Reply #10: I say don't worry about it

[imenja]

Butchering the English language isn't going to suddenly bring about gender equality. Human is a perfectly good word. Go ahead and use it.
The point is to be precise in one's use of language. When writing about deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, one should say men and women because it is accurate. There are cases, however, where that is not descriptive. In graduate school, I knew a Native American student who was asked to look over a high school textbook, because the publisher imagined they were making it more inclusive. They had simply substituted person for male nouns throughout the book: cowboy became cowperson, and other meaningless changes. They had not bothered to rewrite the book to incorporate developments in social history and women's history in particular.
The point I'm emphasizing here is that focusing on language alone is meaningless and can actually obfuscate social inequality.