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You reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in Language"

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...

In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit.

My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.



Thank you - I hadn't seen that before, and this is basically how I feel about having to attach a gender to anyone I refer to in the third person.




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