General Discussion

It's a brave or stupid soul who tries to inject etymology into this sort of debate, but ...

As a hangover from this, I've worked on books where the author and/or publisher wanted us to avoid using "man" in the sense of "mankind". "Humanity" might have been an alternative, but would have fallen foul of the same sensitivities.

It reminds me of a good-natured dispute I had with a young feminist in the 1980s, when she insisted the word "boisterous" was sexist because it was derived from the word "boy" and implied that females couldn't be rowdy and spirited and rough. Etymology didn't help me in that one either.

The same Wikipedia article quoted above goes on to observe, "The word womyn appeared as an Older Scots spelling of woman in the Scots poetry of James Hogg," so anyone unwise or unlucky enough to get into an argument with a MAGA type could point out that it dates back to the turn of the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries.