Comment by reanimus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reanimus | Hacker News Reader

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Really? The post here seemed to indicate otherwise:

> I said I avoid singular they for that reason, 95% of the time you can write around the problem, and (on SE) I'm offended when someone edits my posts badly to solve a gender-neutrality problem. (Editing well is fine, which usually means pluralizing or using a name or something like that instead of either generic "he" or singular "they".) Some people said not using preferred pronouns invalidates the person; I said for me it's not about the person at all but the quality of my own writing (an important part of my identity).

and later:

> I answered saying that we already have a negative commandment, don't call people what they don't want to be called (like wrong pronouns), which is proper, but this question calls for adding a positive requirement to use specific language and we shouldn't do that. I talked about writing in a gender-neutral way, that we rarely even need third-person-singular pronouns in our discussions, and not using a pronoun at all isn't misgendering.

This, to me, sounds like "I refuse to use the pronouns you ask me to use for you and will instead rewrite whenever possible to not use pronouns for you".

Where are pronouns specified? How much digging are volunteer mods required to do under penalty of censure? Will all Stack Exchange sites add a "pronouns" field to user profiles that can be displayed along with user IDs? Are mods going to be required to go look at each user account's free-form description each time to check for pronoun information and possible changes (there have been references to 'gender-fluid' which makes me think the pronoun may change frequently)? Will there be history tracking so when a mod says 'she' and gets called on it by a 'he' it can be shown that the expressed preference has changed since a response was written?

You couldn't do a better job of building a system of unavoidable traps if you were actively trying to sabotage the system. By the time this is all done every.single.moderator will be guaranteed to have violated the CoC at least once and can be censured or fired for it on a whim.

> Will all Stack Exchange sites add a "pronouns" field to user profiles that can be displayed along with user IDs?

You ask this rhetorically and like it's some big challenge, but it's genuinely a good idea and straightforward to implement for any community site.

But then why only pronouns? Are you deliberately ignoring intersectional discrimination? All possible categories must be included lest one identity group is singled out for cancellation.

/s

The answer to this is fairly obvious if you would avoid having a knee-jerk reaction: Because the dimension of gender inflects grammar, even in "ungendered" languages like English, but even moreso in most Romance or Germanic languages.

This is literally the reason many signup forms ask for gender - to know which pronouns to use. Why not just ask that? In languages which have other inflections, those fields are also often asked for - I've worked on software that needed to support Korean honorifics, and even in German you get dropdowns for "Dr." vs. "Prof. Dr.", "Prof. Dr. med.", etc.

German language doesn't even have different words for sex and gender, they are the same. It's just Americans pushing their latest group think on rest of they world. The whole pronoun issue is absurd and invented problem.

The answer to the questions asked on StackExchange have nothing to do with the gender of the asker, they are intended for anyone who has the same question.

There is other communication happening on the site. You may not care about it, but it happens and is a vital part of the site.

Meanwhile, for those of us not ascended to a Platonic space but are still in the real world, Stack Exchange remains people talking to each other.

From your derogatory reply, I can expect that the new policy on SO is to not lock duplicate questions, then, seeing as how it's a forum for conversation, instead of a Q&A platform.

I’m sure the fundamental issue is that one person wrote the code of conduct, and another is enforcing their interpretation of it.

If the code of conduct says “you must use a person’s preferred pronouns,” I would not expect to mean that I have to use pronouns at all. But if I do use pronouns, I will use that person’s chosen pronoun.

I can’t speak for anybody else, but if I write that my real first name is “Max,” and I prefer “he,” I wouldn’t consider it a firing offense if somebody were to say “Max’s post” or “Max’s answer,” or “the advice Max wrote is ridiculously bad,” even if they could have written “his post,” “his answer,” or “the advice he wrote is ridiculously bad.”

The claim (at least as I understand it) is that somebody able to fire employees believes that a rule along the lines of “you must use users’ preferred pronouns” creates some kind of obligation to use pronouns.

Pronouns are meant to be a finite set, contrary to names which are an infinite (or unlimited) set.

That way you can group many multiple names under few pronouns.

If you want to allow an infinite set of pronouns you might just as well remove pronouns altogether as they would stop serving the purpose they are meant to serve.

Ah, I had misread. I don't agree with your conclusions, however. Based on reading her last couple posts, it sounds like she doesn't like using singular they in generic settings. (No evidence either way on people who use a personal singular-they pronoun, but given that she was trying to defend against anti-trans and anti-NB bigotry, that seems unlikely?) I don't think she's anti-trans at all, and just wants to avoid unnecessary use of pronouns in generic writing.

Yes, lost among the many people rushing to comment here is context about a real dynamic that exists in some faux-inclusive, usually queer or queer-adjacent but not trans-friendly, spaces. People will advocate for singular they, solely so they do not have to use "he" or "she" for trans people, playing a shell game to misgender people while claiming not to.

It's fine to use singular "they" to refer to anyone. It's fine to write avoiding pronouns. But if you only use singular they when referring to (even specific) trans people, or only avoid pronouns when referring to (even specific) non-binary people, that's just being coy about your transphobia.

Whether that's what happened here, I suspect we will never know unless all relevant logs leak - neither side has much to gain from in going into subtleties like this.

Your comment makes some strong, derogatory assumptions about some persons' motives. Why is that?

Whose?

(If anything I suspect I'm giving someone at SO too much credit for understanding this dynamic - 99 times out of 100 this shit is just the boring office politics it looks like.)

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