Trying to speak in a gender neutral way

I had a female storeperson (fsp) tell a male colleague to give me assistance on something a few months back. It went like this:
Fsp: Can you give that person we assistance please.
Colleague: Sure...which one?
Gap: (pointing straight at me, in an exasperated voice) that one, there!

That one! Unbelievable. I was less than ten feet away from her, facing her. And I look like a man, make no mistake. And yet I was referred to as "that one". I was annoyed...but I stayed silent anyway.

 

Apologies, gap = fsp. Bleeding phone...

 

That's why the word Comrade should be used.
I don't come to EC on my phone. It's hard enough on my 10 inch Tablet.

 

I would never, ever, come onto my phone...dis-gus-ting.

 

"That customer" probably would have worked much better... In fact, "customer" is a pretty high title and praise if you ask me... or that's what all the business books say if they needed to they could do like some white people do when describing black people but are afraid to call them black "The tall customer over there" or "The customer with the green coat on" etc...

 

Yeah or maybe "the customer who is not different from us yet not the same as us, but who nevertheless is one of us".

 

And you could soe confusion if you are colour blind - "The tall customer in brown over there. No, not that one. No, the other one in brown!".

 

Well, English, with its lack of an explicit gender, is of much help. It is much trickier to do that in gendered languages such as Spanish or German.

 

That does sound difficult. Can you explain to us how there are such difficulties in such gendered languages?

And by the way, why were such languages made to be so gendered in the first place?

 

In French and the other languages mentionned. Adjectives and nouns are gendered. So, you couldn't use ''customer'' because it would be ''client'' for a male and ''cliente'' for a female. The are some nouns that are gender neutral, but you have to think on using them on the fly.

For adjectives, if you say ''I'm happy'', you would say ''Je suis heureux'' as a male and ''Je suis heureuse'' as a female. Basically, it's so hard to be gender-neutral in those languages.

 

In my native language, Finnish, we only use one pronoun for everybody when referring to somebody in third person, which I am definitely very grateful about in this day and age...! The Finnish language is probably one of the most gender neutral in the world. Addressing people with 'lady' 'mam' or 'sir' is also quite rare, at least in most everyday interaction. I work in customer service and hardly ever address anybody with 'mam' or 'sir', we are quite a bit more informal in my country. Mostly elderly people will use these out of courtesy, but it's seen as rather quaint here, hahah.