The attention to gendered language is instrumental in achieving equality in real human rights: it is a political, not a linguistic issue. As such it must necessarily take into account the opportunities of communication and ethics rather than grammar, without, however, generating counterproductive effects. In fact, linguistic interventions obviously differ from language to language. For example, in Italian, where grammatical gender is ubiquitous, as it is manifested on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, articles, and participles (including auxiliary verbs), different problems arise with respect to other languages; in English, more specifically, grammatical gender is manifested only on the pronoun system, and only in the singular form of nominative and accusative case (she/her, he/him). Obviously, the impact on writing requires language specific considerations. Taking into account what we have decided for Italian, while striving to use plural forms as much as possible, we believe that in certain critical points of the English written documents it is appropriate to manifest both the feminine and masculine singular pronouns to underscore our awareness of the importance of this political and ethical issue. A similar caveat will obviously be adopted in case we exploit compounds like “chairperson” to avoid unbalanced expressions such as “chairman”.
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