> >>> Even though in some situations "guys" is claimed to be a > >>> gender-neutral word, I doubt that everyone thinks of themselves > >>> as a "guy". And it will be polite to those people to not make them > >>> choose between doing that or feeling excluded. [...] > This should be on the wiki and on the guidelines for the Debian's > mailing list. > For non-native English speakers those subtlety are hard to comprehend! :)
There's no consensus for how to handle gender neutrality, even among native speakers. The English language isn't built for it. Every single approach is wrong, so basically you have to choose which wrongness you can tolerate. "It" is considered offensive, because it implies that the antecedent is not a person. "They" is grammatically horrible because it's clearly a plural pronoun, not a singular pronoun. "He/She" or "him/her" is just clumsy and awkward. "Sie" or "xie" or similar German-derived words just sound ridiculous and made-up, at least to those of us who don't speak German. Just try to do the best you can. Nobody has any good answers yet.
