Hi Mike,
Assuming there is a 2.0 version to the literature, do you think it possible that you could remove all references to the words "His", "He", etc? For example:
A player must be at his seat when the first card is dealt on the initial deal or he will have a dead hand. A player not then at his seat is dealt in, he may not look at his cards, and the hand is immediately killed after the initial deal. His blinds and antes are posted and if dealt the bring-in card in a stud-type game he will post the bring-in*. A player must be at his seat to call time. “At your seat” means within reach of your chair. This rule is not intended to condone players being out of their seats while involved in a hand. [*Note: In stud, house rules may require additional card(s) be dealt to the killed hand in certain situations.]
I realize the poker world is dominated by male participants, however if we want to attract more people to the game both male and female we need to remove this type of language that alludes to identifying players as a single gender. JMO.
Hi Thomas: Great question. The rules have been written several ways in the past. One was the consistently correct "if he or she declares raise then he or she bets 50 then he or she will have to make a full raise". While gender-accurate, making sure everytime he or she, her or him, etc. was used proved to be cumbersome. Then we switched to using male and female alternately, so one rule would reference a male player (him / he) and the next would reference a female (her / she). Personally I still like this latter approach.
Ultimately in the interest of both brevity and consistency it was all changed to male gender. From memory Linda Johnson may have recommended this. One major objective of TDA rules is to be written in as few words as possible that convey the rule. In fact a big goal for the 2015 rules will be a rule-by-rule review to see what verbiage can be condensed.
However the expectation is that when each venue writes up it's house rules, it will use both male and female references... and that's what is done in alot of house rules.
Perhaps in Version 2.0 we could add an explanatory line:
"For brevity, pronouns herein are in male gender only (him / he). It is recommended that when incorporating TDA rules into house rules that both genders be used".
Another interesting possibility is something Nick posted some time ago about how "they" can actually reference just one person and be grammatically correct. From memory it was something like "If a player declares raise then they bet 50, they will have to make a full raise". But not sure this is a universally accepted use of the pronoun.
Anyway, open to ideas but would like to avoid having to use "he or she", "him or her" everytime.