this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Other languages get around just fine without gendered pronouns. I bet there are other languages that feel like English is missing valuable concepts as well (not necessarily gender-related) , but we don't miss them since we never had them.
I didn't say they didn't, simply that the idea that "Gendered words serve no purpose" is untrue, they are very useful.
They have their use, but I'd say in most sentences the gender doesn't matter at all.
"She went to the grocery store.": Here the gender of that person is as important as any other attribute like the color of their shoes.
Imagine we have pronouns based on shoe color, let's say "de" for someone wearing white shoes. "De went to the grocery store."
And now someone proposes we could ged rid of that pronoun and you say "knowing what shoe color people wear is very useful though!"
This is a better way to word the point I was trying to make. Gender is just another detail in the sentence. If more details are needed, like the gender of the subject, they can be called out specifically like every other detail, like shoe color.
I agree that gendered pronouns can be somewhat useful, but definitely not "very" useful. I can't even contrive a situation where it would be very useful
I would argue it does make a difference. Like I said, many people don't fit gender norms, but most people do. So knowing it's a woman shopping can suggest a array of things.
She will likely be buying some degree more female-oriented or marketed products, a strong example being tampons or a weaker example being beauty products
Her experience shopping will be that of a woman's, i.e. she might get patronised in the hardware section or sales-bullied in the technology section, both of which are quite common for women even now
I really can't think of an example where you interact with other people where a woman's experience won't be affected by her being a woman.