Language and culture are separate, if related, issues: Japanese has no gendered pronouns but the culture, and other aspects of language, are gender dependant. Turkic languages in general lack gendered pronouns.
And by the time I was 8 I realised that French had no real equivalent for "he" and "she", as the pronoun used depended on the noun used in the first place, and possessive pronouns related to the possession, not the possessor. More recently I read an article that referred throughout to a very male actor as "Elle" because the article started off by talking about "la vedette. And Beauty and the Beast are both "elle".
It's not easy to conceptualise a gender-free way of talking about people when there isn't a gender-free way of talking about anything; when even pens and pencils have (different) genders
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And by the time I was 8 I realised that French had no real equivalent for "he" and "she", as the pronoun used depended on the noun used in the first place, and possessive pronouns related to the possession, not the possessor. More recently I read an article that referred throughout to a very male actor as "Elle" because the article started off by talking about "la vedette. And Beauty and the Beast are both "elle".
It's not easy to conceptualise a gender-free way of talking about people when there isn't a gender-free way of talking about anything; when even pens and pencils have (different) genders
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