How Much Gender Is Too Much Gender?

This chapter considers a further normative question: whether we ought to have gender-specific terms in natural language at all. They argue that natural languages ought to have only non-gender-specific pronouns, honorifics, suffixes, and generics on the grounds that gender-specific expressions tend to have stigmatizing and stereotyping effects on certain genders, exclude certain individuals who fall outside of its grammaticalized categories, and force speakers into a bind to either deceive or disclose gender information. Rather than proliferate gendered expressions, which may lead to misrepresentation in practice, they suggest eliminating them from natural languages altogether.