You guys have no idea how lucky you are that you don't have male and female forms for most descriptive nouns. I know there's waiter and waitress and actor and actress but that doesn't appear all that much. In German we have that for basically everything, be it student, teacher, doctor, manager or street sweeper. In that order it's: Student/ Studentin, Lehrer/ Lehrerin, Arzt/ Ärztin, Manager/ Managerin, Straßenkehrer/ Straßenkehrerin. The general form to address all of a certain group is normally "Studenten, Lehrer, Ärzte, Manager, Straßenkehrer", so based on the masculine form. I have known it this way all my life, which is over 30 years and until recently, people didn't pay it much attention.
I generally love that we have this option in German but what I mean by lucky is that at least in this area you as English speakers don't have to deal with the officially insane, who make everything terrible in the name of ideology and "progress". The leftist idiots are singing their own praises about altering our mother tongue German because obviously nothing is worth anything in their eyes unless they mutilate it. Not only have they put the gender drivel everywhere and into law texts now, you are also constantly confronted with bullshit like this (because people get fined if they don't use it) : Student*innen or Lehrer_innen or if that manure just isn't enough, they put "Studierende" or "Lehrende" or "Forschende" in order to make it more gender-neutral. Not only is it stupid, it is also grammatically wrong, it is derived from a gerund-form and is simply not applicable to occupational titles, it expresses something different. It's a bit like if you constantly had to put "waiting people" instead of "waiters". I'm just glad that even though we get continuously blasted with this language butchering from all sides even by those institutions who are originally supposed to study and protect our native language, there are still large portions of the population who just don't give a hoot and continue as usual.
