Personally I like David Brin's solution from the Uplift novels. Most of the things we want to say have nothing to do with sex and apply regardless of gender, so

Personally I like David Brin's solution from the Uplift novels. Most of the things we want to say have nothing to do with sex and apply regardless of gender, so if we aren't going to let the same words double for male and gender-neutral usage, keep the traditional, simple words for the latter usage and move the former to something else. Thus, in Brin's novels, 'man' refers to any human with no implication of gender, and the words for a specifically male or female human are 'mel' and 'fem'.