English Stack Exchange
English Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [gender-neutral]

This tag is for questions related to gender neutral pronouns, nouns, and sentences.

Ask questions on writing a sentence when you don’t know a person’s gender. For question on grammatical number involving singular or plural pronouns, refer to the grammatical-number tag.

190 questions
28
votes
19 answers

Is there a non-gendered term for "gentlemanly"

Opening doors, offering to pay the tab, helping with a coat or a light of the smoke: we may describe these acts of a man to be gentlemanly. In a word, how may we describe these acts of any person?
Lemma
  • 1,327
16
votes
3 answers

Is "Jew" gender-neutral?

I had thought that Jew was gender-neutral, until I heard somebody who was asked if their mother was a Jew and responded, "of course not; she's a Jewess". Is Jew a gender-neutral form, or does one need to distinguish between Jew and Jewess?
Peter Olson
  • 6,111
10
votes
2 answers

Gender-neutral mermaid

What’s the gender-neutral word for an individual mermaid (Ariel) or merman (Triton) of unknown gender? Merperson? Hiberno-English merrow? Germanic nixie (Melusine)? German: die Nixe (f.) and – rarely – der Nix/Neck/Nöck (m.), e.g. in Grimm’s “The…
Crissov
  • 949
6
votes
3 answers

What is a gender-neutral way of saying "middle-man"?

As per the title, I'm looking for an alternative phrasing for "middle-man" without the gender connotations.
Matt
  • 1,284
4
votes
2 answers

What job descriptions are currently accepted as gendered?

It seems to me that in my lifetime, the use of "actress" has fallen out of favor in lieu of "actor", while relatively recently the term "comedienne" has been climbing in popularity. These blog posts seem to confirm my perception: "actress" and…
user1359
  • 1,488
3
votes
1 answer

gender neutral pronoun - he/she or it

I'm a bit lost in gender neutrality. Please see the example below. A: What, I got a child‽ B: Sooner or later *he or she* will show up. From my own research, people put preferences this way: they > she > she or he > he. I think that they, she and…
Vochmelka
  • 133
2
votes
3 answers

How to make gender-neutral: "Let he who would move the world, first move himself."

Here's the original quote from Socrates: Let he who would move the world, first move himself. I'm thinking a non-gender specific version would be: Let they who would move the world, first move themselves. Or should it be theirselves?
James Gentes
  • 123
2
votes
3 answers

Use of "their" in a letter addressed to a person of unknown gender

I wrote the following sentence in an answer to an anonymous reviewer: We would like to thank again the reviewer for the positive review and hope that the new version of the text meets their expectations. I don't know if the reviewer is male or…
Surb
  • 251
2
votes
2 answers

Is gender-neutral language the norm for academic writing ? If so, when did this start?

Most texts I read on linguistics and translation studies seem to use gender-neutral language (e.g. 'he or she/his or her', 'they/their'for people of unknown gender). Is this the dominant trend for academic writing in general (or even for the fields…
Martin09
  • 29
1
vote
2 answers

Do all major occupations ending -man have a gender-neutral option?

Traditionally, many professions have been known by terms ending in -man, presumably because they have often been overwhelmingly performed by men in the past. There are probably others but ones I can think of off the top of my head…
The Dark Lord
  • 348
1
vote
2 answers

Will we ever come up with non-gender specific pronouns and possessive pronouns for the English language?

Will we ever come up with non-gender specific pronouns and possessive pronouns for the English language? It seems that there are many new words in the English language every year, so why not gender-neutral pronouns? This would solve many problems,…
user201324
1
vote
2 answers

Referring to specific individuals gender-neutrally

I am reviewing a set of CVs for a senior position. I need to provide a short summary of each CV with a proceed/drop recommendation. Here is a sample: Ford Prefect: From his CV, he seems to have successfully moved away from functional role A to…
FreeBird
  • 121
0
votes
1 answer

Writing a gender neutral sentence, does 'their' make sense in this usage?

I'm building an app that people can share the results of their calculations. I'm a bit stuck on wording, see below: Andy would like to share their results from a pairing Catherine would like to share their results from a pairing Because I'm not…
Andy Holmes
  • 103
-1
votes
1 answer

Is using the word person in "person's wife" a recent phenomenon?

I came across a language textbook talking about the wife of a "person", rather than of a "man": okusan: (another person's) wife On a following page, it defined "goshuujin" as "(another person's) husband", rather than "(another woman's)…
Golden Cuy
  • 18,154