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Comment by Entalpi | Hacker News Reader

Slighty off-topic but I find (as a non-native English speaker) the whole deal with ”he/she” to be super annoying when reading. Especially when the gender is basically not important such as when talking about what the dentist said (or w/e). Is there any trick so to speak to avoid such situations?

Also, in Swedish we have ”he/she/* = han/hon/hen”. Which is soo useful and I am still kind of amazed that the term ”hen” is a relative modern invention. I wonder how in earlier days people referred to other people when the gender was not the main focus. Maybe it was always more important before? Or was perhaps the use of titles (the Dentristess..?) a way to denote gender an important communication tool?

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See point 19: >"They" is a great word for referring to an unspecified person of an unspecified gender.

Historically in English, the masculine form was the default gender-neutral term.

"Mankind" to refer to all humans.

"All men are created equal" to refer to all humans.

"No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality" refers to all humans.

More recently as other comments have pointed out, singular "they/their" has become more accepted. "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of their nationality nor denied the right to change their nationality".

> Historically in English, the masculine form was the default gender-neutral term.

Actually, singular "they" predates generic "he" by several centuries. Generic "he" was an 18th-19th century invention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

They

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

I guess in earlier days they used the form they found appropriate and didnt think about it much more. Also, as much as you and I like it, the gender-neutral pronoun in swedish is relatively modern enough for it to be yet hardly used in everyday communication (YMMV of course).

I heard at some point (maybe in school, maybe not) that if the gender is not known, you just pick one and stick with it. Some people also take the approach of switching back and forth out of fairness. I find this even worse than saying "he/she".

Just use the generic he[1]. It's classic and has the benefit of not injecting politics into an unrelated issue.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Generic_h...

So the problem is that there’s no way to disguish the “generic” he from the “gendered” he, and it is very easy to read everything that uses the generic as being gendered, and then you suddenly have a world where only guys exist, which is probably some sort of political statement.

The singular they[1] has precedent going back to the fourteenth century. Just use that.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

> and then you suddenly have a world where only guys exist, which is probably some sort of political statement.

I wish people who felt about that strongly and wanted to make a political statement just used the gendered she creating the fictional world where only girls exist. That would have been so much simpler and avoided so much pointless arguments over the grammatical number and gender of pronouns.

As a mathematician I use the generic she as it's got a better expected value if you're optimizing for being right.

I just use "they," "them," "their." Not sure why this isn't more common.

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