Promotion of generic "he" in English can be dated to the 17th and 18th centuries, when the belief arose that English grammar and spelling were hopelessly irregular and could be remedied only by being Latinized. Thus words like "dette" and "doute" that had been borrowed from Norman French shortly after William the Conqueror had to be respelled half a millennium later to align with the b's in their assumed Latin originals, "debitum" and "dubitum", even though no literate English speaker before or since has ever pronounced - more than once, anyway - the b in either "debt" or "doubt".

Objection to generic "he" has been dismissed here as "latest whim". In "Gender politics of the generic 'he', https://blog.oup.com/2016/01/gender-politics-generic-he/, however, Dennis Baron cites pushback against the generic use of "he" as early as the 1660s. Baron also documents a curious phenomenon: whether the "he" in a rule was read as generic depended on whether the rule prescribed a penalty or recognized a right. That is, a woman could without controversy be arraigned under a law that referred to an accused person as "he" - but if a different law referred to an eligible voter or candidate as "he", a woman's right to vote or run could be challenged or denied until and unless that law or section of code explicitly included women.

Generic "he" is thus demonstrably susceptible to interpretation as exclusive "he", and this makes it too imprecise for either the law or a writer whose goal is not to dazzle readers but to connect with them.