Please call female deities 'goddesses.'

[Ycore Rixle]

I vote for goddess. I know a lot of people who would say that acknowledging the differences between the sexes harms every man, or some men, or every woman, or some women. I disagree. I think that the differences between the sexes are delightful.

Also - it irks me that WOTC and many others accept racism (for example, elves get +2 to Dexterity and Wisdom) but not sexism. I vote for consistency. I guess consistency in this case would mean that, if you're going to get rid of god vs. goddess, you'd have to get rid of elf vs. human vs. dwarf and just call them all folk. In place of that, I say, keep the sexes and races. They're fun!

 

[Lackhand]

It is like calling a female adult a Man, or a female child a Boy. It doesn't work, and it just isn't done in the English language (and most other languages do similar, or to a bigger extreme).

Hello Eowyn! How are you today? What's that you say, you're not a Man? Well, I suppose that that's true, but it was sort of a pun, and relies on the term being broadly applicable to you to be fully appreciated. But, yes, I suppose in some senses you're not.

Now, if you'll excuse me, Eowyn and I need some alone time.

 

[Zamkaizer]

Haven't deities transcended all concepts of gender and are easily capable of assuming any physical identity they desire?

It would seem the gender-neutral term would be appropriate in this case.

 

[Urbannen]

Although removing feminine titles from the language is being done for a noble goal, it's not very good grammar.

Other Indo-European languages have grammatical gender, so it doesn't make any sense for them to use the same word for male and female roles. If objects can be masculine or feminine, why not have profesor and profesora?

Objects don't have grammatical gender anymore in English but people do, meaning the words 'he' and 'she'. Any time a word that can be converted to 'he' or 'she' indicates gender, it's easier.

Example gaming dialogue: Cleric: "My god won't allow me to kill Trolls on Tuesday."
Companion: "Your god is strict. Why won't he let you do that?"
Cleric: "Excuse me, SHE is perfectly fair."

See? Saying 'goddess' is just clearer grammar. I wish we had masculine and feminine versions for all 'people' roles in English.

 

[Lackhand]

Urbannen: Yes, but it gets tetchy when there's more than one of them. Which gender wins, and how do you pluralize it? Is a pantheon composed of gods or goddesses? What if the pantheon is female except for one member?

What about set inclusion, man! For the love of god(dess), what about set inclusion?!?

 

[Lurks-no-More]

I agree. Either use "god" and "goddess" as appropriate, or use the gender-neutral and perfectly usable term "deity".

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think it's a bit jarring (like female sorcerers), but no big deal.

I would prefer "deity," I think. Or go the PS route and call them "Powers"?

 

[SteveC]

I agree. Either use "god" and "goddess" as appropriate, or use the gender-neutral and perfectly usable term "deity".

I completely agree with this. God and goddess serve a useful purpose at letting you know the gender of a being that is likely to have a highly ambiguous name. I frankly don't follow the Realms a lot, so these new deities are going to be, well, new to me. And if you don't like that, well, just call them a deity. Problemo solved.

--Steve

 

[Doug McCrae]

it irks me that WOTC and many others accept racism (for example, elves get +2 to Dexterity and Wisdom) but not sexism.

WotC can't be racist towards elves, mostly because elves don't exist.

A character in Forgotten Realms says "Elves are inferior to humans" = racism* (within a fictional world)
Someone from WotC says "Black people are inferior to white people" = racism
WotC gives elves worse stats than humans in their D&D game = not racism


*Yeah, yeah. Elves are a species not a race. Way ahead of you, Poindexter McNerd.

 

[Mercule]

The real issue with sorceress, goddess, warrioress, actress, etc is that the are based upon a flawed assumption: that the originals were gender marked to begin with. They are not. Actor, doctor, sorcerer, and god do not have anything linguistically masculine implied.

However, culturally they do. Because Western culture (I'm specifying Western because these words originate in these languages not to draft any other distinction) has historically highly male-centric, the assumption became that when one referred to a sorcerer, one referred to a man; thus a distinction was needed to draw attention to a female example.

Nice lesson in etymology, but that isn't the reason for the terms today.

Haven't deities transcended all concepts of gender and are easily capable of assuming any physical identity they desire?

Transcendence is unlikely when 4E is explicitly classing gods as killable.

3E actually goes off of what the iconic character is for each class, in a somewhat quirky decision. So the paladin references are all female, for instance, while the sorcerer references are all male.

Actually, that's the best solution I've seen so far. It keeps everything from being in the male form and escapes both the jarring mode of using all female pronouns and the White Wolf oddness of alternating, which could be confusing.