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"He/him means male but also neutral" was a standard thing that was taught for a long time, and while it was true at one point it eventually got taken up by the "anti singular they/them nerds" and lost its credibility.
It still is in Spanish.
In the US southwest dude and possibly bro are gender neutral.
"Dude" was something I learned as gender neutral from TV very very far from the US southwest. I learned here not to use it as much as I did because it's really not considered gender neutral by lots of our trans and/or female comrades.
I do wish it was totally gender neutral though. Rocket Power was fuckin cool
It is hit or miss. I have a been with cis women using it for each other. I was on a date with a Trans comrade and I habitually used dude like I would with a cis woman and it was awkward and I had to rethink some stuff
Same. Being an ESL student in the 2000s and picking up words from pop culture, a lot of my vocabulary wasn't exactly inclusive. Of course I've learned since then.
Dude is gender neutral unless someone doesn't want to be called it and 'bro' is masculine but 'bruh' isn't.
This really is a Galaxy Brain take, "bruh" is the neutral conjugation of "bro," who knew 
I can't take full credit. This was figured out in a group between me and a jury of lesbians when I went out drinking with a co worker and her friend one time. We made a few more similar breakthroughs but the fact that even one was remembered is a miracle.
I'm an nb who asks to be called bruh
I believe this is a standard across most Latin languages, Slavic languages, and at least one other indo-European language. I think that the Finno-Ugreks avoid this by not having gender at the noun.
It was never true, it was just male chauvinism accepted by a male chauvinist academia.
"They" as a neutral pronoun predates using "he" for everything and has been considered more proper for a long time - except among losers.
earliest written use of singular they is 1375
even the losers who say "it isn't grammatically correct!!" accidentally use it constantly
lol Flashpoint Campaigns does the same thing and that came out in 2013
Wargaming's reputation is not entirely undeserved
I remember reading it in the 90s lol. You know it's nice they said anything and addressed it at all. "He or she", like some splat books in 3.5 was pretty clunky. Lately they've been mixing pronouns which is cool (like some sections use he, others use she, some use they), or exlusively using they/them which is probably the actually more gender-neutral term anyway.
MFW this would be considered too woke even today.
: "Whaddya MEAN you don't mean to exclude gurlz!?"
Honestly far better than i expected.
I'm not going to look into what the author means by neutered because words don't have genitals
I'm 99% sure it means "has become a gender neutral word" in this context, but it's hard to imagine they're speaking in good faith, the tone is so defensive. Also "they" is right there
not anymore, they don't. they were all neutered over the last couple centuries.
Sans serif.
Probably some Latin nerd shit, if I had to guess.
Centuries of use have neutered the male
spoiler
iirc 3e switched to all female pronouns. Don't remember what 4e/5e did
Vampire the Masquerade also uses all female pronouns
Skimming through the 5e book online now, to describe building your character they use the perspective of a fictional player 'Bob' and use he/him for that section, but generally uses non gendered language or "he or she", as in "Class broadly describes a character's vocation, what special talents he or she possesses..." I don't get why 'they' isn't the default in place of 'he or she'.
At least the male pronouns aren't directed at the reader and instead at a fictional male character.
For the ease of the reader I have changed all of the gender related pronouns, 'he/she', to the masculine 'he.'
- Tobias Fünke, ~~The Man Inside Me~~ 2nd Edition AD&D Player's Handbook
Damn, if only AD&D's rules were that straightforward.
What are you talking about? AD&D is about making rulings at the table, not rigidly adhering to published rules. Rule Zero trumps basically any other rule.
It is interesting the rather large number of people that think that Hasbro cops will break down your door and ban you from D&D if your group agrees to some other rules. The number of times I see the question "If my gaming group agrees to play by some rule, is that allowed in D&D?" (or whichever system) is... Well, it's a lot
On the other hand Hasbro is the only ttrpg publisher that's actually sent Pinkertons to break down someone's door, so the concern isn't entirely unfounded
THAC0, twenty different charts, attributes being split into two different categories, percentile rolls. I love the system on some level, but you can apply rule zero to anything to claim it's simple.
Yeah, that's why the OSR exists, I think. I have a copy of Old School Essentials, which is basically just a rewritten 2E, but one of the first things they did was convert THAC0 to the system 5E uses, for everything.
I agree that THAC0 and all the charts were awful but role-playing was still evolving out of wargaming, where that sort of thing is much more common.
Hey, I love the system for what it is. I think it's better for fine-tuning a character sheet than 3.5, plus some settings in that era had post-nuclear devastation and canonically bisexual elves.
But I'm just calling it out on thinking grammar was the most mindracking thing.
There were a lot of these notes in RPG books in the 90s. I remember also seeing alternating between he and she every paragraph (this sucked btw) and a convention where the players are he/him and the GM is she/her (sounds almost reasonable until they try to use it instead of specifying which player).
"she/he", "he/she" and "(s)he" in academic texts where a thing for a while.
Would have been so much cleaner to just read "they" or "them".
I think Ars Magica has a note where they basically say "We'll throw around masculine and feminine pronouns and differently gendered nouns completely at random." They use a lot of Latin, so there's a lot of gendered nouns. Unfortunately they never seem to address genders or lack thereof outside the binary, but then again, neither does Latin.
female
~~fe~~male
If you want to be gender neutral, use they/them. If you insist this causes ambiguity once every fifty pages, use gender-neutral she/her. If you actually care about removal of (Very rare! You can usually reword your sentences!) ambiguity and gender neutrality, use two sets of neopronouns!
this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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