I used "Englishmen" for [STRIKE]2[/STRIKE] two reasons.
A) My favorite term "Englanders" is not really accepted on this forum and B) "Englishmen and English women and English transgenders and English kids etc." would be too wordy, wouldn't it?
Yes, it would be too wordy. Did you consider "English people"? That's the collective term.
Frankly, I wish you would encourage your pupils to use "Englanders" more often so that it maybe becomes a common term someday. We're not going to do that.
I mean it's a short, catchy term which includes males, females, everybody, don't you think? [strike]so?[/strike] It's one syllable shorter than "English people" and it's not catchy. You have to remember that it already has negative connotations, as you've been told before.
Please see my comments above.
You need to remember that people in the part of the UK referred to as England don't routinely refer to themselves as English. Most of us say we're British or that we're from the UK. Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish people do tend to be a little more specific.
The dictionary definition of "Englander" is "a native of England", meaning only "someone who was born in England". In this multicultural society, being born in England does not dictate your accent. It tells the listener/reader absolutely nothing about someone's nationality or ethnicity and, therefore, nothing about their accent.
In your first post, you used the word "dialect". That's not the same as "accent". If someone from Scotland started speaking to me in their specific dialect, there's a good chance I would struggle to understand them but that's down to a combination of accent and vocabulary. According to your post, because I speak with an accent from the south-east of England, I should be annoyed by this Scottish person. Of course I wouldn't! My first reaction would be fascination and then I would have to ask the person if they could, effectively, translate what they'd said for me.