He and She and You and Me

56

Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun

by Maria Bustillos on January 6th, 2011

All of a sudden Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia decided to revive the crazymaking debate regarding the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection for women—or, apparently, lack thereof. … In any case, the original rationale for excluding women from the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment did not hold and has not ever held any water from the moment it was ratified until now. All of which brings us to the backstory of the Fourteenth Amendment, and to the thorny history of gender-neutral language in English.

This is a great post: polemical, enlightening, entertaining. Go, read, enjoy.