Firstly, when you’re referring to a sort of unversal, general human, you probably use the word “persona” which is feminine anyway. You’d never do as you would in English and say “man”–”hombre” definitely means a male adult person. You could say “human being” (”ser humano”) which is masculine…..but again that sounds really stilted for just everday speech. Or you can talk about “people” (”la gente”).

Also, Spanish is a pro-drop language, which means that when the personal pronoun is the subject you often don’t use it at all. For example, you wouldn’t normally say, “Yo soy de Canada,” but just “Soy de Canada”. Finally, the 3rd person pronouns (damn, or are they adjectives?) for “his”/”her”/”their” are the gender-neutral “su”/”sus”.

As for the inanimate objects having gender–ok, I’m sure there are historically sexist reasons for all that, but as a modern speaker you in no way think of, say, a book having “masculine” qualities just because it’s “el” or a table being in any way “feminine” just because it’s “la”–even when you’re referring to them as “él” or “ella”. To be honest, thinking about it in those terms is trying to impose an English-speaker’s conception of language onto Spanish-speakers….or in fact the speakers of a number of languages. From what I understand, English is about the only European language that doesn’t have gender for nouns.

However, I do know that some feminists in France had concerns over sexism in French, but since I don’t speak it and don’t know the idiosyncracies of its grammar, I can’t say why that would be.

AFAIK, if a language has gender which is related to male/female — again, lots of languages don’t: gender means kind in these languages; the association of syntactic gender with male or female (or neuter) is very European — it uses masculine as the default.

It never occurred to me to give the breastfeeding example, though I wish it had.

I did notice that, in general, people under 20 had the same intuitions as I did: he is just plain ungrammatical as the gender-neutral. (I’m making a vast generalisation on age, here. But it’s more or less accurate, though it leaves out large numbers of adults who feel the same way.) Which means that this is a change that has, mostly, finished happening: there are still fights going on about whether the gender neutral is he and/or she (but not, apparently, she and/or he) or they, but it’s not just plain he.

If you’re going to disagree with Trish’s phrasing, I don’t think you have much standing if I then disagree with yours. The definition of “needless” is not “any disagreement not started or endorsed by Samantha.”

The whole point the Secret Feminist Conspiracy wants to switch ’she’ for ‘he’ is so people who think that it somehow includes women can get a taste of their own medicine.

Try sentences on them like “Every mother should breastfeed his child” or “Each ballerina must purchase his own shoes.” They’ll wave their arms around and say THAT’S DIFFERENT because clearly you’re talking about women! Well, gosh, you reply, since “his” and “he” are gender-inclusive, and refer to both men and women, why can’t you use them for an all-female group? (If you are lucky, their heads will actually blow up, a la Scanners. I long to observe this phenomenon.)

because the international feminist conspiracy(c 2005 ginmar) isn’t about equality. it’s about revenge for years of putting up with that jackass from accounting. Equality is the internation feminist movement. but feh on them. equality later. revenge now.

The whole point the Secret Feminist Conspiracy wants to switch ’she’ for ‘he’ is so people who think that it somehow includes women can get a taste of their own medicine.

So if I write really sexist, hateful, sexually-explicit fiction it’s ‘erotica’ because no actual bitches are getting pimped out righteously in the making of the process? Or is it just that Trish isn’t capable of deciding what the right term for her own writing is? Geeziz. I write erotica, you read sexually explicit material, she reads porn.

“They” works fine and I don’t particularly care if it makes people snark. 99% of snarkers end their sentences with prepositions and you can nail them rightbackatcha on that one.

For some wacky reason, though, this argument used to make a lot of people really uncomfortable and angry.

Of course, I’m very nearly as happy with the idea of making ’she’ the One True Pronoun. Makes little difference to me. Except, you know, that ‘he’ is one letter shorter.

I don’t mind using she as the default pronoun, just I’m already using a gender neutral pronoun.
my general behavior is they, but omit when able.
for example refering to an infant: “how old is (pronoun of guess)?” becomes “how old is the little dear” or just “how old?”

and for note: This is without a doubt the strongest I have disagreed with many of you in… ever. If I were pope, and this became an issue, I WOULD be willing to cause a scism and declare a crusade against the “he or she” users. I would excommunicate the “hesayers” as heretics and all sorts of evil things.

I really, REALLY believe in the truth of the They-sayers.
“They will not feel fear
fear is the mindslayer
fear is the small death that brings total annihilation.”

of course, I may just be in a weird mood, as most of the evening has been discussing kidnapping a friend and setting him up on a blind date, as I promised to get him a date before he got out of college, and I fear I may be a fae folk, who will shrivel up and die should I fail to keep a promise.
I have no evidence to the contrary, so best to play it safe.

I remember on soc.feminism when no one knew if ampersand was a man or a woman. At least I didn’t know for sure. Only after a while did I start to figure it out.

So it would totally make sense to say: “I don’t agree with all of amps views, but I still respect amp. Amp is quite the feminist.”

;o)