this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Yeah, this is a whole thing. In Portuguese, like most other Romance languages I believe, every single noun is gendered, so cars are male, houses are female, and so on and so forth. We have the male pronoun ele (he) and the female one ela (she), and besides these there's also a neutral isso (it) but using that to refer to someone is very rude and dehumanizing, so we basically have no neutral pronouns (when talking about multiple people you generally use the plural male pronoun eles unless they're all women, but some people think that's kinda sexist I guess).
Some people have been trying to create new pronouns to fix that, such as elu, elx and ile, all of which have seen very limited adoption. I like to consider myself a progressive and inclusive person but I just can't bring myself to use these new words, they all sound terrible, it's like I'm butchering the language. So yeah, when talking about someone you don't know in Portuguese you basically have to guess their gender or just ask them what they like more.
I was just going to come and say basically the same. Portuguese has everything gendered, all words, impossible to speak without it. I would very much like to a have a non-gendered language.
On the other hand I kind of feel like if a house can be female and a car can be male then there can't really be much argument against using whatever gender any human prefers for themselves.