> Speaking like genderless objects addressing other genderless objects with genderless pronouns and genderless generalizations doesn't really help anyone. If y

> Speaking like genderless objects addressing other genderless objects with genderless pronouns and genderless generalizations doesn't really help anyone. If you're speaking in the first person, about your own experiences, it's totally cool to go wild with gender. Also if you're speaking to a person of a particular gender, or in the third person about people of a particular gender: great! No one's saying all speech should be genderless (well, I'm sure someone somewhere is, but that's nowhere near the position of anyone in this thread.) The only issue is that if you're speaking in the second person, to a crowd of people that is in fact mixed-gender, but you speak as if they were all male, then this can have the effect of making women feel (very slightly) unwelcome. Yes, women are more than capable of performing the mental transformation into what you would have said if you were actually addressing them. But the experience of doing this is a constant, subtle reminder that they don't belong.