For those who love to use @ to express gender ambiguity in Portuguese: since English does this, most of the time, without using any specific symbol, do you think English is less prone to sexism than Portuguese (or any other Latin language, for that matter)?
Sexism wouldn’t disappear even if “tod@s” became the correct translation of “everyone”. Sexism will disappear when people stop being sexist. No amount of linguistic fumbling will do that for us. And it doesn’t even help!
For those of you who don’t know what this is about, I’m referring to an habit in some specific milieux to use @ instead of “o” or “a” as a marker of gender. These people seem to be unaware that gender is a grammatical feature of the word, which does not map completely with sex. Feminine gender is used for women and for trees (“a mulher”, “a árvore”), the masculine gender is used for men and computers (“o homem”, “o computador”), but this does not mean that there is any kind of absolute correspondence between gender and sex, specially when talking about the plural of words. When using “todos” (everyone) to refer to both men and women I’m not saying women are inferior in anyway whatsoever.
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