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I can see an organization having an internal gendered pronoun elimination policy --who cares. But I think one should allow anyone writing any contribution to use whatever pronoun gender they prefer. Encourage women to use feminine grammatical gender and men to use either grammatical gender pronoun.

Leave it up to the writer to decide.

For what it's worth, I prefer the neutral 'they' but I also don't get caught up in grammatical genders. Imagine if English had retained grammatical genders for regular nouns --as german and spanish do. What, so we rewrite the language and change grammatical gender because it gets conflated with biological gender?

Also, when I read text and it has the grammatical gender opposite mine, I don't feel disenfranchised by the text. It's not something I keep conscious of. I'm not pronoun hunting, and I think few people do that. Reading would become incomprehensibly distracting.

It's the same as when you see the pronoun 'you' Do you automatically believe it refers to you personally? I know I don't. Same with he, she, they, they're all a third person abstraction.



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