It's more complex.

Basics. It would be really hard to find the concrete origins of the first versions of he and she  in any language, but they most probably had to do with typical role and functional distribution (which obviously evolved/evolves), along with sexual and love relationships and the obvious tendency to identify and treat differently potential partners. The actual replacement of a name for a pronoun in itself is obviously to ease and accelerate communication (while still providing relevant info). With the development of science and language, a distinction was made to differentiate biological sex from the behavioral and emotional tendencies that individuals from concrete social groups would perceive as masculine or feminine. This is the concept of (social) gender or gender role, mainly coined from social psychology and sociology. It's not incompatible with the concept of biological sex, it actually complements it to understand ourselves with more precision. Be...

Note 1: As I said in the previous reply, this is rather for the importance of related topics and not so much the origin of the discussion. Even when I say half-joking that I hate DMC4 sometimes, it's technically true. And I don't consider it optimal, but it's obviously not very transcendent to hate DMC4 or DmC  passively  compared to much more relevant issues. Note 2: This reply is mainly directed at DK, but I intentionally wrote about extra subtopics that he doesn't necessarily disagree with. Because I want others like Turtle to read it as well. What I am basically saying is: don't read this as if I were arguing with DK in every point. It's more an essay about ethics that has to do with a past conversation than an argument or discussion (at least for me). Emotions aren't absolutely independent from choices . Emotions are rarely  pure. And they are usually still attached to morality in both directions: they can influence choices, and choices ca...