Quote Originally Posted by RedFox View Post
As for the Russian language, discussions like "should we use he or she?" are impossible here because of grammatical reasons. Every noun has a grammatical gender, so the answer is always obvious. Кто-то is always masculine and персона or личность are always feminine, and their grammatical gender has absolutely nothing to do with the real gender of a person they refer to.

English differs. In Russian, он means "someone/something having masculine grammatical gender", but in English "he" actually means "male person".

I don't care too much for that kind of language discrimination, as "being discriminated by a pronoun" sounds silly to me. But referring to a "person of any gender" as a "male person" is just wrong and logically incorrect. So I use "he or she" or "he/she" in such situations.
Although gender in Russian nouns is usually obvious, there do seem to be a few exceptions such as кофе. Yes, I know, it is a foreign-origin word, but still there seems to be a lot of disagreement over whether this word is он or оно. No one has been able to prove to me that either one is absolutely correct, so I treat кофе as онo and just accept my fate that from time to time I will be corrected by those who insist it is actually a masculine word.