I certainly prefer genderless terms mainly for reasons of good manners, using firemen is to fail to recognise the real risk that female firefighters make. Whinging about 'political correctness' because someone is to lazy to make a few simple changes to their speech doesn't endear me either. Using 'person' may seem contrived and a little awkward but then saying please or thank you can also seem like this at times. Having said this I hope that some terms will lose their gender specific quality in time. Certainly a group of 'lads' will often include women these days and I would rather 'lads' gained the sense of 'pals' than the ugly neologism 'ladettes' gained popular usage.

A form of political 'correctness' I do find offensive however is the commercialisation of some terms. Patients (derived from the Greek for suffering) have become clients (the people who pay in a professional relationship), passengers are now customers etc. The latest form of Orwellian Newspeak I came across was the rather sinister reverse of this where the people who work in a supermarket are no longer staff but are address by their managers as colleagues I suppose an attempt at deemphasizing the unequal relationship between poorly paid checkout staff and better paid managers. As Orwell said War is Peace and colleague is ?