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Executive order bans gender-neutral language in Arkansas government documents
(fayettevilleflyer.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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The Old Testament literally doesn't contain gender neutral language, which is a large part of why this all is so messed up in the first place.
Hebrew didn't have a neutral gender.
There was no 'parent' just 'mother' or 'father.'
So a number of passages ended up super weird as a result, including the "he made them male and female" in Genesis 1 where a plural God makes humans male and female in 'his' image.
Which was the key line that's been used for millennia now to prejudice against gender nonconformity, including its being cited in the NT regarding marriage in works written just a few years after the emperor of Rome married two different men.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
Edit: Expanding on this as some people seem to be confused....
The article is only about the etymology of the word:
The etymological fallacy is thinking that the etymology relates to the contemporary definition, which is what the commenter was doing in confusing the etymology of woman or man as being somehow connected to its meaning.
In general, the commenter was mistaken, as while it is true that a number of stories in the OT were likely based on earlier concepts of neutral or multiple genders (such as the example I originally gave), from the earliest Hebrew onwards there was literally no way of representing it.
So you ended up with later reinterpretation of passages with binary gender like the Genesis 1 example as having related to a hermaphroditic original man (Philio and the later Naassenes) given it was in the image of what was supposedly a singular God but rendered male and female both. Whereas what's more likely was this passage dated back to the days of a divine power couple of Yahweh and his wife which was later reworked into a monotheistic form without updating the creation of men and women in their images.
But the topic of binary gender representation in the language is fairly broadly discussed and is distinct from what the commenter is trying to represent as being similar in languages with neutral gender representations with some bizarre appeal to etymology.
I suspect it was even the driving concept in the 1st century behind the comments about "make the male and female into a single one" in the Gospel of Thomas saying 22, which ironically still elsewhere referred to the 'Father' as opposed to 'Parent.' (Aramaic was also a binary gendered language.)