we-are-not-amoosed:

kiwianaroha:

I did my master’s thesis on emergency contraception and I used gender-neutral language throughout. Most people didn’t notice. My supervisor occasionally asked me to use the word “women” instead of the word “people” but didn’t care enough to follow up when I ignored him. None of the people who reviewed and marked my thesis made any comment on the language I chose to use.

Using gender-neutral language was easy and I suffered no consequences for doing so as an academic, even when writing a detailed thesis on human reproductive biology.

I compared a sample of articles from two different newspapers for my MA dissertation and used the gender neutral pronoun “they/them” whenever I refered to myself and to the author(s) of any article that did not state the author’s name. Nobody even noticed.

Gender neutral language is so easy to use in English, and stuff like the singular “they” is so established that absolutely no-one will take offence or even notice, unless they specifically look for it because they WANT to be a dick about it.