Quote Originally Posted by simonj View Post
A week or so ago I posted a link on facebook to a news story about a newly discovered species of very tiny lizards. My sister instantly commented with "WOWZA! She's gorgeous." and "HOW did they find her?" which begged me to ask "how do you know it's a female?" and her reply was "Under patriarchy people are led to always use the pronoun "he" I say "she" If I had said he, you wouldn't be asking...". I disagreed, pointing out that I have studied feminism and am a feminist which she should know, we have talked about it in the past and, also, reactionary tactics like that do more harm than good. They promote the out-dated "man-hating, bra-burning" connotations of feminism and when you make create issues out of nowhere you're minimising the bigger issues that need to be tackled.
Imagine how different life would be if English had a gender neutral singular pronoun.