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[–]tea4two 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

A lot of people (including myself) care about that "le masculin l'emporte" rule (literally "the masculine prevails/ takes precedence") because both the rule and the way it's named are really sexist and mirror a very patriarchal society that we want to move away from.

But the solution isn't shoehorning gender neutral pronouns in the language or making things unreadable by double-purposing pronouns*, it's just saying "use ils or elles, if it's a mixed group, it doesn't really matter because there are both men and women in it".

That being said, like most of my compatriots, I fought back against that stupid spelling reform law because we like our language and some of its beautiful idiosyncrasies. It's not that hard to learn how to spell "oignon"!

But it would be nice to stop telling little girls that men 'always prevail' and are so much more important than them that it's enshrined in the language.

** Double-purposing pronouns like what English is doing with singular 'they'. It makes texts ambiguous and hard to follow. There's a reason why so many Americans use "y'all", 'you' being singular and plural was confusing enough!