[NeedMoreTea]

SE is a Q&A site, to answer questions. HN an anonymous discussion. Most messages on both do without names and pronouns entirely. The few times they become necessary is it not better to simply stick to neutral?

Not to be uncaring, offensive, or presumptuous, but to be neutral.

In my life, in a social setting, in work etc I'm going to be much more likely to need to use names and pronouns. I'll make effort to get them right and cause minimal offence, along with keeping friendships. Yet people use the neutral form all the time in conversation as well, sometimes mixed in amongst their names and gendered pronouns.

What is so wrong with that?

[merb]

well I do not think that using non neutral pronouns or names is offensive to another gender. or at least it shouldn't be. example: in germany there is the word student. it means the same than the english version. in germany it uses a male pronoun, but the simple word targeted all kinds of students, not just male ones. the word just had a maskulin pronoun. unfortunatly it was gender incorrect, so some people came up with studentin, however now we sometimes need to deal with the rest and the languages get totally fucked up by genderfication. sometimes a maskulin pronoun does not target a certain group of people. i.e. using neutral/genderfication of pronouns/nouns most often makes it worse. it actually views the world as binary (only males/females) and is most often no the way the language was designed. (some words have a maskulin pronoun but still target everybody) using our languages differently also does not fix any poblem at all, in some cases it might make it even worse.