I scanned the comments here to see if anyone has brought up data about the underlying linguistic issue. I call baloney on the silly idea that "gendered pronouns

I scanned the comments here to see if anyone has brought up data about the underlying linguistic issue. I call baloney on the silly idea that "gendered pronouns" make life better or worse for anyone in actual society as contrasted with "nongendered pronouns." What is my evidence? I speak the world's most-spoken language (the only language that arguably has more speakers than English, namely Modern Standard Chinese) and it has totally nongendered pronouns. There is not a distinction in spoken Chinese[1] between "he," "she," or "it," as the language has just one third-person singular pronoun, namely tā. But my wife, who grew up in Chinese-speaking society and has since lived in English-speaking society, and I, who have lived in both places, think it is ludicrous to suppose that Chinese-speaking society is "less sexist" in any systematic way just because of the pronoun system of Chinese. Pronouns appear to make no difference at all. The map is not the territory. On this issue, languages appear to vary arbitrarily with no particular influence on social custom, and not much influence from social notions of male or female superiority or inferiority. Gendered pronouns don't matter for anything important. It is an extraordinary claim to say that they do. People who make extraordinary claims should bring along extraordinary evidence to back up those claims. [1] Under Western influence, after extensive contact with speakers of Indo-European languages and translation of books from those languages into Chinese, the Chinese writing system has sometimes distinguished written forms '他,'她,' and '它' for "he," "she," and "it," but all are pronounced /tā/ in speech and this distinction has to be painstakingly learned by Chinese children in school, with many native speakers of Chinese confusing the pronouns of English as to gender for years after learning them. For example, I have heard plenty of Chinese-language conversations in which someone describes a situation involving men and women and then starts speaking about individual persons in the situation as he/she did this or that to him/her, and sometimes a listener breaks into the conversation with "male or female?" to keep track of who is whom. And I've heard plenty of Chinese speakers talk about "my sister . . . he is" or "my brother . . . she is" and so forth, making clear that their brains don't distinguish pronouns by grammatical gender in any language.