Say that someone makes a post to a fandom community and addresses the members of that community as "ladies." Is it okay to politely respond that not everyone in the fandom/on the comm is a woman? Some of us are men (trans* or cis), some of us are genderqueer, androgynous, or otherwise not women. (And I'd imagine some of the women in the fandom don'
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I don't know in English, but in French, we have a rule "masculine terms if there is but one man in the group" which is quite sexist, and some people like to subvert it on purpose. I always use the female form of "they" about a class that I have with six guys and 23 girls. Grammatically, I shouldn't, propably. ^^;; But it's not about assuming.
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I do think there's a difference between "ladies" and the French-language situation you mention, because French has grammatical gender while English doesn't. So it's much harder to avoid gender-specific terminology in French. But I take your point.
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(Funny, thinking about it, how 'hey guys' could have and would have totally been considered gender-neutral, or at least acceptable. Just noting that, not making judgements.)
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*nods* I've been trying to stop using it as a gender-neutral term for precisely that reason, but it's pretty engrained.
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Assumptions are never a good thing.
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