entire sentence. The second sentence, for whatever reason, is consistent - probably by accident since they were both written by the same author in the same paragraph.

At any rate, the handwriting seems to be on the wall.  Over the next 50 years or so, we will have changed pronoun behaviors:

• I am
• you are
• he/she/it/they is
• we are
• you are
• they are

I find this grotesque and unnecessary, especially since it is driven by political correctness, but that is where our language appears to be going.  Furthermore, those who safeguard the language - writers - seem to be driving the change.

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