It's ironic because the entire concept of online language policing was invented by arch rivals the radical feminists in the 2010s (anyone remember donglegate?), but the pendulum has swung so far back in the other direction that now the very concept of women is being erased. Geez!
Of course offline language policing is as old as time, but until the late 20th century it was the domain of religions or regimes - those with actual power.
It was only in the ~90s that people realised that you don't need a power structure backing your language policing, you can just apply it anyway, taking advantage of existing status-structured organisations such as universities. In any sizeable population there's enough authoritarians who will gleefully police your linguistic regulations, simply to have power over others.
However, without a serious religious movement backing any of this, the elites will eventually tire of the current linguistic fashion and move onto another cause celebre.
> Gender suffixes have always had a gender connotation, because it is plainly what they mean.
no, it isn't what they mean. you might say it's "equally" sexist, but "man" meant "mankind", it meant "person", and woman comes from "wifeman", person who is a wife. So mailman is "person who delivers mail". A good way to think of it is that language is actually neutral. Cultures have ideas and values, and those ideas and values suffuse communication, but the language is just a transport mechanism and will be bent and altered to communicate what people are thinking. But the language, always neutral.
it's similar to the names of native american tribes. There are so many examples of "the Sioux didn't call themselves the Sioux, they called themselves Lakota, their enemies called them the Sioux." What did Lakota mean in Lakotan? It means "the people". Everybody else? they weren't even people. Every native american tribe did that, and probably our own hunter gatherer ancestors did that too.
None of this is cause for concern, it's actually really interesting.
I think that one of my favorite jokes, "linguists like ambiguity more than most people." applies to your use of "language" here. The ambiguity is that some people say "language" to refer to the intended meaning of groups of words rather than the composition of words each with individual meanings. One can be neutral and the other can be highly biased. Furthermore, overall meaning is more than what is denoted, it is derived from culture and experience far more than it is from distant roots. eg: ask most people where "deadlines" come from and they will probably say "their boss."
Of course offline language policing is as old as time, but until the late 20th century it was the domain of religions or regimes - those with actual power.
It was only in the ~90s that people realised that you don't need a power structure backing your language policing, you can just apply it anyway, taking advantage of existing status-structured organisations such as universities. In any sizeable population there's enough authoritarians who will gleefully police your linguistic regulations, simply to have power over others.
However, without a serious religious movement backing any of this, the elites will eventually tire of the current linguistic fashion and move onto another cause celebre.