Regarding the "insulting" part, you're probably mistranating it. What would be insulting in many Slavic languages is using the "middle grammatical gender" (rough literal translation) which is equivalent to using "it" to refer to a person in English. If you insist on translating literally, using third person gender neutral (in Slovene and many Slavic languages) is actually a sign of respect and is how talks to their superiors (antiquated in 3rd person, but still the norm in 2nd).
Not that it matters anyways, as we're all talking in English and thus English grammar is the only one that matters. Even if you know for a fact all parties in the conversation speak the other language, if you're using English, the rules of the other language don't matter.
P.S. Re: Latinx: yeah, that's stupid and I'd see it as mildly offensive if directed at me, but that is neither a pronoun nor common practice, so is entirely irrelevant here
Keep in mind that Poles are likely to use a single, male variant of the surname, rather than explain the intricacies of inflection in the Polish language.
Her father as a matter of course got letters from all her leisure activities, school &c addressed to 'Mr. Yuri ----skaia'. - as her last name was ----skaia, obviously his would be, too.
At least for us inflectionally challenged Norwegians.
Hope that helps.
language 2 embeds gender in the word itself.
names are words.
it's a lose-lose situation: native speakers of language 2 will look at what you wrote and cringe or just assume you're ignorant. they won't get the point you're trying to make, null, nada, 0% chance. source: i'm a native speaker of language 2.
You can talk about someone at length without mentioning their gender once.
I have a Slavic last name. I also have female relatives whose last name is, quite officially, the male-suffixed version of mine. I invite you to guess how that might have happened.
This unasked for anti-activism is very unhelpful. You are indistinguishable from people who refuse to use correct pronouns even when they know. You do not speak for me.
In English? No it isn't. You are the one who is "butchering" a language's pronouns by improperly mapping considerations into it from another language here, not vice versa.
I have a Slavic last name, and I speak English fluently and Russian not-so-fluently-anymore.
If you use "оно" to refer to me in Russian because you don't know my gender, it would sound weird to me. (I haven't been to any Russian-speaking countries in a while, but I suspect there hasn't been a shift in Russian to use that pronoun that way while I've been gone.) I personally wouldn't be insulted, but I can easily imagine how somebody might; it would carry a subtext of referring to me as an inanimate object.
If you use "they" to refer to me in English because you don't know my gender, it would not sound weird to me at all. (Though it might have 5-10 years ago, for different reasons.) A much closer (but still imperfect) analogy to using "оно" to refer to me in Russian would be using "it" to refer to me in English, which would sound weird to me.
Hope that helps.
We're talking here about third person pronouns, and the "the plural is the polite version and the singular is the casual version" doesn't extend to those. You wouldn't refer refer to someone in the third person as "они" rather than "он" to be polite.
you wouldn’t do that because Russia is a paradise for homophobia, not because it does not make sense.
“Они” is a valid pronoun for the same thing than now means “them” in woke English.
If non-homophobic circles of Russian-speakers actually use "они" as a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, that's news to me. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out that's true. If it is, I would expect that to be a recent development, as in the last decade or so.
But it sounds like you're basing what you're saying on just mapping the English usage to Russian, or basing it on ground principles about what makes sense or doesn't, which is pretty unconvincing. Are you aware of examples of "они" being used this way in the wild by native speakers?
Anyway, whether it expresses politeness is a whole other can of worms, and I would be quite surprised to find out that on top of that in these circles "они" is used to express politeness in place of "он" or "она" (or I guess "оно") the way that "вы" is used to express politeness in place of "ты".