Wrong, it is about intent. By alexgaynor's logic, all traffic accidents are assaults.
Another good argument here is that gendered language is intended to be hostile (as much as a cultural narrative can have intent) and you might just not realize it.
The article had me until it basically said using "he" in documentation makes you an asshole. It does not. Period. You can say it's better to use they, and I would even agree with it. But the article did not stop there.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/he
There is a prescriptivist movement that has branded the use of a generic "he" as not generic and therefore sexist. I refuse to feel guilty because someone else has decided that they can declare language to have officially changed, and dictate what I meant by words I used.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1016/do-you-use-a...
There will always be people who resist this kind of construction, not because they're sexist but because the singular 'they' sounds clumsy to modern ears, its long history notwithstanding. Instead, try something less periphrastic:
Visitors are assigned a session ID, which is transmitted in the HTTP response and stored in the browser.
Shorter, clearer, more direct, and gender-free.
That's the thing though: it doesn't "sound clumsy to modern ears" for many people.
I use "singular-they" completely without thinking; as far as I can recall, I've never explicitly decided to use it, it just comes naturally when it is appropriate. The same seems to be true for many others as well.
However for some people (such as yourself, I presume), this obviously isn't the case.
From there, it's simply a numbers game.
I have no idea where those numbers stand today, but I don't recall anybody ever even noticing my usage, so it can't be too disturbing for those I interact with. It's hard for me to judge how many other people use this construction simply because it's so natural that I don't tend to notice it when they do.
Still, given that it perfectly addresses an otherwise awkward deficiency in English, in a way that fits in naturally with other English usage (e.g., singular/plural "you") and has both historical precedent and widespread modern adoption, the future of "singular-they" looks pretty bright...
When visitors are each presented (the visitor's) personalised session page, each visitor will need to enter the visitor's name, credit card, as well as the visitor's birth date.
Also very passive, which I think has been frowned upon in writing styles since the latter half of the 20th century.
Such a word might seem strange at first, but if major broadcasters such as the BBC instructed staff to use it, larger society would soon fall into place – at least in written English.
Thankfully, this is a European innovation of Chinese that we mostly ignore.
Does the classification of nouns into masculine and feminine reflect gender stereotypes at all? Is there a similar movement towards neutral pronouns for all nouns?
When a user visits the website, the site assigns a session ID to the visit and transmits it in the HTTP response. The user's browser stores this ID.
/pedant (n.b. there is at least one grammatical error in the above pedantry)
Nobody can afford to reject such a pull request now...
Or what would happen if we started pestering Linus about including a pronoun check in git by default?
