I would like the fascination with avoiding the word “he” to finally stop soon. The entire crusade to remove it from our language is simply nonsensical and has proven to be a brilliant example of how conformity and peer pressure have built a new cultural custom out of an absurdity.
It is not simply that the claim that using “he” as a generic pronoun creates or reinforces sexism is made without any evidence: there is actually ample, unambiguous evidence to disprove any such assertion. We can see that there is no correlation between relative levels of sexism in countries in which there is a generic use of the masculine for arbitrary humans and those in which this does not exist. Romance languages employ the plural masculine for any group containing mixed genders, yet this is not considered to create or reinforce sexism in the way our generic use of the word “he” is considered to despite being precisely equivalent. (Indeed, one could argue that this usage, like our usage of “he”, leaves the feminine pronoun containing more information since it unambiguously determines the gender composition of the group in question.)
From this point on, I would like to see our language return to speaking of “he” and of “Man” and rid itself of signs of what has proven a needless and pointless moral crusade.