In most or all the languages of the world, the default gender is male. If the personal pronoun is singular and refers to a person, it's he/him. Masculine. (Except in US English, where we sometimes say "they". Or a baby in English can be "it". I digress.) Now some people say that's sexist. Maybe it originally was. But what are we supposed to use? We could have one personal singular pronoun for humans that is male and female. Maybe like "shim" or "s/he". And some have proposed that. But that's almost too simple. Or the default personal pronoun could be female. By why isn't that sexist? Or anti-male in any event? The artificial language Esperanto uses the male as the default gender. And in response to this, the artificial language Ido doesn't. But as speakers of Esperanto speakers point out, it's not sexist. You need a default gender. And in every language in the world it is male. (Of course you could have one universal pronoun, that refers to all people and/or objects. He/she/it. But that would be way to simple. And pretty ridiculous too.)
Why ridiculous? Why is gender such a big deal? Why does it even need to be regarded grammatically unless it's relevant to the conversation? I'm not necessarily arguing against doing away with gender in grammar, but questioning why we need gender syntactically in the first place.
That’s actually a great question. “It” has always been my default; but also knowing German it’s kind of a response to ridiculous things being gendered. I never had any idea that dorks or tables had a gender. “It” doesn’t capture the humanity though. “They” might be the best word we have now in English, although since it captures a plural it still doesn’t quite feel right. “Where’s Jamie going?” “”They’re going to the 7-11” “Oh, who’s with Jamie?” Some kind of new word is needed. And I’ll be frank, because while I desire a good word, I’m kind of conservative in that I don’t take kindly to trends and new stuff (ask me about technology).
