[marcuskane2]

Interestingly, when I was in school, we were taught that "he" could be used both for male or for gender-neutral usages.

The shift to treating he/him/his as exclusively male seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon (last few decades) as American social progressives sought to change language to be explicitly-inclusive instead of implicitly-inclusive and to avoid confusion due to the context-dependent dual meaning of such words.

1970s - "he" means everyone 1990s - "he/she" means everyone 2020s - "they" means everyone

[lupire]

Explicitly exclusive is another way of saying implicitly inclusive.

Kind of a wild take to ignore centuries of implicit and explicit exclusion of women from having civil rights.

[kanbara]

this is also occurring in a tonne of european languages: german, french, spanish, italian, etc. it's progressives and people who care for others, not just americans.

as is well studies, we know very concretely how language and word usage influences thought (because it is thought, expressed)