Or, we could all just agree that "man" actually refers to "Human" or "Humankind" and wave a little magic wand and stop whining about things that don't really matter. I even noticed that female actors do not refer to themselves as actresses anymore, it's just actors whether they are male or female.
Congressman = a congress person who is a human. Man is a male human, woman is a female human.
Because I'm a lib, I guess, I think it's a
little more complicated than this, but it doesn't have to be
a lot more complicated. When the gendered term has traditionally meant something exclusionary, and there is a non-gendered term that works every bit as well, why not use the non-gendered term? We had this discussion over breakfast a few weeks ago: "steward" was a position of honor, "stewardess" was generally a service/subsidiary position. Hence the now fairly universally used "flight attendant." That seems fair.
Secretary is a funny one (despite not being gendered): my
legal secretary wants to be known as that because a
legal secretary is a position with some status. But I know plenty of administrative assistants (even legal assistants) who blanche at the title secretary because of long held biases against the
women (it's almost always related to women) who have held that role.
Chair vs. chairman? There's no need to gender the term: the board's chair is just as descriptive, and there is a long history of excluding women from that kind of role, so I can understand why women object to the term chairman (and wouldn't want it themselves).
I also agree that there are plenty of reasons that using the term "man" to refer to a human shouldn't be seen as exclusionary. It's a question of whether the term is being used to assume a gender, versus being used to assume a person. One thing "
we" (libs at least) often do in legal writing when referring to a generic judge is to change the pronoun to "she." No harm, no foul, and it establishes that we aren't assuming the judge is male. It's the assumption that is the problem.
And--and this is probably where a lot of people get annoyed by this whole discussion--where the use of a gendered term isn't intended as any kind of a slight, there's no need to get huffy about it. If you're not excluding people, who cares? Stop being so sensitive. I largely agree with this, and I also think it's fair to try to adjust our language to show that we understand the history of exclusion, and that we acknowledge that women should no longer be limited in their opportunities as they have been.
Language also changes over time. I would never refer to someone as "Oriental," but my parents--and definitely their parents--used that routinely. I wasn't upset at my grandparents using that term, and while it was changing over time, I'm not going to lose my mind when I hear my mother-in-law say it (she lives in an area without a lot of Asian Americans, so it's not surprising that that old-fashioned term has had a longer life where she lives).
There's nothing wrong with working towards more inclusive language, but we shouldn't overreact to people using antiquated or ambiguous terms, given the context of what someone is saying.
