Just another reason to avoid watching these self-stroking award shows.

Tom

We may eventually have to change our names as well in order to underscore gender neutrality.

I should start with my own poster name: OlyMensch

Edit: However, I do take issue with the fact that women should feel empowered and yet genders should become invisible on paper. You can't have it both ways.

actor is traditionally male. So LOL. See how you can win them over with this one

Again this depends on the language. In German invisible genders on paper is the last thing fought for. In fact, what they fight is that females were mostly invisible so far, due to too much hassle to mention both sexes.
I suggest they use the female terms only for the next centuries and once the time is equal they fight about it again.

In Yiddish, Mensch means something more than a gender neutral expression.

But I like it.

I don't think we'll have to change our names. All this madness is just a phase.

I think that my limit would be reached if Jack Nicholson were to be awarded best actor in the Oscars for the leading, titled role in Anne Boleyn (sorry, am not up-to-date with US actors - take whoever you like as an example). And if you get into all the best female / male /gender neutral, transgender etc awards (of which there are many actors), then the awards would be even more meaningless and boring...

Seems that the time is ripe for Jaye Davidson to come out of retirement.

Tom

Here another example from this month - https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/juno-st...r-888651927428

I don't know the actress but if she's that good and could convince me, through her art, that she can be that "Anne Boleyn", I don't see anything bad. This series is a piece of fiction, let's put things into perspective here. No need to panic and declare war to millennials.

Not to mention that you'll see now Asian opera singers who obviously interpret different characters than their own phenotypes and nobody bats an eye. I wouldn't say it's going on for ever though or that certain artists didn't struggle for acceptance, but it's certainly going on way before the "woke(ness)" thing.

That's different.

Many people don't realise (definitely not the German speaking feminists) that there's a difference between the category and the invididuals who occupy a position pertaining to said category. Only individuals have a sex, not the category.

Consider the category actor, it encompasses all people who professionally act. The category actress however allows females only, so a "best actress" is best among the women only, it doesn't say that the winner also bested the men. This is why Whoopie Goldberg says "An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor – I can play anything."

The same applies to German. "Du brauchst sofort einen Arzt!" (you need a medical doctor immedieately) doesn't imply that the treating professional is to be male, the professional's sex is completely out of scope. The ignorant feminists don't care and demanded the introduction of the female noun. But that doesn't work either, so they push their idiocy even further and demand a "gender asterisk", though it's already clear that this doesn't work either.

As to the topic:
Playing a fictional character is different from playing a person, whether alive or deceased. It's moronic to have a black actor play a white historical person in a production that claims to portray real events. By deviating on such a fundamental aspect of the main character you remove all credibility, and turn the production into a work of complete fiction. Which is fine, it's just the complete opposite of fact-based.

If you think the difference doesn't matter you should have no problem with a white female tetraplegic playing Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr during their protest marches, and an asian female in geisha outfit playing bishop Desmond Tutu. Or if Sly Stallone played Mother Theresa using his Rambo character.

I identify as a black queer female since an hour ago. So I have the right to be, and am, offended by your ageist nicknames. Therefore you need to change the first part, too, into something nonoffensive. BoyAndGirl for instance would be Ok for me, should you want to keep the female gender in.

MusicBoyAndChick sounds very awkward. I am not a big fan of recent changes to Uncle Ben's nor Aunt Jemima, either.

That's a very recent change though; I've noticed it a lot on British TV recently, and frankly find it confusing. The two terms are _both_ gender-specific, or at least they were, and frankly I can't see any reason why they should not remain so.

Yes, in some professional terms the use of an 'ess' ending can imply a different, usually subordinate, role, but in many others it has never been so. Take headmaster/headmistress, for example; is there any implication that a headmistress is in any way less capable than a headmaster? No, there is not, and never has been, as far as I'm aware.

Consistency is required - if the term actor is to become gender-neutral, then either we need a new term for a male actor or to drop the term actress completely. Reducing the number of academy (and other) awards available and having both men and women competing together in the 'best actor' categories has got to be a popular move, right?

German is different, given that they have gender-specific terms for nearly ever role that can be taken by an individual - is there any move afoot in the German language to reduce these to gender-neutral terms as well? (Genuine question, I have no idea about it).

French also has a fair few like that, which I often trip up over, for example when I describe both myself and my wife as Moniteurs de Ski.

Edit: Are there any cases in French or German where the female term for a job role inherently implies a lesser position? I can think of a few in English, e.g. a governor is a person responsible for governing (be it a prison, a state, a country...) whereas a governess is (was) more of a live-in teacher, who would be called a tutor if male, but often implied more of a glorified nanny for older kids.

I wasn't entirely sure whether actor is also used in a gender-specific way (males only), so I left that out. And I was under the impression that this was not-so-new in English, from before the millenium or so... perhaps driven by developments in German, see below ... anyway, are these kinds of developments, and their speed/timing, roughly the same in American and British English?
These two examples are sex-specific per se, neither encompasses everybody in that position. Am I right to think that "heads" or "heads of school" is used for the category?

I'm going on a limb here, but you may have the inverse with terms like nurse, which were traditionally female but are nowadays used for both genders. I seem to remember that men were forbidden to become nurses (in the US) until well after WW2.
Hehe, you're storming through open doors
That said, IMO you shouldn't expect consistency from anything produced by contemporary feminism or the so-called gender studies. Lack of logic, double standards and inconsitencies are commonplace. If logic was prevalent, the issue wouldn't have been raised with an demand to push in opposite directions in different languages.
That's a new-ish thing, the practice started to take hold during (I'd guess) the 90ies due to feminist demands. Until then you'd have just one noun for most professions or positions, similar to most stuff in English up until today.

So no, no such unifying move afoot in German, AFAICT quite the contrary. The current situation demonstrates that those pushes don't solve anything, and that there's no end. Which is one major reason why I'm dead set against additional pushes and would revert the existing ones in a heartbeat if I could.
France fights that trend actively. It started with the demand (perhaps presidential decree) to avoid Franglais, i.e. to not use anglophone terms where reasonably possible, e.g. to use "Acceuil" rather than "Home" on a webpage, "ordinateur" rather than "computer", etc. And it continues.

Further, it's only a few days ago that Macron banned, by presidential decree, the use of gender-neutral forms in the classroom altogether.

I wish Switzerland had someone with that power, and used it.

Not sure WRT your edit, I need to think about it.

Well, I don't blame the French for wanting to ban that, it's even more confusing than male/female versions. They'd do better to drop the female stuff and just stick to male to make it neutral; no more le/la, un/une, etc, etc. Would make it so much easier to learn the language.

You are joking, right?

Are there any more Anglo-Saxon demands on how to use our languages, as to make them "fair" for everyone?

Last time I checked France is not a colony and it will not accept to have their language and culture changed by the (new) masters. I wish others had the guts too.

Not really. If they want others to learn the language and not have it die out then it probably needs to evolve same as other languages do. Plus it also gets over the gender neutral thing, not that that bothers me particularly.

Isn't there some sort of saying that most French people can't even write their own language properly? I wonder why?

Lots of linguists are on your side. I think politicizing this issue is making the language (any language) deprived of their original, local terms, in favor of invasive English.

I agree with the lack of logic you mentioned earlier.

What I generally dislike about these questions is the kneejerk reaction to immediately claim sexism and misoginy (but never misandry) behind every disparity, and the complete failure to ask why. Your question is emblematic for this bias and prejudice, you're only interested in professions where women have been relegated to "lesser" positions (or assume that the inverse doesn't exist, as if the UK never had any sailors, miners and soldiers).

And I've yet to see a feminist recognise that some disparities actually make sense, especially where physical strength is a core aspect. While that blindness conforms with the axiom that there's no difference between men and women it demonstrates all the better the level of willful ignorance and bias.

Now, to your question, it beats my French as well as my knowledge of France, I have to pass on that. I can think of only a few in German but I may well be missing some as I don't think that way.

One case may be Sekretär/in, I guess the situation was pretty much the same for the anglophone countries. For both sexes it meant assistant with the main task of typing letters. But the range was open to include a leading (but not the top) position, which would usually require a university degree. This requirement would exclude most women altough Swiss universities had been open to them since the 19th century, in some cases since 1847 when CH as it exists now was founded.

Another area are the teaching professions, in my youth women were generally allowed in Kindergarten and primary school only.
But given that physical punishments were a common tool well into the 60ies and still accepted in the 70ies, as an expression of the discipline'ing role expected from the schools, it may have made sense to only allow women for kindergarten and primary school - it wouldn't surprise me if female teachers didn't want to teach in the higher grades anyways. After the onset of puberty many kids can stand against most women with ease, earlier for a kids used to physical labor, that applies much less against a man.

The last one that comes to mind is Polizist/Politesse. AFAIK the latter were introduced as a consequence of the Emanzipation, 2nd wave feminism, with the role of checking and controlling standing traffic.
Subject to the details that may well have been a reasonable distinction, a quick search on YT for failed arrests by women will show that many simply have no place in ordinary street police work, as that often means physical struggles/wrestles and fights.
This should lead to immediate dismissal for the woman on the right for failing to at least try to do her job.
This calls for a warning for at least the one "leading" the man away who was helpful and the only one capable of bringing the situation under control, the other guy should never have been able to get up again before being handcuffed.