Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.
it was
Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.
and it became:
Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.
It’s insane.
Lehrer being explicitly male and Lehrer:innen being explicitly inclusive?
I appreciate that this seems to be an emotional topic, but if people choose to use language in a new way, would it not be best to not withhold that information from you as a reader? Someone else wrote that it's like using an ad-blocker, but if I were to read an article, I would want to read it in the exact form someone wrote it, no? It's a bit like Americans auto-replacing "fucking" with "f***g" in their browsers to avoid an annoyance, but they lose information in the process.
(exception: Chinese didn't really bother with gendered pronouns until about the nineteenth century, due to the need to translate European languages, so some had to be introduced)
> you would lose meaning
No meaning is lost that has not been there before.
> someone else's use of language awkward
Most would judge that it's not just awkward, but grating.
In German: Leser (masculine)
Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen
This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive.
Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow.
I'm far from an expert in such things, but I'd observed that the approach in English to gendered words (actor vs. actress) seemed to be, over time, to drift towards calling everyone an actor - as a neutral term, to avoid treating women differently, rather than a male term per se.
In German, from your explanation, it's gone the opposite way - aggressively maintaining the female option because of a dislike of broad adoption of the male version as a neutral default.
Only living things can have more than one gender and in that case, not only does the article change, but so does the suffix. There is no "singress" in English, only "singer", but in German there's "der Sänger" or "die Sängerin". Calling a female singer "der Sänger" would be grammatically completely incorrect.
The only thing that changed fairly recently is that more and more people intentionally try to maintain gender ambiguity when they don't intent to specify a gender, in which case "the singer" becomes "die Sänger:in", or even "der:die Sänger:in" if you want to be even more pedantic.
