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Notes -
I am not exactly making the argument that ethnicity is based strictly on genetic ancestry, but that there has been no real Hui identity that is divorced from the civilizational project of China, which doesn’t exclude that they can be a minority, or segregated, or whatnot. This is the case even if we take for granted that the Hui are a separate people (minzu as in the Wikipedia article you linked). In that sense, then, I don’t see where the oddity is in a Hui person thinking themselves Chinese, unless you explicitly try to equate Chinese with Han.
This is not the case with the Manchu, for example, who have a long history as a separate people.
Your first sentence was saying that “a person who identifies as Hui in China might well identify as Chinese” seems to imply that a Hui person would usually rather not identify as Chinese, which is very odd sounding to me.
Regardless, it’s a minor quibble, no big deal really.
What exactly is the purpose of neopronouns and “they/them”, then? What exactly are the people (some of whom I know personally) who sometimes flip between “she/her” and “they/them”, and take it very seriously, doing? What about someone who decides to be “xe/xir”?
(One simple way to do away with all this is to just have unisex pronouns for everybody. Alas, that ship has sailed.)
Isn't the use of "they" or any other alternative to he and she consistent with being nonbinary? As for xe, that is apparently exactly what you call for: a unisex pronoun
Yes, now to get it adopted by the entirety of society!
The problem with the they and she thing was the inconsistency and the insistence on different ones at different times (as well as the rarity until recently of using they as a singular for a named subject in modern English); xe is also just not common - I had not heard of it before being exposed to someone who wanted to be called that, nor do I think people who insist on being called xe/xir in contradistinction to more traditional pronouns banking on the idea that having unisex pronouns stops all of this silliness. (Edit: I would be more amenable to going back to the singular they, as English I believe has a history of using it as such, but even then it still just sounds wrong somehow. Xe/xir or ze/zir etc also just look and sound aesthetically revolting, at least to me.)
What I meant was a language, like Estonian or Finnish, which lacks gendered grammar entirely. That sort of cultural and linguistic structure/norm probably isn’t going to happen without a great deal of time and who knows what else.
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