Iris Young's "Throwing Like a Girl" is a wonderful description of gendered experience. Our experiences of the world are influenced by many factors that have to do with our positions in the world, both our physical positions (biological sex, physical disabilities) and our political positions (race, gender, social class, power). "Experience" is defined broadly to encompass all we are conscious of (some call it phenomenological experience). I recommend Kay Toombs work on the phenomenology of disability as another rich description of perspective.

Hurray for singular "they". Apparently good writers have long used it--

This is not a new problem, or a new solution. 'A person can't help their birth', wrote Thackeray in Vanity Fair (1848), and even Shakespeare produced the line 'Every one to rest themselves betake' (in Lucrece), which pedants would reject as logically ungrammatical.

Quote (and more on the subject) is here.

Although I try to use "he or she" or "she or he", and I do like "s/he" and even the allegedly ungrammatical "they" (though I read somewhere that it's not really ungrammatical), often the best solution is to rewrite the sentence to avoid the problem. The best advice on this appears on the American Philosophical Association's website:

Warren, Virginia L. (2001), "Guidelines for Non-Sexist Use of Language".

To the questioner: My sense is that either you are reading a mis-representative sample of philosophical writing or you are exaggerating the use of 'she' and 'her' because you have internalized the normative use of 'he' and 'his' and so examples that resist that norm stand out and perhaps wrankle.

When I was an undergraduate in the mid 1980s, there was pressure to resist that norm -- but I don't have a sense that this resistance was completely successful in either philosophical or most non-philosophical writing. Certainly I don't see widespread use of gender-neutral pronouns and Louise's suggestion still sounds ungrammatical to my ear. In my own writing, I simply try use a mixed balance of gendered personal pronouns.

Hmm: that ("they" with no plural antecedent) is exactly what I will scold a student for doing, though that doesn't stop them!

A suggestion: let's use the plural indefinite "they", like we all do when we're talking: "If anyone wanted the last piece of cake, they should have spoken up."

That's what I do, but I have to have fights with editors about it.

As a matter of fact, there are some psychologists and psycholinguists investigating the very question you ask. Lera Boroditsky, at Stanford University, has data that suggest that speakers of languages that use broad gender marking do associate more feminine characteristics with things whose names are marked as feminine, and more masculine traits with things whose names are marked as masculine. You can read a summary of that research here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/gender.pdf She argues that these and other data show that language shapes thought. However, psycholinguists at U Penn (Lila Gleitman and John Trueswell), and at Delaware (Anna Papafragou) argue against the view that language shapes thought in this way. (Here's a link to a very readable paper by Gleitman and Papafragou on this topic: http://papafragou.psych.udel.edu/papers/Language%20and%20thought.pdf

I don't think that Frye's case depends on how this particular debate comes out. Her point is that there are multiple ways in which everyday life demands that individuals make clear what their gender is. She calls this "mandatory sex announcing." The fact that our language gives us no neutral personal pronoun and no neutral form of address (it's either "sir" or "madam" or "miss") is one thing that makes us have to find out someone's gender even if the person's gender is completely irrelevant to our purposes in referring to or addressing that person. Think of writing a letter to someone when you cannot tell from the individual's name whether that individual is a man or a woman. (Think of how hard I had to work to write those last two sentences without using a pronoun!) But language is just one factor, one way in which our social practices and conventions make it necessary for us to classify people as "men" or "women."

You've several questions, though they're closely related. Let me start with the first one: "What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers?" My answer is: "Darned if I know!" But I rather suspect that most of my co-panelists are in the same position. Whether the presence of grammatical gender in a language has an effect on the outlook of people who speak it is something we could only figure out by bringing to bear the reseources of disciplines like sociology, psychology, sociolinguistics and who knows what else. It would also call for refining the question itself to the point where we knew what counts as an answer. As you yourself observe, it's not exactly obvious that societies whose languages don't mark gender are less sexist than their grammatically gendered counterparts. If there is an effect here, one suspects that it's a subtle one, and not easy to tease out.

It may well be that if the people in a society believe that men and women are "importantly" different from one another, male dominance will be the typical consequence. But whether grammatical markers like "le" vs. "la" reinforce such beliefs is a lot harder to say. It would be hard to argue that sexist language doesn't matter (just as it would be hard to argue that racist language doesn't matter.) But the mere fact that a language sorts nouns into "masculine" and "feminine" may be quite another matter. In any case, the important thing to keep in mind is that the issues here really are empirical; speculation won't provide reliable answers.

This is the effect of a successful political movement, one that sought to replace the use of "he" and "his", as "gender-neutral" pronouns, with the use of something else. The reason was that people thought that the use of "he" and "his", at least in certain contexts, made readers liable to assume that the pronoun referred to a person of the male persuasion, when it need not. One option is to use something that is truly gender-neutral, such as "he or she", but that is rather verbose. Some people therefore use "s/he", but that is ugly. I've taken to using "s'he", but I'm lonely. And there is a case to be made for "she" and "her", unaltered, as well, namely that it makes one conscious of something of which one might not otherwise have been conscious.

I agree with the thrust of your comments -- that there should be uniform physical requirements for anyone who wishes to serve in the military, and these requirements should be based on the physical demands of the jobs recruits will be required to do. But it's this second proposition that should engage our attention. What are the physical demands of a military career? Modern warfare is highly mechanized; that means both that a great many combat roles will not require much in the way of brute physical strength, and that many will require specialized knowledge and mental skills. There are, in short, no uniform physical requirements for serving in "today's army." So it may well be that the relaxed physical standards for women result in no loss of combat readiness whatsoever. In that case, the relaxed standards ought to be the norm for everyone, with more demanding standards imposed only for those who wish to serve in the more physically demanding roles. My guess is that the sexism involved in all this is in the maintenance of gratuitiously high physical standards for men -- the expression of tired old machismo. The obvious thing to do would be to pull out the people with high degrees of upper-body strength and make them the grunts who have to march with body armor and packs, while giving the driving, piloting, and high-tech jobs to the physically weaker people. But you won't see that happening because there are too many high-status jobs in the military that make minimal physical demands, and you can't have women clustered in the high-status positions.

It should be noted, by way of figuring out why things are as they are, that the US military is constantly revising its enlistment requirements, for reasons of political expediency (demands for more opportunities for women in the military) surely, but also in order to get the bodies they need. Without a draft, and with no end in sight to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military has been quietly relaxing standards regarding educational attainment and criminal activity in order to meet its recruitment goals. (See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15197832/ for details.)