As someone that's not a native english speaker, can I ask you why "his" is sexist?
A quick read of a dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/his) says that his is "the possessive form of he", and the second definition of "he" is "anyone (without reference to sex)". That's also what I got taught in middle/high school.
Sorry if I'm just missing something and this is a stupid question.
Something is sexist when language users think it is. The problem with he/him/his is that the primary meaning refers to males, only. Because of that, anyone reading it gets pushed towards the primary meaning.
Because it leads to a default assumption of a male actor which has often been relied upon to exclude women, especially from career roles. While a writer or speaker may intend a term generically, readers and listeners often infer (or pretend to infer) the gendered meaning.
For example, consider the following headline 'What you can tell about a doctor from the sort of shoes he wears.' You're probably not picturing any women's shoes when you read that.
It can be argued that "right" as in "right side" has good connotations, because it is also the word for correct. In Germanic languages, it is the same word as the word for "higher", which arguably also has positive connotations. Then it can be argued that "right handed" has culturally, and through these languages, been given a higher status than being left handed.
If I could flip a switch, I would make it so that "their" or something similar was a gender-neutral pronoun, so that we can avoid both sounding sexist and sounding awkward. On the other hand, languages probably have a lot of cultural baggage associated with it that are outdated. But these are artifacts of the history of the languages intertwined with the past cultures that used it; we don't tacitly embrace the old connotations that they had simply by using it in this day and age.
The word "left" is also associated with being bad: 'sinister' comes from "sinistra", Latin for left. 'Gauche', or clumsy, is the french word for left. And 'dextrous', another good thing, is from the Latin for right. And this isn't accidental, but because being left-handed used to be considered a sign of evil. Some nice etymology lists here: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/39092/how-did-sin...
A quick read of a dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/his) says that his is "the possessive form of he", and the second definition of "he" is "anyone (without reference to sex)". That's also what I got taught in middle/high school.
Sorry if I'm just missing something and this is a stupid question.