(except in linguistics)

You would be surprised how often this concept is misunderstood, and how popular the notion of de-gendering language is. Gender-neutral language works in English with minimal disruption because there are only the merest traces of grammatical gender left in English. It's literally just pronouns now.

But with languages like French and German this simply doesn't work without making major changes to the way the language appears. Verbs conjugate differently depending on the subject pronoun, and any number of participles and nouns have different agreement rules depending on the gender of the words that modify them. Gender-neutral language is impossible in French.

People get confused about 'gender' in linguistics because they don't know that in some languages the concept is simply called 'noun class' (though there is disagreement about whether they are truly the same). Swahili, for instance, has 15 noun classes. Is Swahili 15 times more oppressive than English?

On the other hand, you get languages that have no concept of gender or noun class at all held up as somehow more progressive and virtuous than languages that do, as if this is down to anything more than linguistic accident.

'We don't have gendered pronouns in Turkish,' Mehmet says with a smug, shit-eating grin on his face, as if the Turkish people collectively sat down and decided that the French and the Germans could take their colonial concepts of gender and shove it. 'We're so trans inclusive,' croon Tumblr users from some of the world's most oppressive regimes.

The Uyghur women who've been forced into 'anti-radicalisation training' must be thanking their lucky stars that they don't have to be triggered every time someone rehabilitates the passé notion of GenDeR by insisting that a table is female.