God help anyone learning English as a foreign language ...
Many languages don't distinguish between his/her, preferring instead to mark the gender of the possessed thing.
Additionally, it occurs to me that in German the words for 'his' and 'its' are the same, and the words for 'her' and 'their' are the same. I don't think the entire nation has fallen over yet.
I didn't think I cared about the trans debate. I was cool and right on and "live and let live" because it's easy to be completely tolerant when something has exactly no impact on you whatsoever.
But what I'm recognising from the trans debates in AIBU (etc) is that there is an impact on me and on all women if we redefine what a woman is. I had no idea that the criteria for asserting womanhood had become so loose. I thought you had to have GRS and lengthy hormone treatment.
I didn't realise how much of what I thought was real about gender is totally socially enforced - though I should have, given my interest in human universals and gender definitions being conspicuous by their absence in such lists.
I didn't realise how much it is in men's interests (NAMALT) to reinforce gender inequality. I didn't realise how much it matters to that model to have only two categories of human: Man and Not-Man. I simply hadn't considered why female-only spaces are needed as a shelter from gender inequality.
I believed the statistics about victims of violence at face value: I didn't read the small print that showed that although there's some parity in levels of violence perpetuated against men and women, there's a stark difference in levels of violence perpetuated by men and women. Blinding ourselves to the sources of hateful behaviour in the name of equality is a farce.
Until MNers pointed it out, I had no idea of the possibilities for male club athletes to mimic female biochemistry for a while and bring home medals and world records. There's a lot of talk in the news about doping, but approximately nothing about the specific manipulation of sex hormones for athletic advantage.
And I know that the trans debate doesn't feel as immediate as the FGM debate or the equal pay debate or rape culture - or #BlackLivesMatter or refugees or Zika. But it's creeping up on us and we may lose everything we've gained if we don't debate sensibly before it's too late.