Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.
So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).
> This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.
People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender.
The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.
And people who see all non-praising use of "SJW" as "a dismissive epithet", on the gripping hand, are 100% likely to miss the odd case where it's just used as a handily descriptive piece of shorthand.
It wasn't handily descriptive. They reversed the positions.
People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.
friend of mine went to live in germany and for a hot second tried to just use diminutives for everything so he didn’t have to learn gender forms.
this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.
I'm very skeptical about some of the attempts to change the German language to be more "gender-neutral" due to a number of reasons, but I feel it's not correct to frame this as a misunderstanding between "genus" and "sexus", as I've now read a number of times.
If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine.
What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.
Your point is unclear to me. Gender doesn't mean genre in contemporary English. And context is enough to distinguish grammatical gender from other meanings usually.
Nouns that describe persons with social genders have matching grammatical genders usually. And you have to distinguish when talking about both at once obviously.
> And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.
So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).