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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   26061 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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In the past, this would just be 'he' unless there was context otherwise in which case you guess in what's now considered a sexist, stereotyping way (if you are talking about someone at an embroidery club 'she', if you are talking about a general 'he' etc. etc.). Feminism didn't like this, creating the subsequent problem.

That may be the rule per grammarians, and an acceptable usage, but the use of the neuter plural to refer to a noun of unknown gender is actually a norse import that dates back to the old English period.

It’s not just feminism that doesn’t like this. It’s a limiting way of speaking about the world — one that assumes men are the default human actor. I don’t think one has to be a feminist to see this as questionable.

I didn't particularly mean my explanation to be insulting to feminism, I get why they were annoyed by it - from a certain perspective, it sidelines one sex and stereotypes it at the same time. But at the same time, the gender of an unknown person is either male or female. There's no particular insult in having a conventional default, any more than it insults 1 if your binary values default to 0.

I just think it’s far more efficient to be able to speak of a hypothetical person without needing to assume biographical details at the fundamental level of speech. A gender-neutral pronoun would be highly useful here, and would not need to imply any reification of the idea that any known individual can have a gender which is neither male nor female.

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