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> not allowing any sort of expression of or reference to someone's … gender identity

So the use of he/she is banned by those projects?

Not like that. A pull request that replaced "he" in documentation with "they" was closed with the comment "This project is not the place to advocate your personal politics".

Yeah, that was a pointlessly rude way to close the PR since it assumed ill intent. But tiny pull requests like that are rarely helpful since the one reviewing it will need to check what pronouns are used in the rest of the documentation to make sure the style is consistent so they just create busywork for maintainers even though those PRs are almost always done in good faith.

I definitely do not think he was leading by example here. Making assumptions aabout why people do PRs and denying them based on those is a good way to create a toxic community.

> the one reviewing it will need to check what pronouns are used in the rest of the documentation to make sure the style is consistent

Huh? Nothing in a software project will ever be perfect – code or docs — so this doesn't seem like a reasonable expectation. It's always a process of gradual improvement, and that can be true for a change like this too.

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