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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

And... how is it that you know when someone is twisting his or her sentences?

At StackExchange this is unlikely and difficult. But in an everyday scenario this is quite possible: you call the girls in the class "she", the guys in the class "he", and the boy who used to be a girl and wants to be called "he" these days, you call "they/them". Using a neutral in that scenario could be wrong.

Something like "Jenner said that Jenner's children all have a good relationship with Jenner and that Jenner values Jenner's time with Jenner's children."

(To be clear, I made this sentence up just now, I'm not quoting anyone, but this is presumably the sort of thing that would motivate a policy against not just misgendering but also deliberately avoiding the use of pronouns. If you use this construction, and then use "he" to refer to, say, Daley Thompson, you're sort of calling attention to your refusal to use a pronoun. My reading of the article is this sort of thing is not the moderator in question's intention, though.)

Running with your totally made up example, what's the correct pronoun if the writing is about an interview that happened in the 90s?

Typically, you use someone's current pronouns, and in cases of celebrity you might include something like "nee Bruce Jenner" in a parenthetical.

"When Jenner won the 1976 men's decathalon, she was ecstatic."

That seems reasonable to me. Pronouns are mostly there to define a referent, not to make you think about someone's gender presentation or genitals every time you see the pronoun. So if you have a long article about Caitlin Jenner and you consistently refer to her as "she," I think it won't actually be jarring. (Similar to how if you repeatedly use "... he said" etc. in writing, it subconsciously disappears to readers, but if you as a writer decide that it's repetitive and you need to use other synonyms for "said" every time, that's actually distracting.)

Of course maybe the real answer is to ask her what she'd prefer?

This reads fine to me? Yeah, Jenner is trans. Yes, she ran in events when she was younger. Is anyone reading that not going to understand?

check out the wiki article about DJ Sprinkles:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terre_Thaemlitz

it's written without using pronouns in accordance with the artist's wishes afaik. it's pretty easy to notice the places where you'd normally put a pronoun

I don't know the situation at hand well enough to say whether the policy was fairly enforced, but the policy itself is not unreasonable.

If, for example, someone had the same stylistic practices as the OP and also wrote hateful things about trans people on Twitter, it may be more likely. Or if they use a certain style when referring to cis people but use a different one when referring to people with they/them pronouns or trans people.

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