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Comment by GarrisonPrime | Hacker News Reader

The so-called masculine pronouns can be gender neutral. Their use is usual and proper when the gender of someone is unknown. This is true of practically every language on Earth.

Another way to see it is that he/him/his are always gender neutral, and only the feminine forms are gendered for clarity when context calls for it. Most often context does not, which could be why you’ll so regularly hear all-women groups referring to each other as “guys”.

Millennia of human societal development doesn’t care about the enlightened PC arrogance of 2019.

Sure, there are reasons why having gendered pronouns at all can be bothersome in today’s world. There is some merit to the idea of doing away with them, but you can’t force cultural change on human beings. Even if we move to gender neutral pronouns, the zeitgeist would most likely simply revert to he/his/him like it always has, rather than some contrived “xe” or similar such.

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>The so-called masculine pronouns can be gender neutral. Their use is usual and proper when the gender of someone is unknown. This is true of practically every language on Earth.

In theory, sure.

But imagine I told that riddle where the solution is "the surgeon is the boy's mother". But I kept referring to the surgeon by the "gender neutral" pronoun "he".

You wouldn't feel like you had been misled? You wouldn't feel I had committed to a gender?

I'm not a fan of being super-PC about pronouns, myself. But you have to admit, they do trick you into certain assumptions about the referent that can lead you astray (unless you practice Herculean levels of epistemic hygiene).

I'd rather err on the number than accidentally rule out a gender.

> But imagine I told that riddle where the solution is "the surgeon is the boy's mother". But I kept referring to the surgeon by the "gender neutral" pronoun "he".

In that case you would indeed be deliberately misleading your hearer. Given that you know the gender of the surgeon, and indeed this information is key to your riddle, you would be expected to use a specifically matching pronoun (if any - in practice, of course, the riddle is carefully phrased so as to avoid using a pronoun for the surgeon).

That's not comparable to referring to an unknown person of unspecified gender, where the long-established English convention is to use "he" as a non-gender-specific singular pronoun.

If "he" really, unambiguously functions as a gender neutral pronouns for persons of unspecified identity, that shouldn't matter, though.

Let me say it a different way then.

You can't both say that "he" is a gender neutral pronoun for a generic person, and that I'm affirming a specific gender for said person with "he". Those are directly contradictory.

"He" - like many words - has multiple meanings and usages. Context matters. In some contexts, it is an unambiguously male pronoun. In others, it's not.

It doesn't work to pick just one specific definition, and then interpret the word according to that definition in every context. Human language is rarely that rigid.

Enlightened arrogance is one thing. Being aware of—and addressing—bias in articles is another.

“They” doesn’t cost anyone anything. It’s not a new word. It’s gender-neutral. It’s an easy win, and a change worth making.

Generally I agree with you. However using "he" also doesn't cost anyone anything in this context. After reading I couldn't have told you if the author had used "he," "she," or "they" until you mentioned it.

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