The first. In German, many words that refer to a person (e.g. Fahrer/Fahrerin, male/female driver) have a plural which is identical to the male singular. For a while now, many writers have used a typographic style to make the plural gender-neutral by writing the male plural, an asterisk, and then the female plural suffix (e.g. Fahrer*innen).
Would have been interesting to connect back to Java's own journey to improve its time APIs, with Joda-Time leading into JSR 310, released with Java 8 in 2014. Immutable representations, instants, proper timezone support etc.
Given that the article refers to the "radical proposal" to bring these features to JavaScript came in 2018, surely Java's own solutions had some influence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star