While I was offline, I realized that there are two aspects of this situation. First, whether gendered words exist in given language or not. Second, whether they are used correctly or incorrectly (such as using male pronoun “he” in situations where female person is also possible). These are partially independent (even in a language without gramatical genders it is possible to use constructs such as “director-man” and “director-woman”, and then incorrectly use the word “director-man” in situations not limited to male persons).
Now in your comment I see the third aspect; whether there is a gender-neutral pronoun for people who don’t identify as “he” or “she”. Construct “he or she” is bad, because even when it tries to describe a superset, does it by enumerating subsets. I don’t see any problem with singular “they”, but I am not a native English speaker.
I am afraid that inventing a new pronoun specifically for genderqueers would lead to infinite discussions… such as whether the same pronoun should be used for all kinds of genderqueers, or whether there should be different pronouns for different groups, and everyone would accuse everyone of insensitivity because they use last-year pronouns instead of the most current update. (Evidence: there is still not consensus on the gender-neutral pronoun, and that should be much easier task.)
Yup, those are the three aspects I’m talking about.
I’ve never seen anyone demand a pronoun that didn’t cover binary people, only gender-neutral ones. Having to make do with “he”, “she” and combinations thereof is insufficient.
While I was offline, I realized that there are two aspects of this situation. First, whether gendered words exist in given language or not. Second, whether they are used correctly or incorrectly (such as using male pronoun “he” in situations where female person is also possible). These are partially independent (even in a language without gramatical genders it is possible to use constructs such as “director-man” and “director-woman”, and then incorrectly use the word “director-man” in situations not limited to male persons).
Now in your comment I see the third aspect; whether there is a gender-neutral pronoun for people who don’t identify as “he” or “she”. Construct “he or she” is bad, because even when it tries to describe a superset, does it by enumerating subsets. I don’t see any problem with singular “they”, but I am not a native English speaker.
I am afraid that inventing a new pronoun specifically for genderqueers would lead to infinite discussions… such as whether the same pronoun should be used for all kinds of genderqueers, or whether there should be different pronouns for different groups, and everyone would accuse everyone of insensitivity because they use last-year pronouns instead of the most current update. (Evidence: there is still not consensus on the gender-neutral pronoun, and that should be much easier task.)
Yup, those are the three aspects I’m talking about.
I’ve never seen anyone demand a pronoun that didn’t cover binary people, only gender-neutral ones. Having to make do with “he”, “she” and combinations thereof is insufficient.