Language is already gender-neutral

The argument

This argument turns on what the words actually mean rather than on how they sound to a modern ear. Throughout the history of English, the word "man" and the words containing it — "mankind," "manpower" — have been used to refer to all human beings regardless of gender. That is a claim about usage rather than intention, and usage is a matter of record. Dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary, which trace the development of words throughout history, acknowledge that "man" carries the sense of "human" or "person," alongside and distinct from the narrower sense of "male individual." If that is right, the mechanism by which such language is supposed to do its damage never starts. The charge against androcentric vocabulary is that it quietly installs the male as the default human, so that a woman reading "mankind" is included only by extension from a man. But a word that has carried the general sense for centuries is not smuggling in a male default; it simply refers to human individuals, and a reader who takes it that way has understood it correctly rather than overlooked a slight. Where there is no gendered content in the term, there is no gendered stereotype for it to transmit and no gender role for it to reinforce. The practical conclusion follows directly. Campaigns to replace this vocabulary treat the words as the cause of something the words do not in fact cause, so no change is necessary to get rid of the supposedly androcentric language: it is not inherently male-oriented in the first place. On this view the language cited as the clearest everyday evidence of androcentrism turns out to carry no gendered instruction at all, and androcentrism, whatever else may be said about it, is not perpetuating gender roles through these words.

Premises

Counter-arguments

From an etymological perspective, this viewpoint is false. "Man" has never been exclusively gender-neutral in English. While the Oxford English Dictionary does include meanings of "man" that are gender-neutral, some of which now obsolete, it also shows that this same word has referred to male persons from the beginning, too. Even in Proto-Indo-European, the ancient ancestor that gave English most of its words, the word for "man" refers mainly to a male person. Words like "mankind" have thus never been completely gender-neutral, rendering this argument invalid.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The historical claim reports only half the record. As the counter-argument notes, the same word has denoted male persons from the earliest English onward, so "man" has carried both senses at once rather than being neutral. [Rejecting P2] The Oxford English Dictionary lists the generic sense alongside the male one and marks parts of it obsolete. Citing one entry as "the" meaning treats a historical dictionary as an arbiter of present usage, which is not what it records. [Rejecting P3] Even granting the etymology, the question at issue is how such words are heard and used now, not what they meant centuries ago — and the argument offers nothing on current usage.