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> Is a gendered word really different? Yes. A typo is objectively wrong (as objectively as you can be in such matters, anyway). Gendered words is a matter of style. One style is to only masculine pronouns, another to only use feminine, to mix them, to avoid them altogether... and it's not clear which are better. Avoiding gendered pronouns altogether might be easier on the eyes for some people, for other people it seems confusing (singular they, what?), for others it is simply grating and hard to read, etc. Similar trade offs for the other options, of course. We might as well have people who object to words that they interpret as being offensive, like using the word "right" to indicate "correct" or "good". They might feel that it is biased towards right handed people, and that argument seems to actually have some linguistic precedent - even other than English, "right" in some Germanic languages is also a synonym for "higher", another word with "good" connotations. Even beyond this far-fetched scenario, consider all words that could be argued to have a sexist background. Do we ban all of them, or do we just accept that although they have a nasty history, that history does not necessarily translate to how we intend to use them in this day and age? I also remember some troll on GitHub that started to complain to a lot of repositories - after the Node.js controversy - that their documentation was being sexist. And many of the owners fell straight for it, because apparently it was a well executed troll, and/or they didn't want to risk being dismissive (because, you know, that could end badly for them). |
In English the neuter pronoun is identical to the masculine. "to stop him" doesn't assume that he is male nor female it is agnostic on this point. Unless there is some other indication of the sex of the subject being referred to then you can't necessarily tell. Of course the reason for the use of the masculine pronoun as the neuter is probably historically based in language education being mainly provided to men, but that doesn't mean it needs to be "corrected".
Excepting that point I think I'd agree with what you said.