[dTal]

No, you missed the point entirely. The point is that you pictured this "blue collar local" as a man, as evidenced by your use of the pronoun "he". Don't tell me that it's about the word "man" and its historical role to mean "human".

>I've certainly noticed that those so interested in gender language police invariably seem incapable of abstractly thinking of a person without attaching a gender thereto.

The irony. Next time say "they" instead of "he".

[Blikkentrekker]

> No, you missed the point entirely. The point is that you pictured this "blue collar local" as a man, as evidenced by your use of the pronoun "he".

No I didn't. The pronoun “he” in English is also very often used to refer to an indeterminate, hypothetical person of irrelevant and unspecified sex.

I didn't picture him as anything in particular, given that I am partially aphantastic and never draw mental pictures about such scenarios.

> The irony. Next time say "they" instead of "he".

There is no irony here; you infer that he is male because of the pronoun and I find such usage to not be universal at all.

The pronoun “he” has a very long history in English for use with a hypothetical person, from which the listener is not meant to infer any particular gender. It is also true that some use the pronoun “they” in that case, but that is not a universal behavior and either may be encountered.

Use of “she” for such hypothetical persons has also seen recent use, and was probably innovated deliberately; some auctors deliberately alternate both in even distribution.

All of this is how the English language is used by different speakers. I am not telling you which is better and how you should use it; I am telling you that if you are denying that all have currency, you are but certainly being willfully ignorant because you do not like the descriptive truth about how English is used by it's speakers.