I have lived long enough for the English language to evolve—that is, I am plenty old. When I was little, we said “prescription” instead of “script”, referred to a female actor as an“actress”, and of course understood that“mankind” and the general use of “he” indicated both men and women. “God” of course was always “He” and its variants “Him” and “His”. (When I started writing sermons, I used “You” a lot and such expressions as “The Eternal One” to dodge the gender issue.) “Ms.” did not yet exist nor the singular use of “their” in modern times as in, “Each individual must provide their phone numbers to their fearless leader .” And we only had “firemen” not “fire fighters”.
Most of these changes have to do with what people call “inclusive language”. I remember when “he or she” in a sentence sounded so strange to me. Now it just sounds awkward, even though I use it at times because I am sympathetic to the idea behind it. Of course I perform linguistic acrobatics to avoid such awkward phrasing whenever possible, such as switching to the plural, or the second person, or using vocabulary we already have at hand, such as “humankind”.
Perhaps you think a lot of this is much fuss about nothing; that it is all petty and superficial. If so, thank God you speak English. Is it so hard to give at least a nod to inclusive language by avoiding certain vocabulary and throwing in an extra “ he or she” once in a while? Now don’t go around whining. You have it made compared to a speaker of a language like Spanish. Once I explain why, you will count your blessings as to how easy it is to display how open-minded and nondiscriminatory you are.
Get ready, because here comes a Spanish lesson: Suppose you want to refer to a total of 5 people in a room and not indicate their gender. In English, we would do that by saying “everyone”. No can do in Spanish. You have to choose to refer to all five people as female, if they in fact all are, with the word “todas”, or if all male “todos”, or if a mix, then again the masculine pronoun “todos”. And even if four were females and one were male it would still be the masculine pronoun “todos”. Yes, I know, that is so sexist. What to do? Some Spanish-speaking feminists have suggested a gender-neutral word “todes”.
A similar problem happens with a heap of words that refer to people, such as “friend”, “musician”, “teacher”, and so on. In English these can be male, female, or even non-binary. Not so in Spanish; there is a forced choice: In Spanish, “amiga” necessarily indicates a friend who is female, and “amigo” one who is male. So what will it be, “amig-” with a gender-neutral “e” sound at the end? (technically, because of sound rules, the spelling would be “amigue”.) So here’s the issue: A Spanish speaker who would aspire to changes like this would have to constantly speak differently, having to remember to change so many words, that it would be almost like learning a new language.
¡Dios mío! Spanish speakers have it tough. Maybe the solution for them is to have a manageable set of words that symbolically represent the ideal of non-sexist language, so they can go on speaking normally. If such a speaker is reading this, I would love to hear your opinion of how to bring your language up-to-date. Meanwhile the minimal sacrifice of effort to make English evolve for the good cause of making everyone—todes, todas, and todos– welcome and included is well worth it
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By the way, on December 8th, this article from an online journal came out about a controversy over a gender neutral pronoun in French: https://theconversation.com/no-need-to-iel-why-france-is-so-angry-about-a-gender-neutral-pronoun-173304
offbeatcompassion 