The older I get, the more I fail to understand how the vocal minority is able to completely control the narrative on everything.
While we’re at it, let’s just gut the English language of anything remotely related to gender, race, or color. Then we can go after Latin-based languages that use gender at the core of their grammar.
Weird. The older I get the more understandable it becomes to me. None of this crap matters. At most it matters because it enables bullying, but bullies are always going to find something to bully over.
"Good job, you won, you made me stop using a perfectly fine word that was uniformly well understood, and replace it with another perfectly fine word that is also uniformly well understood. Nothing changed, but now at least you get to take credit for it. Good for you."
Eventually the bullies bully themselves and then no one is safe.
I especially find the term “birthing person” particularly cringey and offensive and I imagine women do as well. Humanity was perfectly fine with the word “woman” (in whatever language you choose) for as long as we invented language, but then some elitist academic comes along and thinks they can simply erase that because…reasons?
Irrelevant nitpick: "gender" in linguistics means "category". Objects in grammatically gendered languages are rarely/never categorized as "manly" or "effeminate"; they're, for example, categorized as "animate" or "inanimate". [1]
Reciprocal nitpick: That explanation of category is pretty weak and cannot be applied universally anyway. In many cases, gender assignment is completely arbitrary, and the article pretty much admits that. For example, in Croatian, table (stol) is masculine, while chair (stolica) is feminine, which is completely arbitrary, and both are inanimate. There is no rule in Croatian (or other Slavic languages that I am aware of) that categorizes gendered nouns for any reason.
While we’re at it, let’s just gut the English language of anything remotely related to gender, race, or color. Then we can go after Latin-based languages that use gender at the core of their grammar.