> This has become problematic when we use the plural.
Grammatically, it's not problematic at all. Some people with new ideas completely out of line with the culture at large make a big deal of it.
Grammatically, it's not problematic at all. Some people with new ideas completely out of line with the culture at large make a big deal of it.
A non-gendered example of this would be something like xerox vs photocopier. There was a time when all photocopiers were xeroxes, but now odds are very low that your xerox machine is a xerox branded photocopier. There are still a few people out there who haven’t bothered to update their language, but largely that shift happened over the past 30 years - and because it’s not very political it was largely a silent shift. “Firemen” is, unfortunately, wrapped up in people’s beliefs about what gender roles SHOULD be - so it’s not going so quietly
It has always seemed to me that a far easier and less painful process would have been to simply accept "men" as gender-neutral, but it seems that ship has sailed *shrug*. I don't think that "Firemen is wrapped up in people’s beliefs about what gender roles SHOULD be" – or at least not necessarily – as many people still just see it as gender neutral.
Historically, the masculine noun class has been used in gender-indeterminate places, but about 100 years ago that usage stared to disappear from the language, or at least become argot. The phrase "I am no man" in the Lord or the Rings is a play on this disappearance.
In English, this disappearance happened alongside a similar change in gender roles; however, in a lot of European languages the social changes occurred, but the linguistic changes did not (and non-European languages often have quite different kinds of noun classes).
It would be interesting to hear how women who speak other European languages that didn't make those changes feel about it - they seem so inherently linked to my ear.
The freedom to define yourself is a good thing, but most people neither need nor want it, and for many who want it undertaking the excercise is a mistake, because it's more flippant wishy-washyness or deliberate, willful ignorance than self-building, per se. Consider the classic case of the Starbucks barista with a degree in postmodern dance theory.
I went to an all girl college prep high school in the early 1970s. All the girls on college track took an aptitude test. We were told to take both the boys and girls test. There were two tests back then. I scored very high in engineering and math on the boys test, but those options did not even exist on the girls test. I found the girls test ridiculous.
This will sound silly but I didn't even consider engineering until after I read The Menace from Earth by Heinlein. I thought engineering meant I wouldn't have a husband and family. I didn't even consider math until after I took this test. I ended up double majoring in Math and Computer Science.
This was in the early days before Comp Sci was gendered. 30% of my Comp Sci class was female. Compare that to my daughter's experience. Her Comp Sci classes were about 15% female until she took a Human Factors class which was 50% female. Sometime in the 1980s women enrolling in Comp Sci dramatically declined.