Throughout the 1920s, a debate continued between three camps: those that preferred to preserve the preexisting use of without distinction between genders, those that wished to preserve the spoken non-gendered pronoun but introduce a new female pronoun in writing, and those that wished to introduce a differently pronounced female pronoun . The pronoun enjoyed widespread support in the 1920s and 1930s but lost out to after the Chinese Civil War. Currently, written pronouns are divided between the masculine human (he, him), feminine human (she, her), and non-human (it), and similarly in the plural. This distinction does not exist in the spoken language, where moreover "tā" is restricted to animate reference; inanimate entities are usually referred to with demonstrative pronouns for 'this' and 'that'.