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Re: Gender neutrality and the multiple-personality third-person pronoun

Subject: Re: Gender neutrality and the multiple-personality third-person pronoun
From: Peter Neilson <neilson -at- alltel -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:45:08 -0500

Sean Hower wrote:


-------------------------
I know it has serious de-humanizing connotations, but maybe we
professional writers and the academics who train future generations
should just start advocating the use of "it" "its" and "itself" when
referring to a single person whose gender is unknown.
-------------------------
I don't know about you, but I always hear people refer to babies as
> "it" until they find out whether it's a boy or it's a girl. Wouldn't
> "He's a girl!" sound sort of weird? ;-)

Standard once was to refer to horses as "it". Now the sex of
the horse is usually used. People sometimes ask us if one
of our chubby gelding ponies is pregnant. (A gelding is
a castrated male horse.) We sometimes say, "She is a boy."
Maybe I should change to "Them are a boy."
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Re: Gender neutrality and the multiple-personality third-person pronoun: From: Sean Hower

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