"ladies and gentlemen, honored guests!"

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Pedant alert:

In the UK it was never a gender thing, it’s a class thing. The original address was “my lords, ladies and gentlemen”. That is the nobility and gentry. If you’re descended from the peasantry (like me) you have no chance.

I’m still trying to decide if I’m offended by this… but probably not.

Comrades! XD

I think things are taken too literally these days. Ladies and gentlemen is just an opening to a public speech. It just means everybody but in a more formal matter.

It's like when people say "guys" to mean everyone. At work people say "hello/goodbye guys" because there are more men at my work than women. But I know they just mean everyone including me and the few other women.

As much as I seem obsessed with gender here, I hardly think about my gender in everyday life. I'm just me, and I don't take offense to common words that can mean something no more than a figure of speech.

I quite like “yo, doods!”

It's not always related to gender: Drivers, start your engines is more accurate than Gentlemen, start your engines since it's only the drivers being asked to do so.

It's only PC in the sense of pedantically correct.

Probably because some drivers are women.

Yeah dude

While that's sometimes true, there's some pretty big gaps where none of the drivers in a given series are women but the person giving the call to start engines still words it as 'drivers' rather than 'gentlemen'.

I've heard "gentlemen start your engines" before.

It's a song by The Grateful Dead

A "dude" is still...a dude.

A male person.

Better would be:

"WORD UP! Party people!"


Cant get more "inclusive" than that!

That discriminates against non-party people.

Comrades, join our party.

Youze

Y’all

Back in the day it seemed to be personal preference, but I feel like now if you said 'drivers' there'd be complaints about political correctness, even if the motive was personal preference.

(At least if it's in NASCAR, a lot of that fandom is very conservative, not just politically but just in general, they don't like changes to the rules between seasons either, even when they're for safety; there's still people who want to go back to an era when competitors and spectators regularly died because nostalgia).

Stuff like that becomes politicized and then you can't win either way; sometimes a change is just because more people like it better that way, or enough prefer it and most don't care.

When it comes to looking towards the past though, it's easy to cherry pick only the good aspects and then imagine the past was better than it was.

I prefer how things were 30 years ago. There was more acceptance but less wokeism. Gay people were becoming accepted (in the adult world anyway) but being homophobic wasn't frowned upon either. Non-whites were becoming more respected and the racial slurs were becoming unacceptable but there wasn't any "if we don't have any non-white employees then we'll be called a racist, prejudiced company". People were just people, regardless of skin colour, which is how it should be, not race being nitpicked.
And gender was just part of social norms, which if we as autistics have learnt anything it's that social norms are part of life and the minority can't change it. When I was growing up there wasn't as much pressure on gender as there was 60 years ago, people were more free to be who they wanted, and males and females were beginning to be treated as equals (for example, women's rights), but there were still only two genders; male and female. People have been transitioning genders for years so I don't really count that has wokeism. But with all these new names for all these new genders and not being allowed to say certain things any more and looking at a future where gender may no longer exist, it just kind of scares me.
Humans seem to evolve depending on developed lifestyles that become the norm, and I feel that with gender becoming abolished it might lead to the sex of humanity starting to deteriorate until humans don't need a sex any more, everyone will instead physically become genderless, and it will wipe out humanity. Thankfully that won't happen in my lifetime.
Most people view gender as tradition and part of our culture. I mean, I get why people get excited when they first discover what the gender of their baby is, hence the gender reveal parties. Will gender reveal parties become offensive and be banned? It's boring to say "aw, I'm having a baby person". I like "oooh, we're having a baby boy, paint his room blue!" and "oooh, I'm having a baby girl, paint her room pink!" That's what every pregnant woman I have met usually say. When my mum was pregnant she didn't want to find out the gender until we were born, and she said it was always like a lovely surprise.
It just feels cultural and traditional, that's all. Most people I know do agree on this. Do you see where I'm coming from?