Well, sure, if you're being Doylist, it was Leckie. :P I feel like there's choices made that make it clear than even from a Watsonian POV, though, this was clearly written in a language other than English (Presumably by Breq, since it's first-person) and then translated, not always perfectly - I'm thinking specifically of the rhymes that don't rhyme, and the parts where she comments on how hard it was to pick a gender for words that aren't gendered in English. So Leckie chose to make the translation issues obvious, and SOMEBODY, in-universe, picked the pronoun when it was translated into whatever language, and it wasn't necessarily a perfect correlate to what was originally used...

(Some day I will type up the ongoing discussion in the letters pages of some of my 1950s Analog issues about how to handle translation and language in far-future SF...)

I'd love to read Leckie's thing about her choice, though!