What gender specific descriptors remain/will remain?

In My Humble Opinion
21

No, both those terms were gendered in the past, as were many others. There is a tendency in English (maybe other languages, but I don’t know enough about them to make a point) for the male term to become the general/non-gender term.

For example, you have actor/actress and waiter/waitress but there also used to be baker/baxter, aviator/aviatrix, and a number of others.

In many cases… probably yes. Or with baker/baxter you had both, but the profession became so male dominated and women in the profession so few that the feminized term was dropped (although some, like Baxter, survive in surnames).

Other times, the formerly male profession - secretary, for example - becomes perceived as feminine when the switched from male dominated to female dominated and got a status downgrade.

We must be in a similar age range. I used to hear that, too.

All aviation pilots are aviators (or aviatrixes) but not every aviator/aviatrix is a pilot even if there is a lot of overlap. “Pilot” has a very defined meaning within aviation, such that one can operate a flying machine and yet not be a pilot within certain definitions.

“Pilot” originally mean someone involved with steering/guiding a boat (Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain was a Mississippi river pilot for part of his life) which no doubt used to cause some confusion in the early 20th Century. And like “sailor” had few to no women in the profession.

At less expensive/prestigious eateries the servers tend to be female and “waitresses”. At the most upscale/prestigious eateries they tend to be male and thus “waiter”. There used to be, and to some extent might still tend to be, a certain status indication at work there. Likewise, less expensive eateries tend to have a “hostess” seat you while a very upscale one has a maitre d’ which term is both French in origin and masculine in gender.

The two terms were retained, although not for the reason you might have originally expected them to be.

22

I’m not disputing that they were gendered by usage, of course that’s true. The question was whether there is anything inherently gendered about the word, as there is with (say) fireman, that would make a current or future change to non-gendered usage awkward or counterintuitive.

Are you suggesting that the etymology of “waiter” is something other than the agent noun derived from the verb wait? Is it inherently any more gendered than “golfer”?

23

The notion of women being athletic, in the late 19th century when a lot of men’s organized sports were taking shape, was just so headsplody that no fixed nomenclature emerged for it.

For instance, this article describes the early phase of women’s cricket in the UK: note the awkward hybrid term “lady cricketers”. Victorian Britain also had “lady footballers” and “lady rowers”, the latter term still in wide use in crew teams and clubs.

In fact, the distinction between (default male) “athletes” and “lady athletes” is still preserved in a lot of school and college sports team names. You got your “Rebels” and your “Lady Rebels”, your “Raiders” and your “Lady Raiders”, your “Bears” and “Lady Bears”, etc.

24

Heck, if it sounds confused, the likely explanation is that I AM confused.

I’m happy for everyone to fuck/marry whoever they want and call themselves pretty much whatever they want. I just observe that to this 60-yr old, it sounds different that I am used to, when I encounter a relationship w/ 2 wives, or 2 husbands. It is just that the vast majority of marriages I have personally encountered have been 1 man and 1 woman, 1 husband and 1 wife. I assume my experience/biases also likely attribute something other than mere gender to the term wife - as in housewife.

I try to examine such biases, and change them to the extent I can. I think my response has been to prefer the gender neutral terms of spouse or partner. Sometimes it just takes my ears unexpectedly long time to catch up with changed norms/usage. Exploring topics here helps me do that.

Would a nonbinary, but outwardly female appearing person consider themself to be a wife? Or something else?

25

Or my favorite one, at my kid’s school: “Lady Rams”.

26

Tangentially, when I was really little I thought that there was no gender reason for the hero/heroine split. Based on stories I’d read and movies I’d seen, I assumed that “hero” meant someone who does the saving, and “heroine” meant someone who got saved. No gender assumptions for either, but the majority of heroes seemed to be men, and the majority of heroines seemed to be women.

27

Confusing the concept of sexual orientation with that of gender seems like a pretty basic one to sort out.

Anyway, it really doesn’t seem all that confusing to me. Male spouses are called husbands, female spouses are called wives, whenever non-gender-neutral terms are used. It doesn’t matter if anyone involved is gay or trans.

The grain of validity in your question was about non-binary people. And they will obviously choose whatever they wish, including the readily-available neutral “spouse” or “partner” if they prefer. As can anyone else, if that’s their preference.

28

Gay people usually refer to “my partner”, in my experience. But if they are married and the partner is being described in a newspaper or an employee bio, or whatever, a female partner is a wife and a male partner is a husband. I know lots of guys with husbands.

If the partner is nonbinary, i assume they are called either “partner” or “spouse”. It’s handy that English has a nice gender-neutral word for that.

Parent for either. But recall “Heather has two moms”. Children often are taught gendered terms for their parents. Lots of kids have two moms. Some have two dads.

Children.

And i refer to my brothers and sister collectively as “the sibs”.

29

The SAG awards already use best male actor/best female actor. I imagine the rest of the award shows will follow at some point.

I don’t think there many people who still refer to themselves as an executrix – that will die out soon if it hasn’t already.

I thought waiter/waitress was already mostly replaced with server, although the -er ending in server is the same as in waiter.

Steward/stewardess is already (or should be, in my view) replaced by flight attendant.

Teachers traditionally had lots of women practitioners – I wonder why the -er there isn’t considered gendered?

Men who repair shirts and shoes – seamsters? Or, is it tailor/seamstress? Or, is tailor the preferred term for both?

30

IME it very much depends on the individual. Usually (IME), a married person whose gender identity is female describes herself as a wife, regardless of what gender her spouse is, while a male-identifying married person considers his marital role to be “husband”. Same as Riemann said.

I would recommend following that practice as the default in referring to married people who clearly present as female or male gender, whether they’re gay or straight. If you know that a married person identifies as nonbinary, it’s probably safest to call them a “spouse”.

31

Grammatical gender is a real thing, but there is nothing “inherent” about it, and even in French and German it is to some degree arbitrary. In English it is even more vestigial; were it not, people would not be confused.

ETA I would consult with women, or check industry publications, who are actually employed as firemen, brakesmen, engineers, etc before deciding on my own initiative to call them something different.

32

But grammatical gender is not remotely what we’re talking about here.

The point is that words like fireMAN and workMAN are inherently ill-suited to adoption as gender-neutral terms. The same inherent obstacle does not exist for the word waiter, it would be a question of overcoming historical usage habits. Perhaps still an insurmountable hurdle, but a question of ingrained usage rather than any inherent problem with the word itself.

33

ISTM grammatical gender is (at least remotely) what we are talking about, since you assume “fireman” can inherently never be gender-neutral (or at least not neutral enough) because “man” has masculine gender. (Cf woMAN !!)

My proposed solution is to avoid any faux pas by using whatever term people in the industry use to call themselves.

34

I didn’t say inherently never. I realize that language does odd things, and that etymology does not rule usage. But in a deliberate prescriptive endeavor to try to correct historical bias and discrimination, I said the word is inherently ill-suited to be adopted as a gender-neutral term.

35

That’s a misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is. Fireman has what is known as “natural gender,” since it applies only to males. But it doesn’t have grammatical gender in the sense that other Indo-European languages have it. English has lost grammatical gender.

36

My experience differs - everyone I know in real-life who refers to a partner is not married. Married men often refer to their husbands and married women to their wives. The only person I know in real life who refers to her “spouse” is a woman married to a man - and I suspect her use of “spouse” rather than “husband” may have something to do with English not being her first language.

37

You obviously haven’t seen many Pride parades. And some of those guys are truly awesome!

To this 75-yr-old man, it sounds perfectly natural. And my husband agrees.

Perhaps in the very near future, people will have to reexamine the phrase “First Lady.” We already have an exception to “Second Lady.”

38

I would think in the performing arts it would be useful to have gender-specific terms since roles are often gender specific. In something like a restaurant it doesn’t matter if a server is male or female, but it matters a whole lot in a play if a character is played by a male or female. The staffing of the performance is often based around certain numbers of male and female performers, so I would tend to think it’s more efficient to say actor/actress instead of “male actor” and “female actor”.

In thinking about this, it makes me wonder why “dancer” doesn’t have male and female versions. Shows often are based on having dancers having different genders. I guess saying male dancer or female dancer works there. Ballerina seems to just be for females here. Although there are specific male words in other languages for a male ballerina, the only one I’ve heard here is “male ballerina”.

39

I admit that it took me a little while to become used to this once gay marriage became common, but now I don’t give it a second thought. It seems to be perfectly natural now. I have a lesbian cousin who is married and they refer to each other as wives.

40

Yes.

In the past English (and its immediate ancestors) were more inflected that it is now. “Wait” is a verb. “Waiter” and “Waitress” both mean "one who waits but -er is the male ending and -ress is the female ending for that word. Likewise you have the -or/-rix pairing seen in “aviator” and “aviatrix”.

English has been losing its gender inflections (I believe that is the correct term, forgive me if it’s not because I’m not a linguist) for a very long time now. The language no longer requires them the way, for example, French requires such endings. But yes, “actor” and “waiter” were, indeed, originally male in gender. Like many Indo-European languages, in English where gender is mixed (a group of men and women) or undetermined the male form was used, but that makes the term no less gendered.

Golf is a more recent innovation, it may be that such gender distinctions have never been made in golf. English is a language full of irregularities.