intellectual property, technology, open licensing, law and strategy

I came across this clause in a legal document the other day:

Words importing the masculine gender only shall include the feminine gender and the neuter (as appropriate) and vice versa.

First, “the neuter gender”? Really? I’m not sure what a linguistic distinction on grammatical gender has to do with contract construction here. I’ve seen this sort of clause before, but never with “the neuter gender” included.

At first blush, this looks like boilerplate safely skimmed and ignored (well, except for the neuter thing, which stuck out like a sore thumb to me).

But when would putting this clause into a contract be worth it? To make an already gender-biased contract seem more palatable to the reader? To avoid what would often be a plainly erroneous construction of the contract by limiting it to one gender, when both were clearly intended despite use of “him” or “his”?

It seems to me that any competent drafter should be able to create a new document without the kind of inherent gender bias that would require this clause. Neither do I see much of a point trying to go back and add this clause to an existing contract — if you’re going for that level of detail, then you may as well chuck it out and go for a whole new (correctly drafted) agreement.

Finally, I suppose that this sort of clause could be looked as some sort of catch all to include other concepts of gender, as in the social roles, behaviour, etc based around sex. If so it does so poor a job at capturing gender identity, third gender, transgender, genderfuck, and other related issues as to not rate including in a contract.

These clauses strike me as needless surplus to modern contracts and should be abandoned. Drafting gender neutral contracts should be a given.