Air Canada announced this week the company is nixing the standard “ladies and gentlemen” greeting at the beginning of their flights to the more gender-neutral “everybody” to keep from offending anyone who doesn’t conform to the so-called "gender binary."
Also known as the basic biological fact that men are men and women are women, with no third option in between.
Fox News reports the airline “has announced the flight crew will no longer greet passengers as “ladies and gentlemen,” instead opting to use the gender neutral term ‘everybody.’”
“The companywide language change will soon be adopted by gate agents, flight attendants and pilots,” the report adds.
According to a statement from Air Canada, the switch reflects an effort to “modernize” the company’s language surrounding gender.
"We will be amending our onboard announcements to modernize them and remove specific references to gender," a media spokesperson for the company said in an email to CTV. "We work hard to make sure all employees feel like valued members of the Air Canada family, while ensuring our customers are comfortable and respected when they choose to travel with us."
This isn’t the first time America’s neighbor to the north made an effort to be more “progressive” when it comes to gender. In 2017, Canada passed a law criminalizing failure to refer to someone by their preferred gender pronoun.
The socialist-leaning government passed a bill last year mandating that a line in the country’s national anthem, “O Canada,” be modified to be more gender “inclusive,” replacing the line "in all thy sons command" with the more neutral "in all of us command."
Canada also became the first country to introduce a gender-neutral “X” option on its passports in August of 2017.