Quote Originally Posted by Gun-Cat View Post
I can only talk about my daily office job that is completely gender neutral in comminucation either with each other or with our customers. Granted with friends you have a lot more freedom to express yourself -as you stated correctly using terms and particles- but talking about someone else you will very rarely use a gendered pronoun, and that is what I suppose this whole thread is about and the quote I was answering to said. You are naturally correct on your take regarding politeness.

As opposed to that take a language like German for example that is very particiular about gendering everything to a nonsensical degree. Fish are always masculin Fish (der Fisch), a woman is always female (die Frau) but girls are for some reason gender neutral (das Mädchen). Again this is only my point of view comparing a few languages I know if you have any other experiences I would love to hear them!
I understand your point, my native language is the same in that any noun is either M or F and we don't even have a neutral gender like english does. However grammatical gender is yet another thing that may or may not be correlated with biological gender. Actually, I think this is the source of the misunderstanding. Gender neutral people, assuming this actually means anything, mistake pronouns that are used to identify a biological feature for pronouns that should be used to define a social category that is a derivation of the biological feature and other historical reasons.