@McTag,
McTag wrote:Or further, that male identifiers (?) are deemed to include the female.
Include, or embrace (cue titters). Allegedly, Winston Churchill was speaking in Parliament in the 1920s and Lady Astor criticised him for using “Man” to mean “the human race”. He responded, “Grammarians will attest that Man embraces woman, unless otherwise stated in the text.” (It isn't in any Act Of Parliament, that's an urban myth).
in English the use of "he" to refer to a person of unknown or unspecified gender was prescribed by manuals of style and school textbooks from the early 18th century until around the 1960s. It is merely a convention, and one that can be adhered to, or not, as the writer or speaker desires, e.g. by use of the singular "they", but in many other languages it's built-in, especially ones where nouns are gendered, such as the Romance languages. In French a crowd of:
1000 men:- is male (of course)
1000 women: is-female (of course)
1000 people gender unspecified: is male
999 women and 1 man: is male
It gets quite complicated in German, where you have to balance gender-neutrality and wordiness.