Even more pedantic and off-topic, but this is actually how the English language used to work. In Old English, “man” just referred to a person, whether they were male or female, adult or child. If you wanted to refer to an adult male specifically, you would say “were”, and an adult woman was a “wif”. Eventually, male defaultism shifted the language such that “man” referred to an adult male, and adult females were called “wifmen” to avoid confusion, which eventually evolved into “women”.

Incidentally, we still see “were” used in modern English as part of the construction of the world “werewolf”, literally meaning “man-wolf”.

Actually, no I don’t believe “congressmen” is gender neutral. Maybe I should have used “representatives” instead but there’s nothing wrong with being all inclusive.

In Anglo-Saxon, “man” meant “person,” like Mensch in German still does.

“Woman” was “wyfman”-- female-human-person. And because sexism has ancient roots, the default gender assumption for a person was that they were male.

So it’s not quite as straightforward as you propose, and the gender-neutrality you mention wasn’t really all that wonderfully gender-neutral after all.

So how about this, based more on modern usage: “person” for a person, regardless of what their gender might be.

“Man” for those of male gender, however that gets socially assigned.

“Woman” for those of female gender, likewise.

And for all the edge and corner cases that make our world so richly diverse, well, we’ll need to figure those out too, hopefully without being oppressive about it.

Omg dude the tears lol

Well at least with the Senate there’s a Latin suffix system that is oft forgotten, that being tor trix suffix. So a male Senate member is a senator and female member is a senatrix.