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Comment by depressedpanda | Hacker News Reader

> True, but I didn't see that she identified herself, or her gender, in the article. So what's a commenter to do?

Simple.

1. Assume an ostensibly correct pronoun of your own choice (like you did)

2. If someone corrects you, optionally acknowledge the correction and apologize if applicable, then use the correct pronoun henceforth

3. Ignore the overly gender-obsessed people who tell you that you should have used ugly or cumbersome constructs such as "they" or, even worse, "s/he" and variants thereof.

4. Don't worry too much about it; everybody can make an honest mistake.

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Calling "they" an ugly or cumbersome construct seems like a reach. I am a native english speaker, and the use of that word to describe people with unknown characteristics (such as criminal suspects and people with obscured features or seen from a distance) has been very common even before the gender-obsessed people took root. It is merely english.

Fair enough, point taken. In my native tongue it doesn't work at all. I was mostly referring to the "s/he" abomination (and its variants) anyway.

It’s ironic to argue that an author’s identity doesn’t really matter, in which an author describes an eregious attempt by a company to steal credit for her work.

I'm sorry, don't see the connection you are trying to make.

In the context of her story, gender is not relevant; she apparently didn't think so either, since the only way I could tell from the article was her hands shown in the last picture.

Her identity is important, and gender is one part of her identity. She didn't state her name either in the article, does that make it OK to refer to her as "Richard Stallman" until she explicitly demands credit?

Yes of course, if someone mistakenly believed that it was Stallman that wrote the article. Conversely it's also OK for others to point out that said assumption is incorrect.

There's no reason for anyone to get worked up about it.

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