Once upon a time, I wrote an essay that mentioned a doctor friend. I called him a vascular surgeon. After publication of the essay, he heatedly (although with a slight self-deprecating smile so I wouldn’t panic) told me that he was board certified in internal medicine and vascular medicine, and as such, was not just a vascular surgeon as I had so glibly christened him. I pointed out that inserting his full title would have wreaked havoc with my sentence structure, and since it wasn’t a medical book, he would need to get over it. He did. I think.
In the further interest of sentence structure, where a personal pronoun needed to be used to refer to a crocheter, I used she or her, not he or she, or his or her, or whatever gender-inclusive combination that would have fit. It’s not that I don’t know that there are male crocheters. It’s not that I wanted to exclude the male readers of this book. It’s just that I find that dual-gender language clunky and I wanted to avoid it, and crocheters by demographic are overwhelmingly female. Please don’t hate me.