OK. I don’t know how much you have heard, read, or had experience with the whole idea of “Gender Inclusive Language” but here at Messiah College, where I learn stuff, I have had to account for this phenomena in my writing, with no small amount of perfunctory annoyance.
Simply put, gender inclusive language removes the “he, him” and “MAN-kind, you guys” and all other usually male oriented pronouns or nouns when used in reference to a person of unknown gender, or collective group of mixed gender. For instance, in my last post, I said something like “the Bible has made more men than any other book.” What I should be understood as saying is this, “The Bible has made people better,” which is how I should rewrite that sentence to avoid any semblance of excluding women from this. I actually do not mean that the Bible has made no women, I mean simply that the Bible has a tendency to transform and strengthen the core traits that makes a man a man and a woman a woman.
This then becomes the habit of my writing. Its not that I mind using language that includes women just as much as men, it is more that I was taught in a literary tradition that was just peachy for a long time until someone decided that it was somehow discriminatory. And habits are hard to break.
Personally, I think we could all stand to be way more mature than we are being, and realize a device of literature and move on with our lives, rather than to get offended about it. Seriously, why bother going around outraged because a new person in college, or high school is a freshman when they are in fact a woman? I mean, come on. Excepting the days when women were perhaps barred from institutions of higher learning, I don’t think anyone seriously intended to mean that only men could go to college, or whatever whoever is offended by this thinks.
Furthermore, if we don’t like all this, and we can’t use words like “mankind” anymore, than we need to rename the entire race. Human still has man in it. And so does woman. and women.
Since when did it become so about us that we had to start being offended by everything, and demand that society bend over backward to include, pander to, cease from offense toward, and in any/every other way stop inconveniencing ourselves and whatever little club, group, or minority that we perceive ourselves as belonging to?
in one very real way: Grow up, people.
a simple man 