The funny thing is that his own name is not even gender neutral: "Kleidermacher" means Clothes maker, but it's the male version of it. The female version would be "Kleidermacherin". It's interesting because if he has a wife then his own wife has a male version of the last name. Interestingly in Polish we always had gender versioned names. My name is Gorski, which is the male version for "Man from the mountains", but my mum and sister are "Gorska" which means "Women from the mountain". It was always like this. My grandpa was Gorski and my grandma was Gorska. This does not exist in German, there is no "Kleidermacherin" as a last name.

Just wanted to point this out as an interesting thing I noticed.

Actually "Kleidermacher" is a genderless word in German. Source: I'm German. :D

But historically this has been a complicated topic. Basically about a hundred years ago the genus and sexus of words started to get separated. Thanks to that you can say "Katze" to both male and female cats. Historically you had to say "Kater" to a male cat.

But of course there were people in the 90s (it started earlier than that) who considered the generic masculinum uninclusive for women, since why is the male genus allowed to be the generic form of the language? Everything had to be gendered explicitly again! Awesome! /s Instead of rolling back the split of genus and sexus of the past decades, they instead opted for just sticking the already existing, but less popular -in suffix to everything and anything. A generic word like "Student" now had it's proper sexus again as "Student und Studentin".

But as you might already know that's uninclusive for nonbinary people and thus we're now at a point where we say "Studierende" or "Studentx" or "Student:in" instead, which linguistically really doesn’t make much sense at all anymore. Awesome! /s

One step forward, two steps backwards. But again, as explained above, the "Kleidermacher" can be of any genus, because...

Genus and sexus are two different things in German.

Is Kleidermacher genderless though or do you mean that the male version has been historically also applied as the genderless term which is kind of the whole problem of the last few years? Macher is male and Macherin is female. Same as Bäcker and Bäckerin, Polizist and Polizistin, Programmierer and Programmiererin. That's why in German people have to say things like "Liebe Bekannte und Bekanntinnen" now.

Kleidermacher is in my understanding the (current) male version which was historically the gender/ sex inclusive word. Interestingly Bäcker (the male term) used to be inclusive too (a long time ago) because the ending -er simply implied that there‘s a person who does something. For Bäcker that means that that’s someone who bakes.

Item_Boring already clarified what I meant better than I could ever express it.

But yeah basically "Kleidermacher" was historically a genderless term for quite a long time (potentially always) and was then gendered again, by people who seemingly misunderstood the generic masculinum. The people who made this worse misunderstood that sexus and genus are two different things.

As I explained before, this is quite ironic given that the -in suffix is now being said to be not inclusive.

People like that need to learn some American/European language/culture/history.

White/light/warm/day = good, Black/dark/cold/night = bad is pretty universal association that only the truly sheltered and privleged could miss.

Just because a word is widely understood doesn't make it inoffensive. I'm sure we can all think of many historical examples of words that were once common but are now almost never used because they are understood to be offensive.

> pretty universal association that only the truly sheltered and privileged could miss.

uhhhh, is this gaslighting?

it is considered privileged to never have introspection on these universal associations

No, that's not what gaslighting is. Gaslighting is when you deny an obvious truth. To attempt to convince someone that what they saw or experienced did not happen as they saw or experienced it.

To me, the thing I was replying to is a reinterpretation of privilege and denying a common reality. I know a lot of people that try to address how white/black terminology exacerbates disproportional civil rights abuses by race based on the unrelated good/bad association and would say it is privilege to not notice that or consider reconciling it.

Assuming that was intentional, perhaps there is a better word. Assuming it was not intentional, then its just odd.

Please don't use "onboard". That would imply that I like boats and I might suffer from naviphobia.....