Gendered languages are the worst. Some are more gendered than others, but they're generally not that difficult to spot. English, for example, isn’t grammatically gendered as much as other languages because it doesn’t have a segregation system for nouns between masculine or feminine.
French is one of the worst gendered languages out there. For example, some idiot decided that a table is a female and should be called ‘la table’ to emphasize it. Why do the French think that a table is female and not a male or sexless is beyond me! Due to this feeble-minded classification, those who learn French are forced to remember each noun’s “sexuality” to use the language properly which strains the long-term memory instead of relying on logic to master the language.
As a writer, I think that segregating the nouns of a language between female and male is utterly ridiculous. Unless a reader is sexually perverted, it’s not essential to indicate the sex of nouns in each and every damn sentence.
In most cases, it stands in the way of expressing one’s thoughts especially when the language necessitates that you must specify the sex of a noun when you don’t know it yet or don’t consider it necessary. For example, and in English, a “person” can only be a he or a she. Let’s say you’re expecting a person, but you still don’t know the sexuality of the person, the language forbids you from calling the person “it.” And as a result of that constraint, you stumble in speech when referring to the person you’re expecting. In many cases, I find myself forced to write “he/she” instead of just using fewer letters by saying “it” to show gender-neutrality.
Segregation is a virtue of tribalism, which I have talked about in detail in my book “Distribia: A Society Free Of Tribalism.” Nothing good can come out of employing segregation in society or its languages.
I personally try to keep my writings as much gender-neutral as possible such as by using “humankind” instead of “mankind” or “businessperson” instead of “businessman” or “businesswoman.” However, it should be taught early in schools because many learners’ mother tongues are grammatically gendered languages. It should be dealt with a long time before learners arrive at their undergraduate studies.
Gendered language is pervasive, but people aren’t necessarily aware of it. I'm not proposing that gendered nouns such as "mankind" or "congressman" should be deleted entirely from the language. I'm only proposing that the language should be more inclusive and allow people to say "humankind" or "congressperson" if they so decided.
