>Er, the only suggestion I can offer here is the only one that I use for
>myself personally, when confronted with a gender-specific pronoun used in
>an impersonal sense.
>
>I just don't wrap so much of my self image up in what someone else
>impersonally used as a pronoun when writing a manual.  And I save my anger
>for those who MEANT to insult me.

That is generally the case outside north America. I think this he/she issue is
totally incomprehensible if English is not your native language. Most other
languages have thousands of words affected by he/she issues, many don't
even have a neutral gender to begin with, and you just say "he" when you
don't know, or "she" if there is cause to believe that it is probably a she.
Imagine adding a whole new gender and declensions and everything
to a language just for the case when you don't know a person's gender! Only a
cross between a certified masochist and an utopic-anarchist would ever propose
that! So when we see Americans spend so much time arguing over the one word
in their language that is not gender neutral, we get thoroughly confused, especially
since the Brits and Aussies don't seem to do that, at least not to the same extent.
 We just don't think that he vs she is an issue at all in the war against sexism,
 but then we think that "free abortion" (which we have mostly had since the 60s
and take for granted) means that you don't need to pay for the costs of the
procedure, which obviously is legal and does not induce shotgun wounds. We
also take it for granted that mothers keep receiving a salary during maternity
leave, and that this maternity leave can be taken by the father if this works out
better for the family (for instance, if the mother's career is more likely to suffer
as a result of taking care of the newborn). I could go on, but my point
is that we find it very hard to believe that women who have neither maternity leave
nor free abortion nor any of these other things that we take for granted because Mom
had them when we were born or got them before we were old enough to understand
what they were have so much energy to spend on grammatical issues that aren't
going to do anything for their career, pocketbook, family life... We do not understand
why the money spent changing all government forms to say "he and she" and so on
could not instead be spent on charity funds that assist single mothers. We are ashamed
of ourselves because many of us still think positively of a man who has many casual
relationships and negatively of a woman in the same role, but he/she is something
we are just unable to comprehend. We don't like being called a "he or she" and definitely
not a "they," that is often enough to make us fail to understand the stated meaning because
we do not necessarily speak English as well as our native tongue, and we get very upset
when we waste 5 min trying to select two addresses out of a pull-down menu, only to
realise that only one address can be selected because only one was meant. We much
prefer "he or she" since at least that is clear, but for some reason the Americans prefer
"they."

All this being said, LISTSERV generates pronouns automatically based on the numerals
(although some pronouns may be hard-coded when the number of items is known, but
that in turn can be changed to generate the pronoun from a hard-coded amount). It
would be easy to change this to say "he or she or it" and "his or her or its" and so on,
and it could even be made optional. However, development for 1.8d is closed and we are
only making last minute fixes, so it will have to wait until 1.8e.

  Eric