Reply to comment about "Making letters and emails gender-inclusive"

Note

Please consult the “Comments and interaction” section on the Canada.ca Terms and conditions page before adding your comment. The Language Portal of Canada reviews comments before they’re posted. We reserve the right to edit, refuse or remove any question or comment that violates these commenting guidelines.

By submitting a comment, you permanently waive your moral rights, which means that you give the Government of Canada permission to use, reproduce, edit and share your comment royalty-free, in whole or in part, in any manner it chooses. You also confirm that nothing in your comment infringes third party rights (for example, the use of a text from a third party without his or her permission).

Submitted by Josephine Versace on November 19, 2020, at 15:08

Thank you for your comment! I apologize for the delay in responding.
You are correct: the salutation “Dear Sir or Madam” is not gender inclusive. This is why our blog post recommends avoiding salutations such as “Dear Sir or Madam,” “Dear Mr. Smith” or “Dear Ms. Brown” in correspondence: “The problem with these formulas is that a non-binary person may not identify with them.”
If you’d like to learn about the solutions we recommend for writing gender-inclusive letters, please read our recommendation on gender-inclusive writing in correspondence, which is linked in the last paragraph of the post.
Date modified: