If this "gender/whatrever neutral" thing is already ridiculous in English language which is rather neutral by design, can you imagine how ridiculous it sounds in, for instance, romance languages where, in general, almost every word has gender assigned (masculine or feminine) to it depending on how it is written like, if finished with "a" this is a feminine word? Or even worse, proto-slavic languages, with its cadences, where the whole phrase is modified depending of what and you are talking?
Yes. The problem is that some people confuse grammatical gender with biological sex (or whatever you may call it). These don’t have anything to do with each other for most nouns that don’t refer to a concrete person.
For example, in German the word “human” is masculine, the word “person” is feminine, and the word “member” is neuter (“der Mensch, die Person, das Mitglied”). But of course, all of these words refer to subjects of any biological sex. There are certain people in Germany who are unable to understand that concept, and who try to change the language.
That black and white thing is somewhat similar. Black and white are just colors that can be used for various things
beside color of skin. Changing the language is not going to make anything better.
Newspapers are usually printed black on white. But the text terminals on my X11 desktop screen use “white on black” – does that make me a racist? No, it’s just because my eyes can read the text better that way.
By the way, I think the word “slave” is a different matter, because it clearly refers to slavery. I always found it strange to use it for technical things. For example, in the context of DNS servers (BIND), I always preferred the term “secondary zones” over “slave zones”. On the other hand, the word master is rather harmless, because it also has meanings not related to slavery. So, for example, I don’t see a problem calling one node in a cluster the master node, while the others are ordinary nodes or just nodes, in particular when all of the nodes are equal, and any of them can obtain the master role (in a fail-over scenario, for example).
In German, the word “Meister” (translation of master) is completely harmless and is used in various contexts. Another example: The German word “Führer” is
very problematic, while its English translation “leader” is rather harmless.
As you can see, it depends a lot on the language how words are interpreted and perceived. The very same word can be perceived radically different in other languages.
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