context: my academic emails have they/them. i wrote my ital prof a note thanking her for the semester and in her response she had a couple words where the ending vowel was replaced with * and i couldn't figure out why. she was making it gender inclusive. and now i'm crying.

i never had to ask her to change her language, i hadn't even thought much about how to do that in italian as it is such a gendered language but she still made the change and effort and it absolutely made my day. not to mention that her response was incredibly kind even without it

and i responded to let her know how much it meant to me. inclusivity in academics is not always guaranteed (and i've even experienced the opposite) and one reason why i was worried about coming out