Emphasis

This is such a little thing and in truth I feel very mean laughing about it, but it is funny.

There is a footnote at the bottom of a recent Slate article called "What you should know about free-range pigs", or possibly "Hog Heaven", or maybe even "Hog Heaven: Life is no picnic for free-range pigs": I can never quite tell with Slate stories, because they always have a main title and then a sub-title and thirdly a different title at the header for the page itself. But anyway, that footnote:

Correction, June 29, 2009: Due to an editing error, this piece originally identified Temple Grandin as a man; she is a woman.

Well, fair enough: "Temple" is not a very usual first name, and since unfortunately the ordinary instinct is to assume that people of unstated sex and dubious nomenclature are male unless proven otherwise, it's not a complete surprise that the writer would use the pronoun "his" in the sentence in question. (Although William Faulkner did write a female character named Temple Drake, but there was a U.S. senator, a man this time, named Temple Dickson, so I guess it's anybody's guess as to gender when someone is named Temple.)

Anyway. The sentence in question, which originally must have read "The French have banned the practice because, as Grandin and his co-writer, N.G. Gregory, write in Animal Welfare and Meat Production, 'it is considered cruel,'" now reads as follows:

The French have banned the practice because, as Grandin and HER co-writer, N.G. Gregory, write in Animal Welfare and Meat Production, "it is considered cruel."

HER! Not "his"! HER, I tell you!