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Comment by japanman425 | Hacker News Reader

>she

Just use “they” instead of hamfisting gender equality. Which ironically you do in your first paragraph.

Why do you think it’s hamfisted to use she? It doesn’t make their comment any less clear, and there are many female CEOs around the world

Using she is male erasure and non binary exclusive…

It’s actually worse than using he since he is almost unanimously used as gender neutral in internal language models

Reminds me of this joke:

A man and his son get into a horrible car crash. The man is killed instantly, and the boy is taken to the hospital for emergency surgery. The surgeon takes one look at the boy and says, "Oh my god! This is my son!"

Then the car crashes into the operating room and kills everyone.

How is this possible?

Answer: It was a Tesla in FSD mode.

But in all seriousness, thank you for your feedback.

Can someone shed a little explanatory light on this joke please?

When I first heard it, it was billed as a riddle, not a joke. It only really makes sense in any way as a riddle / brain-teaser if it successfully plays on your biases of the operating room doctor being incapable of being his mother (or other father, etc). In a 1950s, old-timey-wimey, nuclear family mindset, the father is the breadwinner and the mother is the homemaker, and there is no other reasonable possibility. Anyone that was taught to think that way will hear the father dying in the car accident and then be confused when someone else can also refer to them as their son.

This came up a few years ago for the first time for me, and I tried it on my (elementary school) sons and they immediately said "uhh, its his mom, I guess?"

Anyway, I hope that clarifies things for you.

I get that the Tesla FSD crashed once, but did it hold some king of grudge and followed him to the hospital? Or did Tesla build Skynet and it was a second Tesla and they were coordinating the attack? Was the son named Connor?

Ah I get it now. Where I live this usually the family structure and doctors etc are mostly male anyway therefore I assumed surgeon to be the father too and got very confused. Thanks for explaining.

The two genders, male and political.

Depends on the context, if you're talking about e.g. nurses or domestic violence victims, it switches to "the two genders, female or political"

More hamfisted than the always-jarring use of a plural pronoun instead of a singular one?

in case you really didn't know, "they" can also be singular

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/they

Yeah, yeah, I know. And language evolves. Is the best way to address the lack of a gender-neutral singular pronoun in English really to lazily adopt a word which is ambiguous in the vernacular? Be creative - make a new word!

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