What do we think of gender neutral / gendered language?

[BolloxtoGender]

they instead of he/she (I'm not keen on this unless the sex is unknown, or is someone's preferred pronoun)
distinguished guests instead of ladies and gentlemen (not keen either)
Everyone, People/person (glossing over, bland)
Actor vs Actor/Actress (not keen , as pretending that 'Actor' is gender neutral when it is not)
Manhour, mankind to mean generically - I don't mind, and what's the alternative anyway?

Does gender neutral language effectively make females even more invisible? When means that women's achievements and presence, for example, are not recognised.

Thoughts?

How do languages which are gendered work with this sort of thing?

I think the Academie Française is having un, or possibly une nervous breakdown over this question.

That is really insightful and clear @redtoothbrush

I couldn't quite get my head round whether it is a 'good' thing or a 'bad' thing, hence why I thought I'd throw it out there.

It's just that at work as part of LGBTIAPQ++++ alphabet soup and specifically 'how to be a better ally to Transgender people' (resources provided by GLAAD, who obviously have an agenda to drive and seems to be loaded with woke Corporate money.....) , GLAAD was advocating for the use of gender neutral language in the context of being a better Trans ally.

However, in some instances it erases females (and males) when it is important in conveying factual information. In other instances it can help to break stereotypes e.g. firefighter instead of fireman.

The point of being neutral is to remove bias and preconceptions by merely being factual rather than political. It's about observation (think about the scientific protocols of removing bias from research).

But science can be biased if its methodology is flawed. And that's what happens with 'gender neutral' language if its based on anything other than pure observation.

If there are 18 women in a room then it is not biased to state there are 18 women in a room. It's observational.

It's potentially biased to state that there are 18 people in the room rather than women as it affects how you understand who is standing in the room. Or why they are standing in the room.

Is the fact that it's men or women important is a question that still needs to be asked.

It falls under the same concept of

One person say it’s raining and another person says it’s not; a journalist’s job is not to report both sides but to go outside and see if it’s fucking raining.

Observed facts are important. Details affect how we process information and understand situations.

If it's important to understand that the significance of sex within a situation (eg because it affects women more profoundly) it is important to observe women because it affects how we understand.

Bias works in two directions. What you have to also understand is where sex IS relevant as well as when it IS NOT.

Thus sex being recorded in rape is important and significant. Its not neutral to use gender neutral pronouns nor is it neutral to use gender identity.

But some fuckwits out there can't get their heads around the significance, importance and mechanics of sex to rape.

Which is pretty damn appalling and unscientific bullcrap.

Thatagain - you're talking about sex, not gender. Sex is what we biologically are, female or male. Gender is the baggage of stereotypes, 'roles' and 'presentation' that gets assigned to each sex. Some people use it to refer to their 'identity'.

I dislike the removal of man as the neutral as well as masculine personally. I appreciate a lot of posters here will disagree though. I take mankind to include all humans. I prefer madam chairman to chairperson.
I'm not inclined to get into huge arguments about these things, it isn't life or death, but seeing as you asked that's my feeling on the matter.

I'd be really interested to hear your reasoning, if you have time. I feel much the same way, and I have a hard time articulating why to people - the general response I get is that it's obviously sexist.

Goosefoot

I'm not sure I could articulate it myself. In part it is a certain clumsiness to the phrasing that I can't quite put my finger on. Madam Chairman just sounds better than Madam Chairperson. I'm not sure 'one small step for man but one giant leap for mankind' can be improved upon and make me feel more included by changing it to humankind. I never felt I wasn't included to start with.

Partly though it is down to my own relationship with language. I went to school at a time when speaking our own language was very much discouraged. If we said 'ament' rather than 'am not' or 'gie' rather than 'give' we'd be told to speak 'properly' or even called stupid. This was more habit than a deliberate attempt to stamp out Scots by the time I was at school but I grew up thinking speaking the way we speak at home was wrong and stupid and would be looked down on. It's only as an adult both seeing my own children go through an education system that accepts Scots (day to day not just on Burns' Night) and using it in adult literacies where it has certain advantages over English (due to freer spelling rules) that I've really questioned the attitudes I grew up with.

It has left me with a huge appreciation for the rich diversity of both English and Scots dialects and a wariness of attempts to standardise or force conformity on how people speak. To me language is a living, evolving thing that should be set free, not constantly policed.

Thanks, ArnoldW.

That resonates with me in a lot of ways, and I think it probably is related to my sense that trying to shape ideas through language control in that way is a problem in itself - and also often ineffective.

But this : I never felt I wasn't included to start with. seems also very true to me. When people started to say this to me, I really wasn't sure why they had that idea.

I sometimes get very frustrated by the way in which 'complex' or 'academic sounding' language is held up to be somehow 'better' than simple English which includes regional expression.

What is more important than the language is what meaning is communicated. The idea that complex language communicates better is something I hope to be incorrect.

Complex ideas are best explained if simpler and plainer language is used well rather than 'superior language' used badly.

I also believe that ideas are more powerful if they are universally understood by more people and again this is where more basic or collaqual language is important. It has to 'connect' with people not just be the officially sanctioned and approved language.

The skill is in communicating well not in policing language. Policing language is about an abject failure to persuade people through communicating an idea on its merit alone.

I think this is where politics has gone wildly and badly wrong and instead of complex ideas being discussed well we either have complex ideas oversimplified and then sold by good use of communication skills or we have complex ideas oversimplified by hiding behind euphemisms, language policing and threats of improper beliefs so that real meaning is hidden.

Good communication is a skill. It is not easy.

Being able to use words well and effectively is better than using 'the right' words.

Is the increasingly widespread use of folk / folks part of this? Always sounds really fake (though not obvious what it's replacing) and as if we're this close to a hoedown or something.

Yes Folks is suggested by GLAAD to replace Guys, as in when addressing a group of (literally) guys OR a mixed sex group.

I have to say much of academic writing annoys me. Pompous and pretentious word salads that says very little, or which could be said in a much more concise manner.

What is wrong with 'people' instead of 'folks' or 'guys'?

Thanks - I think 'everyone' is a more natural sounding avoidance of 'guys' than 'folks' (though 'guys' sounds more acceptable to me than 'gents' despite being just as obviously masculine. Couldn't really say why).

Yes, I know, I feel the same about gents and guys. Gents definitely does not recognise there are women in the group, guys feels more for both girls and boys....maybe just more culturally accustomed to usage in that context.

What do left handed people do? They don't ask to be, they can't help it, they're just born with brains wired that way. Have we changed our language so that 'sinister' no longer references the left (and dextral the right)?

Our language is gendered, live with it.

I have a personal bugbear when 'they' is used as a singular pronoun. A person can be child, man, woman, transman, transwoman, and gender fluid. What they can't be is more than one person. 'They' to mean one person has connotations of people with multiple personality disorder.

I also had a letter from the hospital telling me that 'pregnant individuals' may not accompany their child into an X ray.
Women. Women get pregnant. Men don't get pregnant. Transmen might, but they are of course, biological women.

In my organisation we say 'Chair' not chairperson. My dad, who has been retired a while, finds it odd. I've been using it for 15 years and I find 'chairperson' 'chairwoman' and 'chairman' clunky.

'They' gives me a physical reaction. I used to get really stressed over languages homework and I can feel my y7 teacher bollocking me about singular and plural!

They has been used as third person singular for a long time, and it generally doesn't bother me - we use it a lot in documentation at work, things like, "ask the user when they first started experiencing the problem." But this is stuff where someone's sex should be irrelevant, whereas in gynaecology and obstetrics and some other contexts, it is very much relevant.

I really hate the use of folk/folks, though, which is wrapped up in something an aunt said when I was a child, and I know it's irrational and unreasonable, but I won't use it. As someone said upthread, what's wrong with saying people?

A lot of my colleagues don't have English as their first language and are used to having a non-specific third person singular word - which usually takes the masculine third person singular verb form. On top of that, their diversity stats are even worse than over here. At least we have me; many of our teams have no women at all, so defaulting to masculine language forms is accurate, but it embeds expectations and biases that women won't or can't work in this field. Changing documents to "she" gets comments in a way "they" doesn't, and at least it's not "he, he, he, he,he."
Maybe it's not enough, but it's just one of many little battles every day.

Well, folks is the local language in some places. It could be becoming more common elsewhere for other reasons, I think social media has spread some language around in a funny way.

I find it amusing that many of the words I use are viewed as contentious or offensive these days. I grew up as a South Asian in the Middle East and watched a lot of American and British television. My English tends to be a weird blend of various cultural references.

I use folk/folks all the time..... they/them if I don't know the sex of the person I'm referring to.... My friends from high school and I still use 'guys' to address us as a group (we're all women) or, even more horrifying, we use 'ladies'!

I'm still baffled by the lady / ladies thing. This immigrant didn't get the memo so I'm not sure what I'm meant to be outraged about.

I spent a lot of time in the American South and amongst people from Appalachia, where you'd most expect to hear "folks" used, and I swear, the Woke use it more than I ever heard in the place where it'sbeen most commonly used colloquially.

Ditto with y'all. It really grates my ears when someone lacking the appropriate accent in the rest of their speech uses y'all. It feels completely affected, ie a pose.

Why the Woke have adopted speech from the American South, I have no idea. Most likely it's an appropriation of what they regard as African-American lingo. Just as their use of Woke is an appropriation of what the word originally meant to the Black community.

I address adult groups as 'people', youngsters as 'children' and try to keep my language as gender neutral as possible. It really helps when I'm working with a almost-exclusively female group with just one or two men.

I am a huge advocate of the gender-neutral classroom which means no pointed commenting about children's choices of activity or dress-up or friends, no setting boys v girls against each other as in, "Well girls, the boys are all ready, so hurry up!" and no creating single sex pairs or groups or lines.

Teachers and TAs watch each other's language and assumptions and challenge children's assumptions. There's more to it, of course, but it's a move in the right direction. How much gender dysphoria is a result of being expected to conform to gender stereotypes we will probably not know for decades, but we must do what we can.

I don't like gender neutral. I am a woman and I want to be referred to aa such. I'm not ashamed of my biology.

I don't think anyone here is advocating the use neutrals for individuals of known sex, sibello.

I work with a multinational group, I can't think of any gendered language being used. The Americans sometimes use 'guys' as a neutral group term but I think it's more often 'hello everyone' (time zone neutral as well!), or 'thank you all for attending' type of thing. (I've only heard "y'all" from a genuine Southerner). None of our roles have gendered terms available - developer, engineer, application scientist etc.