>It's going to be difficult in many languages. In Spanish, nouns and adjectives are male (typically ending in o) or female (typically ending in a). There is no gender neutral alternative.
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>As for English, several years ago, the UK tried to outlaw any job description that indicated gender. For example, postman became Postperson. They had to backtrack on the law when someone pointed out that the Queen would become the Throneperson.

Actually, in most Latin countries we mostly don't care. I guess we didn't reach this level of political correctness obsession in general. Anyway, in Spanish you can perfectly write (in fact, it has been done several times) a whole story or a novel without declaring the main character gender.

In any case, it is a matter of resources, will and skill. Georges Perec wrote a whole novel which is a lipogram, La Disparition. without using the letter "e".

Here is a fragment of the excelent translation of Gilber Adair (the title became "A void") which managed to keep the lipogram:


Noon rings out. A wasp, making an ominous sound, a sound akin to a klaxon or a tocsin, flits about. Augustus, who has had a bad night, sits up blinking and purblind. Oh what was that word (is his thought) that ran through my brain all night, that idiotic word that, hard as I'd try to pun it down, was always just an inch or two out of my grasp - fowl or foul or Vow or Voyal? - a word which, by association, brought into play an incongruous mass and magma of nouns, idioms, slogans and sayings, a confusing, amorphous outpouring which I sought in vain to control or turn off but which wound around my mind a whirlwind of a cord, a whiplash of a cord, a cord that would split again and again, would knit again and again, of words without communication or any possibility of combination, words without pronunciation, signification or transcription but out of which, notwithstanding, was brought forth a flux, a continuous, compact and lucid flow: an intuition, a vacillating frisson of illumination as if caught in a flash of lightning or in a mist abruptly rising to unshroud an obvious sign - but a sign, alas, that would last an instant only to vanish for good.


Enjoy!