Inclusive language isn’t even a particularly new “woke” thing. The phrase “Ladies and gentlemen” goes way way back.
I’m going to assume you’re in the white men majority, probably christian, so it seems weird to you because by default, people use he/him and male centric wording. Lets flip it for a second: female is now the default. You’re presumed to be a woman unless proven otherwise. Everything starts with “Ladies, welcome to the show”. All the products are pink and advertised to women, unless it’s specifically a men’s product, and when it does, it clearly says “for men” like you’re a special kind of human. You buy a wrench “for men” to fix your car. People always talk to your wife first, as you’re just the wife’s husband she’s hauling around. How do you feel? Pretty excluded right?
That’s why we use inclusive language. And we didn’t even touch LGBTQ+ issues yet.
It’s not hard to not make assumptions. I can use “OP claimed they did X” instead of "OP claimed she did ", with zero loss of information, but the first one is right whether you’re a man or woman, the other assumes you’re a woman and implies you’re unusual for not being a woman, you’re the other kind that needs to be explicitly mentioned. And it happens all day, everyday, all the time.
So, if you want to include everyone, you don’t make gender, race, political alignment or religious assumptions unless you know for sure. It’s basic respect, it’s free, and it makes some people happier, so why not do it?
I speak french, I can definitely understand the mess that it is (and the currently accepted neutral pronouns are… not great). Fortunately in those languages we’re also just kinda accepting we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future, it’s not like we can have a french 2.0 where my desk is genderless.
Ultimately it’s respect. You don’t have to go all out of your way to be inclusive, but trying your best to be is a nice gesture overall.
This might not be the right place for a linguistic history lesson, but how did that happen in the first place? Why does your desk have a gender? It sounds creepy thinking about it now. Who looked at a desk, or a spoon and thought “ah, that’s a ‘she’, then looked at a door and said ‘yep, definitely a ‘he’ right there…”
It’s kinda weird because you somehow intuitively know which gender it’s gonna be, it’s got to have some pattern to it in some way. I think it comes down to sounds, “la/une table” vs “le/un table”, “le/un bureau” vs “la/une bureau”. Except when we decide fuck it we’ll just say “l’amour”, “l’argent” so it’s like, only tangible things can be gendered but also intangible things inherently sound weird if you do try to slap a “le/un” or “la/une” before it, so like the whole sound of the word somewhat carries its gender? Things in “-ette” are pretty much always female.
The more you think about it the weirder it gets with exceptions and edge cases.
Who looked at a desk, or a spoon and thought “ah, that’s a ‘she’, then looked at a door and said ‘yep, definitely a ‘he’ right there…”
Thinking about it, it sounds about right. If I were to name a thing, I’d probably just pick what sounds best kinda like you’d name a pet or baby except you’re not constrained to a gender.
I’d definitely enjoy a good read on how the fuck we ended up there. It seems to affect most romance languages so it’s gotta go way back. I think the genders are mostly matched with spanish too, like, tables are also female in spanish iirc.
Inclusive language isn’t even a particularly new “woke” thing. The phrase “Ladies and gentlemen” goes way way back.
I’m going to assume you’re in the white men majority, probably christian, so it seems weird to you because by default, people use he/him and male centric wording. Lets flip it for a second: female is now the default. You’re presumed to be a woman unless proven otherwise. Everything starts with “Ladies, welcome to the show”. All the products are pink and advertised to women, unless it’s specifically a men’s product, and when it does, it clearly says “for men” like you’re a special kind of human. You buy a wrench “for men” to fix your car. People always talk to your wife first, as you’re just the wife’s husband she’s hauling around. How do you feel? Pretty excluded right?
That’s why we use inclusive language. And we didn’t even touch LGBTQ+ issues yet.
It’s not hard to not make assumptions. I can use “OP claimed they did X” instead of "OP claimed she did ", with zero loss of information, but the first one is right whether you’re a man or woman, the other assumes you’re a woman and implies you’re unusual for not being a woman, you’re the other kind that needs to be explicitly mentioned. And it happens all day, everyday, all the time.
So, if you want to include everyone, you don’t make gender, race, political alignment or religious assumptions unless you know for sure. It’s basic respect, it’s free, and it makes some people happier, so why not do it?
Pretty reasonable mate, personally as I speak English and Spanish it’s very simple to use inclusive lang in English, but in Spanish it’s a mess.
Thx for your POV.
I speak french, I can definitely understand the mess that it is (and the currently accepted neutral pronouns are… not great). Fortunately in those languages we’re also just kinda accepting we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future, it’s not like we can have a french 2.0 where my desk is genderless.
Ultimately it’s respect. You don’t have to go all out of your way to be inclusive, but trying your best to be is a nice gesture overall.
This might not be the right place for a linguistic history lesson, but how did that happen in the first place? Why does your desk have a gender? It sounds creepy thinking about it now. Who looked at a desk, or a spoon and thought “ah, that’s a ‘she’, then looked at a door and said ‘yep, definitely a ‘he’ right there…”
It’s kinda weird because you somehow intuitively know which gender it’s gonna be, it’s got to have some pattern to it in some way. I think it comes down to sounds, “la/une table” vs “le/un table”, “le/un bureau” vs “la/une bureau”. Except when we decide fuck it we’ll just say “l’amour”, “l’argent” so it’s like, only tangible things can be gendered but also intangible things inherently sound weird if you do try to slap a “le/un” or “la/une” before it, so like the whole sound of the word somewhat carries its gender? Things in “-ette” are pretty much always female.
The more you think about it the weirder it gets with exceptions and edge cases.
Thinking about it, it sounds about right. If I were to name a thing, I’d probably just pick what sounds best kinda like you’d name a pet or baby except you’re not constrained to a gender.
I’d definitely enjoy a good read on how the fuck we ended up there. It seems to affect most romance languages so it’s gotta go way back. I think the genders are mostly matched with spanish too, like, tables are also female in spanish iirc.