"require use of preferred pronouns and avoiding them is forbidden"
This line of thinking is so bizarre to me, but seems to be increasingly common (or at least loud enough in the right places to be noticed). There is a segment of the population that seems intent on being able assign and punish that assumed thought crime.
The behavior of the far-left identity politics crowd has crossed over into outright bullying. I say this as someone who self-identifies fairly left and extremely liberal.
Their central rhetorical tool is extremely effective: if you are not a member of a marginalized identity group (this category itself being fluid), you do not have a right to question anything they say (according to them). This works on thoughtful people who want to do the right thing, because such people tend to take the general concept of social justice very seriously (as they should, it's important).
We need to collectively realize how toxic these people are, and start pushing back.
Yes, and that's why this and other people (like the way Codes of Conduct were pushed in the first place) always smelled to me similar to a fascist coup. You suddenly find yourself you've become a part of the identity group, you're judged a traitor, and you're out.
(I know "fascism" is the wrong word here, but what's the correct word for "fascism-like, but with $random-issue instead of nationality, and without the far-right"? We need that word.)
I think the proper word is "authoritarian", which is a classification they would likely agree with.
As an aside, I think traditionally political labels like "the Left" are becoming very problematic and are part of the problem. It's generally no longer enough to ask someone whether they're left or right and then correctly assume their stance on things. Instead - and I argue that we should have started doing that before this current upheaval - instead, you have to query a person specifically about their positions on specific things.
For example, that way some confusion about the so-called Social Justice Warriors could have been avoided on all sides. They are a heterogenous group, but do tend to represent leftist values (inclusiveness, equality, a belief that society should take care of disadvantaged individuals disproportionately), at the same time they are not liberals in most regards. They tend to believe in progress through force, and they do generally favor strict rules and harsh/permanent punishment. They're authoritarians.
One might argue that the SJW movement has more in common with conservatives and reactionaries than traditional leftist liberals, if you disregard their disparate political goals for a moment. Leftist liberals and SJWs often cannot successfully communicate and as a result are often in conflict, despite overlapping goals.
This may also be the reason why, as the article describes in one instance, an openly anti-trans moderator was mostly seen as A-OK, whereas the leftist liberal author was fired.
Thanks. I might be too young (being ~30), but I never understood why people use the labels "left" and "right". As you say, they're not very informative; doubly so, if you talk in an international setting (like HN), with US "left" and "right" being different than Europe's "left" and "right". But even in the past, I don't remember any time when they were accurate. Personally, I hate them and much prefer to talk about particular issues. I only brought "alt-right" because Wikipedia puts it in the definition of fascism.
As an aside to aside, if we take that Wikipedia definition: "Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy" - and if we strip it off "far-right" and "nationalism", we're left with "authoritarianism" + "dictatorial power" + "regimentation". Not sure about the last one, but "dictatorial power" doesn't seem to me to fit the SJW movement. There are few prominent figures wielding some amount of influence, but they've already fallen out of favor. When I look at it, it feels like authoritarianism, except the authority at the top is missing. Just a bunch of people willing to disrupt a community bottom-up for an idea.
Come to think of it, it actually smells like a bottom-up, secular flavor of a cult. I grew up in a religion which is sometimes classified as a cult, and the way the SJWs manage to insert themselves into a group and suddenly turn the focus from whatever it was originally about into a focus on race or gender issues very much resembles what I've seen (and sometimes done) in that group. Except that dismissing some discussion because "God's Kingdom will soon come and put an end to that problem, so it's more important to talk about how to be in that Kingdom than about that problem" doesn't work anywhere as well as the equivalent with gender.
If I had to shoehorn it in a historical political ideology I might pick Stalinism.
People were “disappeared” overnight into Siberian labor camps or just shot with very little thought or due process.
At some point some caught on and started to report people they didn’t like for made up stuff, knowing the state would do the dirty work for them. You didn’t like your neighbor’s haircut? — No big deal, report them for criticizing the party, then watch them being dragged away.
> (I know "fascism" is the wrong word here, but what's the correct word for "fascism-like, but with $random-issue instead of nationality, and without the far-right"? We need that word.)
I think Social Justice Warriors is the proper term.
That's with $random-issue = something from the bag of things related to gender identity and minorities. I wonder if there's a more general term, partly because I have the feeling that the very use of "SJW" is now perceived by many as association with far-right.
I don't really think calling it "fascism" is especially accurate or productive. It stinks of "the other side" which is, frankly, much scarier, whether you think I'm referring to the far-right fringe or the propaganda operations that are working to deepen these divisions. See also e.g. the widely documented fake BLM pages on Facebook.
It's just a meme that spreads through its appeal to a certain type of person.
The other side in this case isn’t the far right. The other side are just ordinary people who don’t want to be called names for forgetting to use the right pronoun or even not using a pronoun at all.
The "actual thing" w/r/t pronouns in particular is that people should respect someone else's identity.
Deadnaming someone is basically bullying. There's no principled to intentionally do it, and it's almost always done as a power play more than anything. Respecting someone's choice of identity is just baseline "respect for others". It would be like insisting to use someone's old married name after a divorce (or even just refusing to use someone's name after they get it changed, for whatever reason!)
I'm a bit agnostic about stuff like "forbidding non-pronoun usage" (how is that intent even seen?) and fights are getting virulent. But I think it's hard to see the principled argument against asking people to respect someone's choice of pronouns or name.
All things are not the same thing. We are not talking about using the wrong pronouns, or deadnaming, intentionally or otherwise. We are talking about somebody who expressed a preference to favor "writing in a gender-neutral way" (her words) over using specifically "them" and "they" for (ostensibly) a linguistic reason having nothing to do with the identity of people who prefer those pronouns for themselves.
It's irresponsible to trot out this sort of vague common-sense rhetoric (most of which I agree with, of course) to justify inventing an offense, or blowing something small way out of proportion, and on that basis piling on in public social media to paint the accused with the brush of transphobia or racism or whatever it may be.
You have a right to have whatever identity you have, but others should not be enforced to respect that. That they do is a courtesy extended to you by the person you're interacting with. This much I'm fine with. Doubly so with assumed genders, which is IMO, a perfectly reasonable thing to go on. We don't fit to outliers after all and simply correcting when requested seems like a reasonable approach to me.
However, I've seen a steadily rising trend of weaponized fragility and crusading on this particular topic, along with a particularly virulent group which uses this as a tool to force compliance and control. It's bad enough that while I can observe my personal opinion of the T side sliding towards the negative through frequent contact and exposure with that sort.
I don't get how this became a thing. 5 years ago half of the people who are railed up about this didn't even know what word 'pronoun' means.
Why would using the wrong one be harmful to anybody?
You can call me a she but it just would mean that you'd be wrong. It would harm your public image more than mine since there would be no harm to mine. None of my self-worth or my worth to other people relies on people believing me being any specific gender.
And if you build your worth on your gender should I really be interested? It was your choice. You could have chosen otherwise. Any harm you might feel when someone misgenders you is self inflicted.
Try to imagine a thing that's very personal to you, and secret. Imagine that you pour it out into some creative work, like a painting or a story, and you share that thing with the world. You feel anxious exposing yourself like this but also joyful, because you're finally telling everybody who you really are.
Now imagine that nobody sees any of the things you love about your work, and that all your anxieties are borne out. You are crazy, a freak, a slut, a pervert, an idiot. Delusional, more than anything. Nobody ever looks at you the same way again. You took the leap you desperately needed to take, and you fell on your face.
The older we get, the less we care what other people think, and some people probably literally cannot identify with this even if they scour the depths of their adolescent memories looking for an analog. I think it would be sad to be one of those people, but I guess maybe they're the lucky ones?
> Now imagine that nobody sees any of the things you love about your work, and that all your anxieties are borne out. You are crazy, a freak, a slut, a pervert, an idiot. Delusional, more than anything. Nobody ever looks at you the same way again. You took the leap you desperately needed to take, and you fell on your face.
That's pretty much the feeling that every even mildly controversial artist experiences at some point. The question remains "was that a good idea to make something like this out of your gender?" I'd say, never.
> The older we get, the less we care what other people think, and some people probably literally cannot identify with this even if they scour the depths of their adolescent memories looking for an analog.
Maybe that's it. I'm 40 year old fart whose life partner died a month ago because of brain cancer. My scale of how significant teenage-like problems are, must be off. But even as I reach towards my adolescent memories ... I struggle to find any instance where I was desperate to be recognized as a man or a boy. Maybe that's because I was raised as a single mother, never met my father and my male model was my grandfather who above all was a tinkerer so that became much more important part of my identity then being of specific gender.
I think it's important to recognize that most of us fall into one of two buckets that are considered "normal" wrt. our sex and gender. If you don't fall into one of those two buckets, you are going to feel tension externally, in the ways other people interact with you, and internally insofar as you've internalized societal sex/gender norms, which is hard to avoid doing when you've lived in society your whole life.
So really it is not so much about looking for a problem ("I've decided to hang my identity on my gender") as it is about having to solve a problem that most people (including you) don't have ("I'm in the wrong body"). It's a distressing problem to have, and not an easy one to solve.
But isn't the best solution for not falling neatly into those two buckets, paying less attention to the buckets and promoting giving less attention to the buckets? Maybe taking some additional labels out of the buckets and putting them on the floor so everyone can enjoy them?
Not putting out your own new bucket with a laud bang, puting yourself into it, and claiming it is just a legit as those two because you put 0.1% of people in there with yourself (which may or may not want to be put there) and getting offended when your bucket doesn't get equal recognition as the ones containing over 3bln people each?
...
I am very sorry for people that have constant feeling that there's something wrong with their body and when I meet them in person I always try to be mindful and help them however I can in either accepting or changing it. Although I must admit I lean toward option that brings less harm to their physical health. I am a materialist and believe that except for very rare cases you should avoid permanent damage to your hardware just to make possibly software bug more bearable.
I don't have any transgender friends (that I know of) but I would definitely try to talk to them in a way they find most comfortable. However being required to always use that way rubs me the wrong way. That seems like something authoritarian. There's a specific way you should address royalty or clergy or teacher in school system with threat of violent reaction looming. I don't think we should enlarge that group of people and put that rules in writing.
When priest welcomes you in Poland he always says "let be praised Jesus Christ" and you are supposed to say "for ages of ages, amen".
As an atheist I refuse to participate in this and respond with "hello". Which communicates "your cognitive problems and solutions you've chosen are not mine and are different form mine, I won't reinforce your beliefs" or I hope it at least "ah, non-believer, I shouldn't put too much Jesus on him". This is mean spirited of me, because it's just a customary greeting and I might be harming this man a bit by poking at the image of reality he internalized and keeps reinforced daily, but I'd like to have the option to do that. I wouldn't like to be forced by code of conduct or law to respond (or talk) to religious person in their preferred way even if that's the most polite thing to do. Right to be mildly impolite to people you don't agree with to let them know you'd prefer they kept their distance because you don't share their mindset is maybe not the nicest thing but I think it's how a lot of people protect themselves and a thing that people should be required to suffer through.
Of course that doesn't mean that you should be free to stalk people, telling them things that make them feel bad as they are trying to isolate themselves from you. That behaviour is reprehensible because of intentional nature, persistence, high disruption it brings and physical and emotional cost incurred to counter it, not because of the content of what the offender is saying. Content might be expression of love and still the action is horrible. We won't solve stalking by banning compliments and expressions of love. We should ban targeted insistence in causing distress instead. And if anyone would try defend it with freedom of speech, you do have right to speak, but not loudly into specific person's ear as you follow them around.
> And if you build your worth on your gender should I really be interested? It was your choice. You could have chosen otherwise. Any harm you might feel when someone misgenders you is self inflicted.
Would you say the same about a person being called a racial slur for example? “You shouldn’t have built your worth on your race”?
Any harm you might feel when someone [calls you the n-word] is self inflicted, of course.
> Why would using the wrong one be harmful to anybody?
As alexwennerberg said elsewhere in this thread:
> The reason that people are so sensitive and strict about this is because the stakes for trans people are very high -- some people don't believe trans people exist, should exist, or should have the same rights as cis people. Refusing to use the right pronouns reveals either a benign misunderstanding about trans people or a willful hostility towards their existence. The latter is extremely common and can be both hurtful and often scary, as trans people, especially trans people of color, are often subject to violence because of their identities.
I think that's absolutely horrible when people intentionally call others names they don't want to be called by. Even worse if it's done in hostility and if it escalates to violence.
I think that people taking strong offence from a racial slur or any other slur made the mistake of making "I'm a universally respectable person" part of their identity. Then any display of disrespect becomes attack on identity. Making race part of your identity would backfire not when people recognize your race even with a racial slur but when your race is doubted ("you are not that black") or misrecognized, like hearing n-word when you had some black ancestors but you think of yourself as white and made it a part of your identity.
'n-word' rose in popularity immensely over last two decades. Earlier either people said it or didn't say it but never people made the mental gymnastic of saying a lot 'that word that we do not say'. It could be made taboo because it's fairly useless and there are fairly good alternatives. People born in the fifties in the US might disagree but this never bothered me much, being born in 99,99% white country that never had any expeirience of exploiting people of other races. Also any reflexive negative feeling you get when hearing specific words is self inflicted harm. You trained yourself to react that way to those words. It's not innate. Getting mad at people is punishing yourself for their stupidity and you should try to do as little of that as you can.
Unfortunately you can't convince people who despise you especially when you don't know who are those people. And they will not stop despising you.
By trying to convince everyone what you might get is a lot of people despising your actions when you try to turn a common word like 'he' or 'she' into a contextual slur.
A lot of people care how their actions affect other people and don't like when they affect other people negatively. Telling them that your plain speech affects you negatively and possibly intentionally, affects them negatively. I think striving to not harming people is important part of a lot of people's identity as is gender for some and telling them they are harming you is attacking their identity.
I guess I just figured out why this is a thing.
There are just two fractions of offended people. One fraction suspects other of intentionally attacking their identity by using improper gender pronouns. The other feels like the first one intentionally attacks their identity of being a good person by insinuating that there's harmful intent in their use of common words. Words they use every day. Words they learned around age 3.
While the despicable people grab popcorn, fuel the fire, and watch from the sidelines as vulerable people and good people hurt each other.
I see no resolution of that conflict. It will just gradually die down by a lot of people removing gender out of their identity and a lot more removing 'being good' from their identity to remove themselves from the conflict. This is all sad.
I guess lesson for me is, be ready to shed parts of your identity when they become source of harm for you.
> And if you build your worth on your gender should I really be interested? It was your choice.
We live in a world where entire social structures are built up based on gender. It's not a choice.
Also, it's not about "worth". It's about identity. If we lived in some alien society that defined nothing along gender lines and didn't even have gender specific pronouns, maybe there would be some merit to the argument. But we don't and there's none.
Your gender is not a choice (i think? Not sure where science stands on that) but whether you make it part of your identity or not is a choice. "I'm a male" is statement of a fact, but "I identify as a man" is a statement of choice.
I choose to identify as a hacker, potentially useful, solver, youthful, intelligent, mostly self-reliant, good person. If you don't successfully harm my perception of myself in those aspects then you won't threaten my identity. And even if you do I'm ready to shed parts of my identity if they start to be too troublesome to uphold. If you called me 'not that white' or 'half of the man somone else is' or 'a pussy' or a 'weakling' it wouldn't harm me in a bit because those are not the parts of my identity.
What societal structures are based on gender? The only one I can think of in modern western society are the toilets/dressing rooms of gyms and pools, clergy, husband, wife and mother.
This comment is off-topic to the issue at hand, which is about forcing people to use "they" instead of any other singular gender-neutral pronoun or simply avoiding pronouns.
"identity politics" has very little to do with the left. It's a social diversion tactic from actual left-wing struggles, that is employed by pro-Capitalist political parties (with the US Democratic Party being a prominent example).
That's liberal politics, not left. There's a real, meaningful difference. Liberating identities is a form of liberalism.
There's some dogpiling effect where all these terms which deviate from a current conservative are used interchangeably.
Leftists and liberals really don't like each other and when the liberal parties need to choose between supporting their conservative opponents or a leftist challenger, they almost without exception, join the conservatives to block out the leftists from power.
Many liberals see the left as a far bigger threat than most forms of conservatism and to confuse the these groups is part of the reason people don't think these groups have a coherent vision, because they actually don't like each other and aren't the same.
That people should be allowed to assume whatever identities they like is a liberal position, but telling people what they cannot say and should not think in relation to identity (or anything else, really) is not. There may be some muddled overlap between those two sets but they are absolutely not the same.
The latter is, generally, a leftist thing. The political left is concerned with egalitarianism, often to the extent that they believe specific and deliberate actions should be taken to reduce inequality. See also: social justice. The identity politicking we're discussing here is predicated on the idea that there are marginalized groups, i.e. folks who do not comfortably fit into the established gender binary and/or gender-sex clustering, and that people outside those groups should change their behavior to reduce that marginalization.
The leftist position is the imposition of the language is yet another form of oppression. Crafting new social hierarchies based on language, like has has existed throughout time, is wildly incompatible with leftism.
Anarchism, Libertarianism, these are closer to leftism than liberalism.
The liberal would reproduce class hierarchies through language and phrasing virtue signaling, ignoring and respecting people based on their use of language. The left has no such masters which is why they have such a hard time consolidating and organizing - there isn't a central cultural idealism.
And just to be clear, I'm perfectly happy with being ahead of the curve on this one and getting the "down votes". I know most people don't currently see or care about this distinction, but it's really important.
The two words begin with "L" and sound alike and the liberal party tries to capture the left like the conservatives try to capture libertarians, but these four things aren't really two things and their differences matter.
As much as I wish you weren't, I think you're actually behind the curve on this. Barely anyone defines left-wing politics this way any more; it's all about idpol and capitalist realism now.
The only important distinction is in self-identification. Who calls themselves a leftist, not who is called one. For instance, look at the program for the left forum 2019: https://www.leftforum.org/program-2019 or the offerings of say Verso books: https://www.versobooks.com or the self proclaimed left-wing news sites like in these times: https://inthesetimes.com or jacobin: https://jacobinmag.com ... there's effectively zero identity politics.
Instead, they critique and criticize it.
For instance, here is a book review from verso
> "...argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements. It marks a retreat from the crucial passage of identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to the collective struggle against an oppressive social structures"
People who see identity politics in action on news sites indeed call it leftism, along with fascism, liberalism, racism, and socialism. These people are just flinging words around however, they don't draw a distinction between any of those things. They're using those words as a form of profanity, purely emotive.
and here's another example of how leftists do not like identpol, also from verso:
> identity politics is positioned in a variety of Marxist frameworks as ineffectual; as a politics founded on difference, it is inherently incapable of building the broad-based movement needed to destabilise capitalism.
Or Jacobin, the leftist magazine, smearing it as a form of liberalism (which leftists, once again, do not like):
> But the term “neoliberal identity politics” refers to the way the politics of identity can be — and often are — abused by those in power, to undermine the very politics of collectivity upon which the liberation of all oppressed groups depends.
or the leftist InTheseTimes, clearly criticizing the (liberal) Democratic party:
> Far too many black folks will vote for their worst enemy, if he or she looks like them. That’s why identity politics, which masquerades as a black power strategy, winds up disempowering African Americans every election.
It doesn't matter whether one agrees with these positions, what's important is to correctly identify who is making them if one values trying to accurately depict reality. These 4 citations from popular self-identified leftist sources think identpol is a bad idea. There's dozens more.
IMO internet communities make this worse - it’s a lot easier to be a bully online than in person. Also, internet communities are so large that the chance of running into a bully is much higher.
I have plenty of LGBT friends and family, and none of them get too caught up in language. I’d assume this is the norm? Nobody wants to be disrespected - if someone clearly identifies as a man, then referring to them as “she” (especially if done in a spiteful manner/tone) is disrespectful. Using gender neutral pronouns, or avoiding pronouns altogether ... I don’t think many would consider that an issue? Especially online, gender is normally not known at all, and that’s fine. Calling someone a bigot because they avoid using gendered pronouns seems like bullying to me.
Communities should stand up to bullies, not cave in to them, especially internet communities where bullying is so easy and common. This is true whether the bullies are extreme left, extreme right, or just assholes. I consider myself fairly left of centre, but siding with someone just because they’re on your end of the political spectrum is wrong. People can share some beliefs with you but still behave as bullies, and if they do it’s important to stand up to them.
From what I’ve read of this Stack Exchange mess, it seems like the people who won were the bullies, and that’s unfortunate.
This may seem shocking but it is absolutely not any form of attack: One person's identity crisis is very likely not another person's problem. Trying to force that problem where it is not well understood causes confusion and miscommunication issues, especially for people who not using the current language as a comfortable native language. Furthermore, a difference of opinion is not a form of attack. People forcing the narrative that any difference of opinion must be some form of attack are perhaps a source of the problem.
When these sorts of issues come up in an online community I do myself the service of abandoning the community before watching things get out of hand.
It's also super weird because everyone I know who is NB, trans, or genderqueer is fine with singular they and absolutely supports its use when someone's pronouns are unspecified.
But this is in a case where the pronouns are (presumably?) known. If you were obviously doing it with regards to one person, it could be very offensive. That is, if you insist on referring to a transgender person as "they", when you know their pronouns but refer to cis-gender people using gendered pronouns.... then you're just refusing to gender a trans person correctly as opposed to trying to take pronouns out of your language.
We did just have the whole contrapoints fiasco regarding pronouns, which shows that... the community is not dealing with some of these things very well at all. (FWIW, I'm a transgender woman and I totally agree with the concept she was expressing)
What if you use they for just about everyone? The other question I have is am I expected to look up every single person's preferred pronouns that I reply to? This situation doesn't make any sense at all to me personally.
I feel like there's part of this story I'm not hearing because just using gender neutral language for everyone on its own shouldn't be offensive. Unless, as I said in my other reply, you're basically doing it to avoid having to gender someone correctly.
I certainly wouldn't expect somebody to know what my pronouns are over the Internet. I try very hard to present in a way that is identified as female in real life, but the Internet? It's not like I try to write in a feminine way or anything, there's just no way you would know.
The part of the story you're missing is the somewhat recent (arguably happening for many years, now) phenomenon where some people take an issue like this (correct use of pronouns, in this case), weaponize it, and use it to assault communities. If you find yourself in a situation like this, you cannot get away by being more neutral and more reasonable, because it's not a misunderstanding - it's an attack. The situation is very asymmetrical; a lot of people and organizations yield at the very first opportunity, and people thinking it was just a misunderstanding get thrown under a bus.
They aren't, though they seem to be most successful at it currently.
To me, this phenomenon feels like a memetic equivalent of transplanting a species into a perfect niche far away from home, where it faces no predators or restrictions, so it's free to grow extremely fast. It usually ends up with it devastating the new ecosystem it was introduced to.
I think the difference is made by the medium. In any meatspace population, most quirks and beliefs are close to normally distributed. You have to deal with people who are different from you in many dimensions. The cost of associating and forming groups is high. On-line, all differences except those a person is willing to express themselves are masked by default, the cost of associating and forming groups is near-zero. Any group that finds purchase in their attempts at gaining influence can very quickly exploit it.
What I'm not sure about is why gender and race, and not religion. It would seem that religion was the original hot topic on the Internet, but we've managed to develop ways of dealing with the issue in both meatspace and on-line. Then again, maybe it's because the way we did it was to stick to the letter of old anti-religion-discrimination laws, but otherwise marginalize the religious - if you bring religion to a discussion you're by default "in the wrong", the same way that when you bring race or gender identity to a discussion, you're somehow by default "in the right".
Yes, they're most successful at it online. And from what I read, on many university campuses. But notwithstanding the historic election of President Obama, things aren't looking at all well for them in meatspace.
I get what you say about the ease of community building online. But online, all you can do is talk. And yes, frighten people who are managing online communities.
In meatspace, however, you can vote. Without otherwise revealing what you support. And you can also game the process through gerrymandering, challenging voters, and so on.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple decades. Especially in light of the surprises that climate change may bring. Such as perhaps millions of immigrants coming north as drought reduces agricultural productivity.
> Yes, they're most successful at it online. And from what I read, on many university campuses.
Which correlates with what I've observed: they're all young. I don't think I've seen a social justice activist older than 30-35. I wonder why that may be?
> It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple decades. Especially in light of the surprises that climate change may bring. Such as perhaps millions of immigrants coming north as drought reduces agricultural productivity.
Interesting, yes, but it's the flavor of "interesting" that scares the hell out of me. Dealing with climate issues requires cooperation, and it seems that in spite of all the social and technological advancements we've made, we're at historical low point of humanity's ability to coordinate.
> we're at historical low point of humanity's ability to coordinate
I don't think this is true. We humans have never been good at solving coordination problems on scales larger than the family or the tribe. I don't think the present is any worse in that respect.
What's different about the present is that instant global communication has made billions of people aware of huge differences among humans along many dimensions, that previously were only known to those who were able to travel extensively. But I think it's an error to translate much increased knowledge of those differences into much increased coordination problems. Virtually all of these "problems" would be solved if people would just let each other alone when interaction was not necessary.
They're mostly young because change is accelerating so fast that few older people remain outliers. I used to consider myself a social justice activist. A few decades ago.
Huh, didn't consider that angle - that changes happen so fast that your cause can fall out of the public consciousness within a decade or three. Thanks.
I meant that, regarding social justice, my position has become too close to the norm for me to be accepted as an activist. By activists, I mean. But by many civilians, sure.
Picking up an argument I wouldn't generally make myself, because I think I at least understand it:
Imagine some person, P. P is not very nice and for whatever reason P really hates transgendered people and thinks everything about them is fake and invalid.
P encounters a transgendered person, T, and would like nothing more to call T by the wrong gender to make it clear that P disapproves and to make T unhappy. But P's culture would consider such an action harassment, so P can't get away with that.
So what does P do instead? Maybe P carefully and conspicuously erases T's gender in every interaction specifically calling attention to this de-gendering through its conspicuousness, and ultimately having the same harassing result.
[You could even imagine that T might even prefer the more overt behavior, then at least it would be clear where everyone stood-- and T wouldn't lose support from people who hadn't yet seen enough from P to have inferred the intent.]
I think most reasonable people would agree that someone carefully following the letter of an anti-harassment rule in a contrived way in order to harass someone ... would simply be harassment, and should just be dealt with as such.
I don't think it's that hard to see how some could believe that it is possible to prevent this sort of problem (or at least make giving P a kick in the teeth much easier) by proscribing in advance P's behavior.
I think the problem with that approach is that P's specific behaviors weren't the problem at least in isolation, P's intent was the problem. An effort to prohibit that behavior by blunt rule which is inherently blind to intent will inevitably be full of false positives and be unduly burdensome. Especially so because avoiding a needless invocation of gender has historically been a highly effective way to avoid offending people when you simply don't or can't know what gender to use, and also because the overuse of gender itself offends some people who argue against gender existentialism.
But the idea that there could be harassment that exploits the ability to omit gender seems reasonable to me, even if it doesn't seem reasonable to me to solve that problem by-rule.
Of course, there are much less charitable interpretations of these sorts of disputes. But the mere fact that there are both charitable and uncharitable interpretations possible on all sides is a major reason why this kind of issue can turn into such a mess.
This appears to have been more specifically about using neutral forms (EDIT: specifically avoiding any pronouns at all), if someone's preference otherwise is known.
Even if someone's pronouns are known, what is the issue with using a gender neutral term? The ire with he/she is misgendering someone, so why is going with a neutral term for everyone a bad thing?
I am not trying to be inflammatory, I am genuinely confused as to why this would upset anyone. I don't look up the pronouns of every single person I respond to on the internet.
It upsets me because it's removing utility from the language.
"They" is plural. "They are running late" tells me that multiple people are delayed. "She is running late" tells me that one person is running late.
It's a silly workaround at best, but also a massive reduction in the usefulness of the language, and it establishes the awful precedent that a accommodating a fraction of a percentage of people supersedes the universal utility of the language. Even if you are okay with "they", what will the next re-write of the language sacrifice?
Don't get me wrong, if there is a way to accommodate that small group of people's circumstances without damaging the language, I am 100% for it. But "they" is like cutting off your middle finger in order to never gesture rudely with your hand.
Shakespeare used singular "they". If you want to cite your personal authority vs The Bard, you lose. Hint: he used it in gender-bent situations. Theater people tend to be progressive... 400 years ahead of the game in this instance.
That's actually not what's in contention here. Using singular "they" when gender is unknown avoids the old default of "he". Which feminists rightly took as sexist.
What this is about is using singular "they" when declared gender is known. Whatever people declare themselves to be is what they are. The rest is just mechanics.
The issue is when you use pronouns for others, but you won't for one person, because they're transgender. You're really calling their otherness out, and it hurts.
There are people in this world (ex: Ben Shapiro) who simply refuse to gender transgender people correctly on principle. If you are such a person, and your organization doesn't let you do that, and your solution is to use gender neutral pronouns for transgender people? Yup, that's very nearly as bad.
This is very different than me referring to you or anyone else who I only know as a screen name as "they". That's normal because if you don't even know their pronouns, what else can you do? But if you are part of a team and you know how people identify, you don't really have an excuse.
To be fair to Monica I think she was intending to use gender neutral pronouns for everyone regardless of their preference. This looks like a good compromise solution.
Actually, she appears to have wanted to not use pronouns at all--to write in such a way that pronouns, or at least third person singular ones, are never required. And the SE staff appears to have told her that would be against the new Code of Conduct, apparently on the theory that purposely avoiding the use of pronouns counts as misgendering, even if it's done all the time and not just with respect to particular people.
I've heard Shapiro's opinion on the matter, and he is most definitely not intending to "call their otherness out". Rather, the point he intends to make is that by agreeing to others demands that he and others use "correct" pronouns, that he would be giving up his principles on free speech, and therefore the foundations of the country. Other people like to frame the issue as plain bigotry without trying to understand the actual point of view at hand.
Everyone is welcome to exercise their freedom of speech to say offensive things -- and no one is required to give them a platform to do so. Nothing new here.
Miss Manners was strongly of the opinion that you should call people what they wished to be called. In her era, the controversy was about Miss vs. Mrs. vs. Ms.
"Gosh. How can it possibly be bigotry to call people something they don't want to be called? I do it all the time." - the belief system of a bigot, spoiler alert.
So let's speak frankly for a tick. Is it that you have such a low opinion of your readers that you think that "oh, it's a well-known and self-admitted regressive's free speech in question, not that he hates trans people and has a vested interest in catering to those who hate trans people" is an actual argument? Or are you a dupe who genuinely buys it as if it were true?
Of course, my question is rhetorical. Not attempting to other trans people? Don't insult the people reading your comments like that. Shapiro's entire schtick is othering anyone who the GOP doesn't have in their pocket. His entire ethos, hell his entire telos, is to maximally hurt and control those who are not white, straight, preferably-Christian men (and them too, so long as they are poor).It has nothing to do with "free speech" except insofar as "free speech" can be perverted to "freedom to abuse others while remaining beyond their reach." That's what he gets out of bed in the morning for.
This insistence on assigning maximum negative intention to someone's actions is really bizarre, and is a trend I see a lot of on the Left today (though it isn't limited to them). You're reading into what Shapiro does (I don't follow the guy) and inventing an entire narrative around it that makes him sound like an actual in-real-life cypto-Nazi (which is a little strange, as understand that Shapiro is Jewish).
What you call "inventing", I call "having been unfortunately aware of his boil-on-the-public-discourse's-rear-end existence for most of his career." And to be very clear, he's not a crypto-Nazi. He carries water for crypto-Nazis because they pay his checks. Being Jewish is immaterial; this was the argument used about the gay, Jewish Milo Yiannpoulos not possibly being a literal fascist. Play that one back, too, and see where you get.
There is a strain of thought among the terminally gray-fallacious that somebody has to say "I am a trans-hating asshat" (which is different from being a Nazi, crypto- or otherwise) to be understood as a trans-hating asshat. He does it intentionally, he does it with malice, he does it to appease his similarly trans-hating-asshat bosses and customers, and we have the receipts. Res ipsa loquitur.
In meatspace this issue is quite different, and I have no issue with using what someone wants. What about using they for everyone, preferred pronouns or not? It seems more logical to not make distinctions at all, and just use one term, they, for everyone. In other languages one can simply omit the subject as well.
> You're really calling their otherness out, and it hurts.
> your solution is to use gender neutral pronouns for transgender people? Yup, that's very nearly as bad.
Indeed, this is calling out someone as other and different, probably with pejorative intent. However, this is distinct from the effect of mis-gendering someone. The latter is about the transgender person not feeling like they are perceived like they perceive themselves. The former is about the transgender person being ostracized.
Those are different problems. Wanting to fix one of them does not require fixing the other. And really, if people want to ostracize, they will find ways. We should give guidance on speech to avoid inadvertently hurting others. For those who intentionally want to hurt others with speech, rules won't suffice. Those people either need a change of mind, or be dealt with like you would any other asshole.
I suppose that taking certain speech out of the accepted vernacular can help isolate the bigots. Because they could no longer hide amongst those who unintentionally use harmful language. This is what happened with the N-word. If someone uses it these days, you can pretty easily mark them as racists without worrying they didn't mean to use the term.
If I'm reading these leaks correctly, the core issue is that Monica was not okay with singular they. The issue isn't that SO was forcing her not to use it, it's that they were forcing her to use it, and she was refusing.
It’s the other way around, the policy was enforcing specific (preferred) pronouns. But they didn’t get to force her to do anything, she was fired before having a chance to violate it.
> Monica was asked many times, by many other moderators, to please use "singular they" for people who she actively knew preferred that pronoun.
To the extent that's true, then 1) the issue is about her refusal to use the singular they construction, and 2) the suggestion that this about her potential to violate a future change to the CoC is a red herring, because she was removed for actual violations of existing rules.
Of course, I'm not sure how much I trust the leaks. Given how politicized the situation now is, any transcript now has to be viewed a bit sceptically. However, The Register talked with her, and their story (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/01/stack_exchange_cont...) quotes her as saying "I said I don't use singular they". From context it seems this is categorical; she won't use it ever, in any circumstances, including in cases where that is someone's preferred pronoun.
That doesn't answer the timeline question, but it strongly suggests reports of her refusal to use singular they are correct. If she's just quietly avoided language she didn't like, I'm sure she'd have been fine, but when you make a big deal about how you're refusing to use a specific pronoun, even when asked, and even when using it is grammatically correct...
...yeah. Sorry, no sympathy for Monica there. I don't see how she really gave SO a lot of choice.
SO had the choice to 1) not remove someone for a violation that hadn't actually happened, and 2) give her a warning rather than surprise her with a firing, and 3) follow their own procedures for removing a moderator. And many other choices besides.
Heck, they could even have had a discussion with her.
Ad hominem arguments are always unacceptable. People with various mental illnesses (depression, autism, asperger, OCD, etc.) can still hold perfectly valid claims. The fact that somebody might see the world in a different way does not discredit them.
Singular they is great when pronouns are unspecified, and also makes for a great specific pronoun :)
But the issue at hand is precisely that Monica doesn't want to use singular they, even when someone has specified that pronoun – not out of bigotry, but because it supposedly makes for ambiguous, inelegant writing. Instead she prefers alternative constructions. I think this standpoint is more stupid than actually harmful; Stack Exchange of course disagrees.
It’s a private organisation. The person “let go” was a volunteer. It sucks, but both parties acted within their rights, legally and I’d argue morally.
Lots of places have weird norms—dress codes, for instance. This group has a different view of pronouns. They want to enforce that as a cultural value. Apparently, their leadership either agrees or doesn’t find the topic worth burning political capital over. The author did find it worth burning political capital over, which caused him [EDIT: oops, them] to be ejected.
The cost of vilifying norms we disagree with is a reduced cultural space private organisations can explore. That loss of dynamism may reduce the frequency of seemingly-silly subcultures, but it also hits our broader culture’s flexibility.
Yes, it's a private organization acting within their "rights", but this private organization is heavily reliant on their community, which they are now alienating themselves from.. which is the topic of discussion.
The moderator (whom you are ironically misgendering) was not attempting to burn political capital, and was never told they were doing anything against the rules by offering their opinion on a topic of discussion.
> The moderator (whom you are ironically misgendering) was not attempting to burn political capital
One, thank you for pointing out the midgendering. Flagged it in my original comment.
They weren’t attempting to deploy political capital. But repeatedly flagging an issue for discussion is a political act. (This is, by the way, another cultural norm. The level of openness to challenging the organisation’s authority.)
On content, I agree with the author. But I disagree with OP’s claim that there is a growing wing of our culture seeking to punish people for thoughtcrime.
The analogy would be someone who brings up the office dress code at every meeting. Yes, it’s arbitrary. Yes, you’re just talking about the rule. And yes, at a certain point it will be perceived as a challenge. (Depending on the culture, one that is laughed off or responded to.)
It was on private moderator chat. Content of this conversation was not intended to be public. It was not Monica to bring this issue up to discussion but new PR people in SO working on new CoC.
IMO there bigger problems in SO that should be addressed on instead of gender pronouns. I would question SO leadership ability to focus on the right things.
Where do you see an indication that the moderator in question brought up the issue constantly? By her own account, she got into a single major discussion and then let it go.
> The cost of vilifying norms we disagree with is a reduced cultural space private organisations can explore.
In case you've been living under a rock, this has already happened. Organizations are routinely boycotted, denied business, harassed out of existence and deplatformed by providers for "exploring" cultural spaces and for allowing others to do that without enforcing certain cultural norms in aggressive enough manner. It's not something theoretical, it's what has already happened many times. People fired, sites shut down, services denied, etc. And yet, the occasion where you decide to raise your voice is when somebody complains about being excluded from the community for mere discussing the rules - and falsely accused in violating those rules with no evidence whatsoever? This is where you wake up and start protesting about narrowing the exploration of cultural space - when somebody who dares to question whether it should be narrowed as harshly as it is done is immediately fired and libelously accused?
Somehow it sounds to me as if either you are not completely informed or your "let the thousands flowers bloom" sentiment is less than genuine and of more tactical nature.
> their culture is stupid and alienating to many intelligent people
We grant private organisations wide latitude to set their norms. Seemingly stupid norms can develop into, or inspire, sensible ones. Alternatively, they can illustrate the deficiencies of the norm.
I’m arguing against automatically branding this as stupid. I don’t agree with the norm, as a frequent user of the singular “they”. But there isn’t a clear right answer to the question, and that means diverging solutions deserve at least the respect of being explored.
(I would be more pointed if this were a government agency or company firing someone for not following this communication policy.)
Stack Exchange is the closest thing there is to a utility in terms of technology Q&A sites. I find it pretty disturbing to see websites like this become so overtly political.
I don't think anyone thinks SE violated the law. The point is they are a useful organization that many people use. The policy is causing their target audience to question the usefulness and try to find alternatives. I am curious about the alternatives.
My problem with the policy is the cognative load that the policy puts on the moderators given that most people want to be judged for their ideas rather than their gender.
Because the comment at the top of this thread uses the phrase "punish that assumed thought crime." It's just a disagreement of values.
I'm not going to hire a Catholic to be a pastor at my Lutheran church, but that doesn't mean I think that Catholics are committing thoughtcrime. (Despite the historical fact that many Lutherans and many Catholics did go to war for disagreeing with each other thoughts.)
True, I've never heard of an official state established Q&A site. So there's even less danger of state suppression of rights in the case of the technology site.
I mean, first, I'm surprised at the implicit claim that most of the world's programmers do use Stack Exchange and abide by its policies. I don't have a Stack Exchange account. I occasionally run across it in Google searches, but I don't have to abide by any policies to read a website. And my company (which is in a regulated industry and is IP-sensitive) prohibits us from posting detailed information about our work externally without review by the security team, so I assume most (I certainly don't assume all) of my coworkers don't post to Stack Exchange from work / about their work. I can't remember the last time I heard a coworker (here or at a previous employer) say "I asked StackOverflow and they said....". There are a lot of companies and non-company employers (governments...) which will be equally sensitive about posting code.
Second, even if it were true that most of the world's programmers do use Stack Exchange, why do they have to? It's a company that's barely 10 years old. It's a site that's notorious for closing question as off topic. Surely there are other resources. Surely other sites could pop up. I specifically mentioned "established" churches because it is no such thing - it's popular because people want to use it, not because anyone is obligated to. If people want to use something else, or nothing at all, they can. If someone figures out how to disrupt Stack Exchange, nobody is stopping them. "Crime" is a term that applies to violations of rules set by the government, which you are obligated to follow - it does not apply to violations of rules set by private parties.
Finally, the policies in question were applied in this instance to a moderator, not a user. I don't believe that most of the world's programmers have to be a moderator. (And, again, given that StackOverflow is notorious for editing questions to make them more generally useful even at the risk of making the question useless for the individual asker, I assume they would at most rephrase the question to be policy-compliant instead of banning the user.)
> Meh. It’s a private organisation. The person “let go” was a volunteer. It sucks, but both parties acted within their rights.
The drama isn't that any party acted or is alleged to have acted illegally.
Stack Overflow derives huge value from, in part, free moderation by volunteers; part of continuing to extract that free labor means maintaining positive relationships.
"It’s a private organisation. The person “let go” was a volunteer. It sucks, but both parties acted within their rights."
This. Also, if you have a legal dispute with someone, hire a lawyer and STFU. Do not go ranting on HN - that really screws stuff up for whoever has to be your advocate.
One line of thinking around requiring usage of preferred pronouns is that normalizing the act of giving/asking for pronouns allows for more inclusive spaces. For instance, if someone is transitioning between genders it might not be obvious what their gender identity is, and assuming their gender identity can lead to further dysphoria. At the same time, if you are someone who sees that the only people who get asked for their pronouns are people who do not obviously exist at either of edge of the gender spectrum, then the act of being asked for pronouns is tantamount to someone admitting their own confusion of your identity. This issue can be resolved for all parties and gender identities when asking/giving pronoun preference is the norm. For people with more straightforwardly normative gender identities, offering preferred pronouns is an act of solidarity with people who might not have the privilege of their gender identity being so obvious.
Doesn't that approach have the downside risk strongly elevating gender to be essential to activities where it really has no business?
I have no idea what your gender is and I don't think our interaction would be improved by forcing you-- by either rule or convention-- to specify something. Doing so would unnecessarily prime my sterotypes and perhaps leave you and/or me worrying that my response was unduly biased by the knoweldge. An effective requirement-to-specify implicitly makes a strong assumption that your gender can be described categorically rather than as, say, the fractal attractor of a complex collection of partial differential equations. :)
For a long time online I've tended to fill out apparently pointless gender fields with a "none of your business". I'm happy to support people identifying in whatever way they find most enabling, but at the same time it feels like a step back to elevate gender as important in contexts where it isn't after working so long to push towards a more gender blind world.
this has been established practise since the dawn of time, to the point where some languages have honorifics built into their grammar. Communities have guidelines and addressing someone with their preferred pronoun seems as simple to me as addressing someone with their proper name and title.
If someone is not up to the task to treat others with at least a modicum of respect they probably shouldn't moderate communities.
Avoiding pronouns appears to be an offense in that new CoC though. If I was to refer to your comment saying "As Barrin92 wrote", I'd be close to a ban if you've stated your preferred pronouns in your profile, as those are to be used.
> ...addressing someone with their proper name and title.
Except titles were banned by the U.S. Constitution. I'm not sure why Your Honor and Dr. stuck around, probably because of the immediacy of the need to oblige onesself to them. But it's important to remember that the Dr. honorific is cultural and unenforced. And the Your Honor is only enforced in court.
If someone wants to call the President "Donny", there are no legal repercussions. Not that Donny T will be a grown-up about it necessarily.
Titles as the general category were not banned. The US Constitution only concerns titles of nobility, and more specifically:
> "No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
Military titles are very important, and enforced within the military rank system. (Consider a private referring directly to a colonel as "Sherman" instead of "Colonel Potter".)
Some very common titles are "Mr.", "Ms", "Mrs.", and "Miss".
Some job titles are protected, like "engineer" - in several states only a certified professional engineer can have the job title "Engineer".
And nowhere are you generally a jerk for not calling someone "Colonel Mustard" in a grocery store instead of "Rick". If you are in trouble for that, it's in a narrow circumstance probably involving the chain of command or some generally inapplicable honor code. The grocery store certainly wouldn't ask an insubordinate PFC to leave for being careless in addressing a superior officer.
American disregard for formalities is literally a fish-out-of-water element in Saving Mr. Banks that the British "Mrs. Travers" bristles as the American Walt Disney (always just "Walt" to his employees) keeps calling her "Pamela" because that's how he talks to everyone. And the insistence on using last names formally seems archaic to the modern American viewer, besides. The screenwriters have P.L. Travers explain why she finds that form of address too familiar instead of assuming the audience understands implicitly.
That still doesn't mean titles were banned by the U.S. Constitution, as you claim it did.
All you're showing is that the US has a lower regard for formalities than the UK (in the mid-20th century). While I don't think pointing to one film is good evidence, I agree, based on what I know from other things.
However, that doesn't show "disregard for formalities" only less regard for formalities.
A decade later, you still had Mr. Rogers talking to Mr. McFeely of Speedy Delivery and Officer Clemons, so its not like that one film was representative of a US-wide change.
In 2009 it was still the norm that undergrads call their professors by title, not by first name - http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1153 says "Undergrads must never call Professors by their first name. It's just weird."
this isn't a legal matter, nobody on stackoverflow is going to sue you, they're apparently just going to stop you from being a moderator. If you work at the white house and you call the president Donny I would expect you don't have your job for very long. And that wouldn't be exclusive to the white house or stackoverflow either. If you start a pronoun rebellion at waffle house or are rude to your customers in some other way the same thing would happen.
Hasn't been as big as, say, Germany, but it can still be important to address someone with their proper name and title, as Barrin92 pointed out.
Consider that Mr., Ms, Mrs. and Miss are four very common honorifics in the US, to the point where there are forms which require entering one of those terms. Just why do I need to know someone gender and marital status?
Yet referring to a married couple as "Mr. and Miss Smith" can make people angry. Just like referring to someone as "Ma'am" can make them angry.
Go to, for example, United's web site to enroll in MileagePlus. They require a title, which must be one of Dr., Miss, Mr., Mrs., Ms., Mstr., Mx., Prof., Rev. Sir, and Sister.
Mx. is the the very new way to avoid the question of gender and marital status, but you likely won't get a good response referring to the couple as "Mx. and Mx. Smith".
Which means that Barrin92 is right, and the US is one example of "Communities have guidelines and addressing someone ... with their proper name and title" is something we do.
The Mx title is a very new way to avoid the gender+marital status problem, showing that, yes, the US has
Go back to Barrin92's statement, "addressing someone with their preferred pronoun seems as simple to me as addressing someone with their proper name and title."
It appears to me that your reply was that titles aren't important, and so therefore addressing someone with their preferred pronoun wasn't important.
I believe I have shown that titles have been and are important in the US. (Consider that in the US, children refer to adults by Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms while in some other countries, first names are the norm.) It's certainly not the case that the Constitution prohibits all titles.
Given that, your comment now seems to be that since people don't get banned for not referring to someone as Reverend, they shouldn't be banned for using the wrong pronoun.
Which is a rather different argument which doesn't depend on any history of titles in the US.
BTW, given that some reverends are touchy about being called reverend, and given that some people will deliberately not call someone a reverend, either to make them annoyed or as a protest over the right to be called a reverend, I find it very unlikely that someone wasn't banned from a website for refusing to call someone a reverend.
> It appears to me that your reply was that titles aren't important...
I didn't say it wasn't ever important. I said the U.S. isn't big on honorifics and they are largely unenforced.
If somebody wants to get snippy about honorifics or other so-called manners like elbows on the table, it's largely on them and everyone else is free to consider them a pain in the neck and avoid them.
Very rarely are there more than interpersonal consequences for ignoring honorifics. To the extent that they are honored (doctor, your honor, ranks), there is usually an involuntary imbalance of power involved with immediate consequences, at least in effect.
Nowhere am I able to put "Her Ladyship" or "Esq." on a plackard and enforce it with more than dirty looks and lectures. And, in the U.S., one would be considered tiresome for trying. It is plausibly an establishing scene for a bullying high society character in a film.
"Isn't big" is a relative thing. In the US, children (at least where I grew up) refer to most adults by their title + last name, like "Mr. Rogers". This holds even up to college, where professors are generally referred to by "Prof." or "Dr." + last name.
By comparison, in the Nordic countries, children often refer to adults by their first name, as well as college students to their professors.
To an Icelandic person, the US is big on honorifics.
But to get back to Barrin92's statement, "addressing someone with their preferred pronoun seems as simple to me as addressing someone with their proper name and title." We see that people do tend follow honorifics, even when there is no legal obligation. We also know some people do complain - loudly - when using the wrong honorifics. And we know there was a whole social movement in the 1970s to use "Ms" for women who didn't think that knowing her marital status was important.
Barrin92's statement doesn't depend on being "big on honorifics" only that honorifics are recognized as being important enough that most people follow the conventions.
An "involuntary imbalance of power" describes Stack Overflow, yes?
It's very convenient for me that you happened to pick "Esq." as an example, since that happens to be a protected term in some US jurisdictions. The Wikipedia link for 'Esquire' points to https://web.archive.org/web/20110530134510/http://www.abajou... :
> But some jurisdictions have reservations about the use of Esq. The Ohio Supreme Court’s Board of Commissioners on Grievances and Discipline, for example, prohibited a lawyer who was not licensed to practice law in the state from appending Esq. to his signature on business correspondence because it was deemed to connote licensure in Ohio. Ohio S. Ct. Opinion 91-24 (1991).
That would seem to undermine your argument.
Similarly, titles like "Engineer" and "attorney-at-law" and others are also protected. False use of these titles can be illegal.
It's not a dick move because the singular "they" covers every conceivable pronoun that could ever possibly exist. Saying "they" is not the same as calling a man "she" or calling a woman "he" or any combination of genders and pronouns. The singular "they" is as accurate for one gender as it is for any other possible genders and covers all of them exactly the same.
That's the entire reason neutral words like "they" exist, to cover every possible case to avoid mis-gendering. If we decide that the singular "they" is inappropriate, we might as well do away with pronouns altogether and refer to people by name every time we mention someone.
English already has a non-specific pronoun that's been around for hundreds of years. It has come from the French, so it's been around at least since the Norman Invasion of 1066. So roughly 1050 years.
At least in modern English, "one" is specifically an indefinite pronoun, and is therefore inappropriate for use when referring to a specific individual.
And before anyone claims otherwise, "they" was still in use as a definite, gender-neutral pronoun long before its NB usage began to become mainstream.
"They" might be a definite pronoun, but it is almost exclusively used as a plural. It's also a pretty bad drop in replacement; "They is currently running" sounds weird as all hell for instance. That there has been an explicit and forced attempt to shift it towards that doesn't make it sound any better.
Furthermore, "He" has been used as a generic pronoun long predating the singular they. While it comes with some ambiguity as well, it flows a lot better and does not screw around with singular/plural ambiguity.
"They" has been used continuously for the singular since 1300. It has literally never died out, despite protests from grammatical prescriptivists beginning around 1795. Even Shakespeare used singular they, but this would have been considered unremarkable by his audiences.
The only thing that seems relative new here is usage to refer to a specific known individual, of known gender. Historically singular they was used definite but unknown individuals, or at least individuals of unknown gender.
In any case, "They is" is wrong for singular, just like "you is".
"You" always takes "are", for both singular and plural "you". Indeed singular "you" differs from plural "you" only in the reflexive: yourself/yourselves.
Singular "They" is exactly the same. It uses "are" and differs only in the reflexive: themself/themselves. The only difference here is that the plural reflexive can be used for the singular, and indeed that has been standard for several hundred years, but feels extremely awkward with respect to a known specific individual.
Fun fact: "themself" actually predates "themselves", and was originally used for both singular and plural they, although around 1450 "themselves" became standard for plural, with "themself" remaining standard for singular. But eventually "themself" almost completely died out.
> 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
Straight from the article. You can tell people not to call you something, Cellio will not call you that thing. However, they will not go out of their way to call you what you want to be called, it's their choice in what they call you, as well as how they respond to names you don't like.
What? You can't say "call me they/them," rather you can only say "don't call me him/her/or any other pronoun besides they"? That's very silly.
Clarification of rules, even to the point where they may seem redundant, is completely fine and often important. This is such a weird hill for them to die on.
The new rule is not a clarification of the existing rule. If you'd not like me to call you "OP", that's fine, I can refer to you by your username or they or I can refer only to "the post", and if you prefer a pronoun, Cellio states she will use that pronoun. The issue is that the new rule states you must use a certain term whichever the user specifies.
I think we (as humans on this planet) need to be respectful of each other. Not go out of our way to hurt each other.
But "being respectful" needs to have a standard, society-wide definition. We cannot allow individuals to set their own standard of what they demand in order to feel respected, because then people can invent unreasonable demands on others and then claim to be harmed when that fails to happen.
For instance, I can go around demanding people call me "your lordship". No, my name is not Scott. My name is not unreal37. I am not he/she/they. Call me "your lordship" or I will consider that an insult.
Individuals cannot define the rules like this. We need a standard of what is considered respectful behavior and it applies to everyone.
Let's use a hypothetical here. Let's say you're on a team with someone named Mike.
Mike has a team member that keeps referring to him as 'Mikey'. Mike doesn't like this, because he feels it's demeaning and rude. He insists on being called Mike, but his teammate refuses.
If his manager gets involved and tells said team member to cut it out, is that punishing someone for wrongthink? Do you think it's acceptable to repeatedly call someone a name that they don't like?
There's a huge difference between calling someone you know and have interacted with for a significant amount of time or a random internet stranger the wrong thing though (not to mention the overhead of looking up & remembering the pronoun vs just writing around it for technical/factual answers)
Except that's not the scenario in question. The person I was responding to (and in turn, the OP) was about someone explicitly not calling you by what you request even after you ask them to please to so.
In my scenario, it doesn't change much if Mike is a new employee at said company. The coworker still calls him Mikey even after the employee's requests to stop, which would be considered rude by a lot of people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
I don't think it's particularly difficult to refer to a person how they want to be referred to. Enforcing that as a standard isn't thought crime and the amount of hand wringing over this supposed 'thought crime' is gross.
I call Robert, Robert - and not Bob, Bobby, or Teddy. Because Robert goes by Robert. Similar to pronouns. Not difficult at all.
I have a somewhat unusual name for Anglosphere. Some people have trouble pronouncing it. When that happens, I don't attack them in a fit of rage, I either correct them or most frequently just ignore it. Sometimes - e.g. Starbucks and so on - I use English version of the name that I never use otherwise but that sounds close enough so I know they are calling me. I don't try to organize boycott of Starbucks and demand the state to make a law that under penalty of firing on the spot they have to pronounce my name absolutely correctly and with the right accent. I don't demand from people who don't know me to instantly know my name and never be confused about how to pronounce it - in fact, some of my friends sometimes mispronounce it and I don't have trouble with it because I know their language background makes it harder for them to express the right combination of sounds that the correct pronunciation in my native language requires. I don't demand venues to make rules that require everybody to learn my name and how to pronounce it and fire anybody who speaks around it because they can't remember it or have hard time to pronounce it. I know none of it is meant as an insult to me and none of people who have hard time properly pronouncing my name do it because they hate me and my whole ethnic background.
Everyone has their quirks. If a friend breaks down crying on any mention of arbor day because their spouse died on arbor day... Someone might consider that response to be irrational, overly emotional, and/or inconvenient. But it would still be really unkind to fail to accommodate the friend. After all, it's easy to avoid mentioning arbor day 99.999% of the time.
Life is hard for everyone, at least at times. When we can do something painless to avoid giving someone a bad day even if its an act that would be meaningless to us, why shouldn't we?
Admitting that doesn't mean we're also required to accommodate when it's actually a problem, or that we're awful people if we don't know, forget, or make a mistake. It doesn't mean that we agree with or endorse their quirks... it's just a simple act of kindness and respect.
It's also efficient, because there is almost always something better to get done than navigate some other person's emotional minefield that we avoidably upset.
Not only is it not difficult to use someone's correct name and pronouns, frankly it's just basic politeness to call people what they want to be called.
That would probably make it somewhat easy enough for most native English speakers who keep up with the times. It would still be difficult enough that a big majority of my peers (middle-aged+ non-native English speakers) would get it wrong a lot of the time.
This whole thing is just a little alien and baffling to me. I don't understand why all interactions should take into account gender (or religion, age, seniority, or insert-your-favorite-disposition-here). I respect your choices and accomplishments about these things, but it's hard for me to remember to weave them into every sentence when it has nothing to do with the matter at hand.
I've had quite a few fruitful and interesting discussions online without having to bring in gender, religion, age, sex, or any number of other irrelevant preferences into it. In most contexts, I don't see the point of making a point of any of those.
I could call rank and require myself be called with all sorts of names (check my profile), but what would that benefit? I'm interested in your opinions; not on making you follow my rules.
> There is a segment of the population that seems intent on being able assign and punish that assumed thought crime.
Nobody really believes this outside of trolls and maybe a tiny fraction of people that only exist on the internet.
There are real people out there that are uncomfortable with their biological gender and I can promise you that none of them are asking to be called "xe/xey/xem" or whatever people want to beleive now.
I don't think refering to trans people by the gender they want or by "they" is too much to ask.
* Singular “they” can be the correct pronoun for some people, especially enbies.
* Monica does not want to use singular they for grammatical/stylistic reasons – when talking about persons of unspecified gender, alternative constructions are available.
* SE's CoC clarification supposedly says you must use the correct pronoun if it is known, including singular they. Constructions that intentionally avoid pronouns would then be ruled out.
* This is not a ban on the use of singular they.
Of course, SE's new CoC or new interpretation is still not public, so its actual contents are unknown.
It is a violation of a code of conduct that doesn't exist yet. It is a proposed future code of conduct. She was kicked out because it was decided that questioning the logic of the future code of conduct meant she didn't (or wouldn't -- I'm not sure which one is worse) follow the code of conduct that hadn't been implemented yet.
Recently, though, a trans acquaintance told me that some trans people do find gender-neutral pronouns like "they" to trigger dysphoria. I said I don't understand how that's possible (not that I understand dysphoria to begin with). They said they don't get it either. Have we then found the line separating the realms of cultural accommodation and psychiatric help, and is that minority of trans people across it?
I don't want to know your gender. I don't care. It's your thing. It's non of my business, and it makes no difference to me whatsoever.
If I do want to know your gender, then things between us are starting to become intimate.
To sum things up: I would say it's rude if someone shares his gender identity with me without being asked. On the same level as if someone shares his/her dick size without being asked.
I agree, "They" is perfect. If you're offended then so be it. I don't really care if you're a man, woman, transgender, gay, lesbian, whatever.
We are in a society that demands special treatment and we've become so afraid of offending people.
To the offended - Don't be, assume the best of everyone and things will be fine. The problem starts when people are offended and they require special treatment. Malice, racism, segregation and other forms of abuse is not part of this clause. Those are universally inexcusable.
You, and most of the commenters in this thread, seem to have somehow missed that the author specifically objects to using the singular "they". Perhaps people are skipping to the comments and/or jumping to stock reactions to the topic of gendered pronouns instead of reading and responding to the content of the linked post. Otherwise, I've no idea why so much debate is ragimg around, for example, "custom pronouns" (ze/xir/etc), when the original author doesn't mention them at all.
There are two ways of avoiding dealing with gender in written communication in English. You can use singular "they", or you can write in such a way gendered pronouns or singular they are not necessary. The author seems to prefer the second one as a stylistic choice, expressed that preference, and apparently this was what got said author fired.
The way this decision and surrounding information about the new CoC can be read, is that it's no longer about avoiding misgendering people. It's about having to pay fealty. Writing around gendered pronouns means weaseling out of having to make a stand on the issue, which labels you as the enemy.
Many discussion threads here seem to be losing sight of the fact that these are internet forums. 99% of the time one doesn't have a clue what gender, race, species etc one's interlocutor is.
There is a perfectly good third person pronoun for this situation. Some might decry it as a neologism, but I suggest it has been around long enough and has firmly entered the language:
Would you be offended if someone shared their name without being asked? The issue here is that names and pronouns come up in ordinary conversation quite frequently.
I don't get offended when someone is rude, it just makes that person an asshole in my mind.
But of-course I don't think sharing the name is rude, it's a basic personal reference. It would be rude if it's followed by "I'm straight" or "I'm a woman". As for pronouns, in most languages, you can know the [grammatically] correct gender automatically from the name. And if you don't, most grammars have middle or neutral gender, so that can be used. The issue here is that we shouldn't bother other people with our gender identity.
What if you ask what somebody does and she explains she’s a mom? You don’t obtusely ask, “But I didn’t ask if you were a mom. I didn’t even ask about your gender.” Life is gendered. It’s okay to reveal gender. And in the workplace, or even church or social gatherings, people are definitely thinking of sex and sexuality all the time — who is surprised when coworkers start dating?
It’s no more rude than having baby pictures or a wedding ring or a cross around your neck. These are all examples of intimate disclosure which have little or nothing to do with some idealized cold professional relations. People wear their identity in many ways and the rest of society is perfectly okay with it.
> As for pronouns, in most languages, you can know the [grammatically] correct gender automatically from the name.
But what if you can’t? Or there aren’t enough context clues to determine this? For example, my username contains my name in it; do you have any idea what my gender is? Or what I’d I had a “gendered” name but actually had a different identity personally?
But really the problem is that gender comes up in conversation a lot more than orientation. You can get a lot further in a conversation without the latter than the former, so some people see it fit to frontload that information.
Well, since I generally don't care about your gender identity, I would be quite satisfied if I use the grammatical gender that corresponds with your gendered name. BTW in my native language all nouns are gendered, even the surnames, and it would be grammatically incorrect to refer to a feminine or masculine name with pronouns from different gender.
I disagree that personal gender is often relevant in that kind of discussions (SO, or similar general topic forums), and when it is, then it's perfectly normal to share it. The same goes for dick size. But why to mention it if not necessary?
I'm appalled that moderators edit posts over pronouns. And not sure why the gender or sexual orientation of people matters on a site where you can basically be anonymous. I guess because I only read Stack Overflow questions from Google searches there's a whole dimension of Stack Exchange that eludes me.
On Twitter I know not to engage with people that specify their pronouns on their bio, it's just a waste of time even for trolling. I guess it's something that I can extend to SE and elsewhere.
And to be clear I've no problem with trans people and calling them what they want, but sometimes it's just difficult to remind it all (and confusing over different languages).
> And to be clear I've no problem with trans people and calling them what they want, but sometimes it's just difficult to remind it all (and confusing over different languages).
But wouldn't you have to look in every profile on SE before posting an answer or comment to make sure you're up to date about the pronoun that person wants to have used? At least that's what I understood is how it's supposed to be.
That was the next thing I was wondering about. Will there be some "visited your profile"-marker or whatever so that somebody could be "innocent" because he did actually not visit the profile or will that visit just be mandatory before commenting on a post?
One fair option is to outlaw pronouns in the entirety. While this is largely absurd it solves for any and all related problems of emotional distress equally to all people.
More seriously though, at one point is catering to somebody's offense the line too far? I am really of the mind that online posts that voice offense or defensiveness should be flagged. To me offense is a lazy way to discard disagreement when remaining objective or simply walking away are more effective.
It was poorly written on my part, I mostly meant trans people I would meet in real life and choosing between he or she.
I guess I'm strongly against discrimination but basically don't care about the rest, especially when it's about pseudonyms on the internet where nobody cares about your gender.
Maybe because I'm from the "there are no girls on the internet" meme times.
>The employee did not stay to field questions, but came back a couple hours later to tell me "we've been as clear as we can and your values are out of alignment".
The core issue as I see it isn't CoC or gender pronouns. Stack Overflow is punishing people if their perceived internal views (ie: "values") are not the same as a set of unwritten allowed views. So basically thought crime mixed with McCarthyism. Except without any specific clarify on what the allowed thoughts are.
StackOverflow is a community and communities are sustained by shared values. It makes perfect sense to oust leaders from a community who are out of alignment with the values the community wants to support.
I think the problem here is that those values are not in fact being defined by the community, in toto. They are being defined by a very vocal and relatively small subgroup. Furthermore, the author doesn't even seem to be opposed to those values, just highly ambivalent about them.
That’s what surprises me about this. I see the StackExchange sites as a place where people help each other make their software a little less crappy. In all my years using it, I don’t think I’ve ever used a third person pronoun (gendered or not) for another user. I don’t think anybody has used any pronoun except “you” to refer to me either. Usually if I’m referenced at all it’s “@smudgy’s answer is wrong because x,y and z”. How often can pronouns come up?
StackOverflow is made of of people, not technical knowledge seeking robots. Those people are messy and will inevitably come with a hole bundle of values in addition to their desire to ask and answer technical questions.
The community has been very vocal on this issue - they stand with the fired moderator. If what you said was true, the CEO of the company would get ousted, because clearly his values are not aligned with the values of the community.
That's straight up unenforceable though. And I doubt you would be left with much of a community if you kicked out everyone that isn't at least as hard-line on the issue as the described policy and its interpretation.
This person wasn't AFAIK kicked out of the community completely. They were removed from a leadership position. Those in leadership are held to higher standards than others in the community.
I'm mildly embarrassed to have written off critiques of the Great Awokening via CoCs a few years ago – after a few more years dealing with adult life, it's pretty clear that two constants are A) people, universally, can be in a dark cloud where unrelated actions by unrelated people are a personal attack on their existence B) authority _hates_ dealing with issues, especially the more distant they are from you in the hierarchy, and will always choose the option that keeps the largest crowd aware of the situation the quietest.
I was ready to be on Monica's side until I found and read the leaked Teacher's Lounge transcript. I'm now significantly more conflicted.
In the chat, Monica was asked many times, by many other moderators, to please use "singular they" for people who she actively knew preferred that pronoun. Monica flat out refused, saying it was confusing and grammatically incorrect. She said she'd be happy to use literally any other word, including "new" pronouns like "Xe". She also suggested that she could avoid using pronouns altogether, either just for people who preferred singular they, or universally for everyone. (Other moderators said this last option likely would have been fine had Monica not made known her reason for doing so.)
Now, on a purely personal level, I also find singular they to be super confusing in conversation, at least when the subject is unambiguous. But the extent to which Monica refused to budge, even after being told that she was making colleagues uncomfortable, struck me as behavior that would need to be disciplined in any formal workplace.
> But the extent to which Monica refused to budge, even after being told that she was making colleagues uncomfortable, struck me as behavior that would need to be disciplined in any formal workplace.
Whether you agree or disagree with the author's position, whether you agree or disagree with the Stack Exchange policies, a reasonable person acting in good faith would change their behaviour when told they are making others feel uncomfortable (unless perhaps they thought the change would make others more uncomfortable which doesn't appear to be the case here). This is pretty much the definition of good faith.
"a reasonable person acting in good faith would change their behaviour when told they are making others feel uncomfortable"
Yes, in yesterday's world this would be sensible. Nowadays being uncomfortable is being weaponized to bully others into submission and this should be fought against.
Being uncomfortable is part of the human existence and anyone should be able to feel uncomfortable and continue to function and continue to work with whoever is making them uncomfortable, unless that person is being downright offensive. Using "they" doesn't qualify, it's not even playing this game.
I agree with you insofar as, this isn't about the policy itself so much as Monica's reaction to being told she was making others uncomfortable.
However, I truly do believe from reading the chat that Monica had no ill intentions. She has strong feelings about the english language, and takes pride in upholding her own personal standards of quality in her writing.
Furthermore, the entire conversation was overly heated. And much of the blame that can be placed on StackExchange—they dropped an ambiguous announcement into the chat without any context, and left everyone to discuss and interpret it amongst themselves instead of staying to answer questions.
Fair, I haven't read the original discussion and was more making a general point about the fact that feeling uncomfortable is the main concern here, not the specifics of the discussion, and it sounds like that's Stack Exchange's opinion as well.
> Other moderators said this last option likely would have been fine had Monica not made known her reason for doing so.
That reason being that it's "confusing and grammatically incorrect"? What does that have to do with the distinction between "people who preferred singular they" and "everyone"?
> even after being told that she was making colleagues uncomfortable
Where is the evidence that she was legitimately making colleagues "uncomfortable"?
If I claim to be "uncomfortable" at work because my colleagues do X or don't do Y in their interactions with me, should that be taken at face value? Is my claim enough to have them removed if they don't correct their "problematic" behavior?
One of the many reasons I'd never work at a big company.
I just want to build software. I don't go to work to talk politics or have to keep track of every person's political radicalism for fear of being fired.
I'd also prefer not to add even more social anxiety because I don't keep up with the latest stuff on Twitter.
Working from home used to make me feel anxious about being lonely and the lack of networking. Now I know I made the right decision and plan to stick to it as long as possible.
I'd like to learn how to force cultural change on people who don't want it and don't care about it. It's just a really cool society hacking technique.
So how does a bill become a law with regards to this pronoun stuff? Who were the people who initiated this policy? What motivated them to do it? Who influenced them? Who influenced them? Who funded the whole movement?
4chan has been doing research into this by doing enough trolling that they got the ok hand sign classified as a hate symbol. It seems, based on following the timeline on that phenomenon that a lot of what is considered forbidden in our culture is generated by certain 3 and 4 letter non-profits who feed that information to Google, Facebook, and others. That's just the negative part of it all though: how behavior becomes forbidden.
I want to know how behavior, like the pronoun stuff, becomes prescribed. I want to use that machinery to get society to do strange stuff as civilization level performance art.
If you ever discover the technique, please also make the civilization finally do something about climate change and getting us gently off the exponent in our economies. Sincerely, a time traveller from the 2080s.
Climate change has been screamed at you from every single information stream in your entire universe. To act like you're the smart one who has to deliver this to the people is the height of grandiosity.
What I am asking here is how do we regain control of The Spectacle of Guy Debord for our own performance art projects that originate nowhere except our very own minds.
Not directly related, but I'm a bit afraid that as someone who is not a native speaker of English, it becomes more and more difficult not to inadvertantly cause a shit storm on American websites. People seem to become incredibly sensitive to "correct speech".
It's not just more difficult, it also feels weird (to not say more). In France, they want to change how to write things so you write the masculine and feminine version of each word at the same time, and even though it looks like the most stupid thing in the world, a lot of people working at university or some politician do it.
Almost nobody is for progress for the sake of progress. Rejecting a solution that tries to address a (arguably) less-than-ideal status quo as stupid is not very helpful. We could argue that the status quo is stupid too anyway. Don't you see that the solution you find stupid (which you can, of course) is an attempt to address something some people see as a problem?
At least, enlighten us with reasons why you find it stupid, it's easy to find interesting things to say on this matter.
I recently got caught off-guard on HN. Until a few months I didn't really get that 'they' could be used to refer to a company and I believe it led to some quiproquo in a conversation. One HN commentator went into my post history and hinted I was lying about it.
This history-trolling is a nasty element in this new landscape. I've noticed the more zealous members of this policing regime creating automated tools for each forum that will scan through post history and divine - for example - occurrences of the n--- word, listing how many times they've said it, and whether they've tried to cover their tracks since the last search.
I think it's more clear-headed to judge somebody from the perspective of history than as if you had Alzheimer's. What may be unfair is information asymmetry between the strong and the weak.
As for the erroneous judgment stemming from analysis (like doing a word count for taboo words), would analysis arising from drastically less historical data be any more impressive?
It's intentionally ignorant of change, intentionally aiming to derail redemption and forgiveness, and intentionally crafting an isolated narrative without constructing the /actual/ context of those historical posts. It's a very narrow, distorted view.
Compared to an Alzheimer's perspective? How does one even remotely discuss a history of unwell behavior? Obviously through a documentation of a person's history.
Or does one somehow incredibly discuss a person from a single snapshot? Surely one-shot judgment is what's shallow, and zero-history judgment is called prejudice.
How does one crave context and then forget the past?
And when court compassionately considers events in a person's life which may have lead to a crime, how is that a "derailing" of forgiveness? What would clarity even mean here?
I'm not arguing to forget the past. I'm arguing that the current trend is that of merely skimming and cherry-picking, the least useful of historical analyses.
Yes, you're saying you wish some people would stop analyzing badly. I presume you have more confidence in HN moderators who analyze personal history. There are some people you trust, and some you don't.
I guess the deep distinction you are proposing is that the random HN person who cherry-picked is bad, while HN moderation is good. How do we recognize your distinction? Through a history of behavior.
HN, I trust to some greater degree, yes. That doesn't mean temperature doesn't change, as it has on many platforms before, and will on many after.
The tool I linked above is an example of working around the issue: it's a form of doxxing, in which the information is dumped publicly beneath the user's post in order to tag and attempt to remove the validity of the post in the public opinion, even (and especially) when used in a non-sequitur manner.
Ha, so true. I know a lot of people (particularly East Asians) who struggle with basic English gender pronouns. I used to have a Chinese co-worker who just always got them backwards and when she said "him or his" I always assumed she was talking about a woman and vice-versa.
A few months back I took the IELTS(International english language testing system) exam. There was nothing in the entire syllabus, or sample tests I took, or the exam I appeared in, about all this. In fact I did a fair bit of practice on listening, reading, writing and speaking tests. Worked my way through some 7 - 8 workbooks. Had a good score in the exam too.
This entire thing is so confusing to a point it almost requires a fair degree of exposure to politics, sub culture and social narrative cutting across various issues just to be able to ask some one to serve them a cup of tea.
I'm surprised a language proficiency testing system, with may be tens of thousands of people taking the exam, with books, and training material designed with may be a century worth of experience from English speaking cultures across the world doesn't have anything on this. Or doesn't train us on this. There is no right way, grammatical or cultural accepted across the English speaking world to get this right.
It so confusing. At this point in time its like I have to run a rule engine inside my brain just be be able to say 'Hi $title, $name, Did $pronoun take the book from my desk'
Try filling in $title and $pronoun and see how it goes, especially when $name has a gender attached to it over entire known human history.
Might be a bit meta but could it be that there's a pretty widespread attitude of 'wanting to be offended' and black and white 'with me or against me' thinking in America (sorry if over-generalizing here), judging from what I get to see on Twitter?
How's a society supposed to work like this? Could it be that assuming good faith more often might be a starting point for a solution to a lot of problems, this one included?
You find a common enemy to hate in unison, for example China. And then you remind other black and white groups that hay we have greater things to hate.
Come on. We’re all children of the Earth. Half of the shit we consume is made in China. Let’s not spread xenophobia about an entire nation that makes 30% of the world’s population
It's not xenophobia, just the sad reality. I've seen rhetoric against China amp up from almost 0 to 100 real quick in the political discourse, to the point where any accusation are generally held as verdict, and in turn generates more hate. But we've seen it before and I'm kind of glad that even though the hate is universal majority does not intend to invoke MAD, so there's not much chance of an armed conflict (In comparison to Iraq/Libya)
It does work though. The left and the right in the West are mostly together on hating China. There are small minorities in both that are not on board, but in general, it works.
Of course, you'd only level up the problem, from being a domestic issue to being a global issue. Next up: those damn bugs from Klendathu are threatening earth, we need to stand together against them. A planetary threat (with a face, climate change won't work) will bring together pretty much everybody.
This person seems to think using 'they' as a singular is somehow wrong in English.
That's not correct. It's been used since the 1500s and it was only when the wave of idiot Victoria grammar prescriptivists started throwing weight around that there was any dispute at all.
I really like how simple it is in English to use the singular pronoun they when the gender of the person you are referring to is not known. I find that it reads a lot better than the compound he/she.
I wish we had something similar in Dutch that didn't sound like a kludge. If we do, I haven't found it yet.
Interestingly, in Japanese it's rather easy to refer to people in a gender-neutral way if you know either the profession or the name of that person; the honorific suffixes for names (e.g., さん or 様) where we would use Mr/Mrs/Ms don't differentiate by gender in Japanese and professions are often gender-neutral in name.
It gets trickier if you don't have that information, because you tend to need he or she (彼 and 彼女 respectively) or one of the very common age bracket and gender specific classifiers like (you who could be someone's) sister (お姉さん) for any adult woman under the age of 35 (or older if you want to flirt a bit). Of course there is always the generic that person (あの方 or あの人).
Luckily, Japanese allows you to complete leave out the subject of a sentence and still make sense if the context makes it clear, so there is that.
Formal Japanese takes a lot to get into coming from English, but the benefit is that in informal conversation you can reliquish the honorifics to some extent.
The con is that there is not that much informal conversation going on especially in regards to work, so polite form grammar should be the default way to speak. On the other hand, polite form still allows you to drop gender specific words, and another note is the way Japanese conversations are formulated, gender is almost never a pre-stated thing, it's usually inferred based on who you're speaking about or who you're talking to.
Honestly sounds like the mods were just ginning up for a fight. They would rather force people into compliance with difficult rules while the writer of this piece was looking to reduce conflict. It's not exclusive to LGBTQ+ and is a pretty common theme in any subculture. Some people just live to enforce rules and any chance to create new and obscure rules is like catnip to them.
If I can rope this back into something more relatable to the HN crowds, this is like the agile gurus who present an inviolable 87-step process to achieve agility while completely ignoring the actual goals of the process.
For the record, on stackexchange, "mod" refers to a volunteer (elected by the community) and "CM" or "Community Manager" to someone employed and paid by SE. I believe you meant "CM" instead of "mod" in your first sentence.
The problem is that it's popularly a plural pronoun now, despite any finer points of etymology. Especially going back that far, all sorts of words have had meanings drift. Shakespeare and the King James Bible need footnotes to be intelligible.
1. It's not clear from your snippet if the vehicle will arrive empty or with passengers.
2. Even if that sentence is unambiguous, it is not hard to come up with sentences that are ambiguous.
3. Colloquially people do all sorts of imprecise and grammatically inadvisable things like "Give 'em a hand." That does not mean the phrasing makes sense for formal, professional, or technical writing.
4. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If people are confused by singular "them" (they are, but someone please do a proper study to confirm empirically), the construct is confusing.
5. If an author feels it is ambiguous in some cases, how do we accommodate that without branding the author insensitive or even hateful? It seems also unwelcoming to not leave room for agency in grammatical decisions.
[2] If the gender of the antecedent/referent is not known, using singular they/them speeds up comprehension. If gender is known, it slows it down compared to using the known gender pronoun: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293036/
1. Not sure where these passengers came from, but sure, if you can insert entities into the referent then any pronoun is potentially invalid.
2. Of course you can, but (a) context will fill in the gaps and (b) if that doesn't work, you can usually interrogate the author/speaker (and (c), if you can't interrogate the author/speaker, then yes, they've failed in their composition - but that doesn't necessarily mean that singular they/them is the problem, or is infeasible in all contexts.
3. Sure, there are many things that are acceptable colloquially and not professionally, and vice versa. Does writing on an internet forum fall more in line with formal or informal writing? I don't think it's clear.
4. See the above; sometimes it "confuses" people, sometimes it doesn't (and the unqualified assumption that it does is perhaps an indication that there's some motivated reasoning at play)
5. I don't myself have any issues with writing to avoid pronouns, however if you pointedly avoid pronouns with one person and then use them with another (let's say you use them with a cis-female and then avoid them with a non-binary person) that's not really welcoming or sensitive, and it seems apt to brand them as such. If you're avoiding pronouns equally in all situations, that's different. But if you're selectively avoiding pronouns where they don't line up with your personal viewpoints, then you might be seen as insensitive or hateful, and you might not be welcome everywhere. That's kind of how life is, and you just need to deal with it.
And, if you're coming from a Romance language, it feels natural to use "plural" pronouns (like "they") for singular subjects because that's the formal way to address people in those languages (when you're being more respectful). It seems like such an efficient solution. (Ironic, too, that it comes from languages where inanimate objects have genders!)
I’m a native speaker of one such language, where plural is the respectful form (though lately cultural Americanization imports singular/familiar tone into even business contexts). It has gendered plural pronouns and no natural way to be gender-less except “it”.
According to most style guides as of 5 years ago, it's only proper English when the gender of the person is unknown, though even that isn't universal - he/she is often preferred.
This is a side question, but in regards to the actual gendered pronoun discussion that seems to be at the center of the policy debate, what even is the specific set of criteria being used?
It seems like someone is lobbying that moderators must refer to others with pronouns that the other person chooses. Doesn’t this obviously have unsolvable problems, in principle?
- most of the time, responses on a Stack Overflow site are content-specific (“clinical”) and should not necessarily make reference to another human at all (and probably should make efforts to avoid such references as often as possible, for writing clarity).
- when referencing another comment or answer or something, dry scientific writing that does so without attributable language attaching it to a person would be less controversial, more clear, and less likely to bring subjective opinions into a matter of reference.
- you could always make all references revert to a chosen username and restructure language to have no concept of gender, which for clinical writing is a huge positive aspect, and is in no way connected to the preferences of those being referred to (by matter of it being clinical, not by any matter of status of gender identity)
- even if you assume you did need to refer by pronoun, how could Person A know what pronoun Person B wishes to be referred by, unless explicitly stated somewhere?
- how could you prove negative intent when choosing not to use certain pronouns, as opposed to a mistake, or pronoun identity that was not publicly known, etc.?
I’m just curious how such a thing could ever conceivably be part of a policy that restricts or controls clinical writing style in the moderation of a forum. Regardless of all the moderator drama, it just appears to me like a type of policy that functionally cannot exist, regardless of whether a corporate entity declares it a policy or not.
> - how could you prove negative intent when choosing not to use certain pronouns, as opposed to a mistake, or pronoun identity that was not publicly known, etc.?
Same way you prove someone is posting maliciously in any other context -- you make a judgement call based on history? If it looks like an honest mistake and they say, "Whoops, my bad!", then it's no big deal?
> - even if you assume you did need to refer by pronoun, how could Person A know what pronoun Person B wishes to be referred by, unless explicitly stated somewhere?
People who care about having the correct pronoun used will either gently correct you or have their pronouns in their profiles.
> “Same way you prove someone is posting maliciously in any other context -- you make a judgement call based on history?“
Since when is that the evidenciary standard for making a decision like this? At the very least that certainly doesn’t seem in line with Stack Overflow’s policy (which favors assuming positive intent and working to rectify before punishment), so seems implausible in that specific case. More generally, “make a judgment call based on history” sounds like a recipe for huge abuses of power and double standards in applying the policy. Instead you need clear guidelines on exactly what it means (which seems near impossible in this case.)
> “People who care about having the correct pronoun used will either gently correct you or have their pronouns in their profiles.”
There are a lot of problems with this. For one, it assumes you can identify “people who care” and removes the possibility of people who might care but don’t speak up for any variety of reasons.
More importantly though, without a clear policy on the first part, then writing something which presents any way in which someone can “gently correct you” may already be a violation of the code of conduct, or could selectively be treated as such, with no hard guidelines by which someone could defend themselves as having made an honest mistake.
Going further, a lot of the discussion in the SO meta posts seemed to be around the idea that pursuing a gender-neutral writing style that structures language so as to not need any type of pronoun reference was itself a form of misgendering or disrespect. It’s not fully clear, but there’s significant reason to think the people lobbying for the SO policy were trying to say that you both have to write using pronouns and also have to know and use the correct pronouns, and that any other type of behavior would potentially be considered a violation.
> Since when is that the evidenciary standard for making a decision like this?
Since internet forums were a thing? Actually, since law was a thing? There's always a human in the loop, and the human is always making a judgement call. In some cases there's a lot at stake, at other times there's very little. But ultimately people look at the guidelines, look at the history, and make a decision with the best info they have.
> More importantly though, without a clear policy on the first part, then writing something which presents any way in which someone can “gently correct you” may already be a violation of the code of conduct, or could selectively be treated as such, with no hard guidelines by which someone could defend themselves as having made an honest mistake.
You are arguing a problem that doesn't exist in practice. I use singular they. I sometimes include it my profiles online, in other places I don't. If someone gets it wrong and it bothers me I'll say, "Hey, no big deal, but I use singular they."
I get one of two outcomes -- either a bunch of downvotes and insults, or a "Whoops, my bad" response.
So it would be everyone's obligation to check everyone's profile before interacting with them in any way - even if it only makes a difference in 1%-3% of the cases? That's just plain unrealistic if you ask me.
This impacts women in tech spaces as well, where frequently 'he' is the default assumption.
And yeah, many discords and forums I'm a part of include pronouns in usernames, fields below the name, in hovercards, or in profiles. In the rare occasion you need to reference someone's pronouns, it takes ~3 seconds to look up.
It's genuinely pretty rare to refer to another poster using a pronoun. Often you'll see, "the parent commenter" or "the op", etc.
Open up your comment history and look through it -- how often do you use a pronoun? Specifically to refer to another commenter (and not about a person referenced in an article)? I'm guessing very, very infrequently...
The most common case for me is commenting on a SO answer something like "This is not what the OP asked about. <They> wanted X and you only talk about Y" and similar - talking in third person about the asker. I have yet to encounter a case where "they" seems inappropriate.
That said, I will not go out of my way to check someone's profile before talking to them. Given a technical aid (e.g. hovercard) that might not be a problem though.
> An employee with a "director" title posted and pinned a message saying the company is changing the CoC to require use of preferred pronouns and avoiding them is forbidden. I asked questions, most importantly: would it now be a violation of this new policy to write in the gender-neutral way that I already use? And how are you judging "avoiding", which requires knowledge of intent? Other people had questions and issues too. One moderator pointed out a problem with something I was proposing to do and I agreed after it was explained and said I wouldn't do that. The employee did not stay to field questions, but came back a couple hours later to tell me "we've been as clear as we can and your values are out of alignment".
In what world is this type of action supposed to be praised?
I am left leaning and have actively supported the LGBT community, campaigned for marriage equality and helped raise someone who is LGBT and who suffered from brutal bullying in school.
I have moved away from actively supporting the LGBT community but I still support my friends and family. I did this because the toxicity and witch hunting has gotten out of hand. We all used to fight the good fight. But the community has transitioned into a culture that is creating an increasing number of rules and tribes in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of society and in order to 'trap' outsiders into making a faux pas and then elevate themselves by pointing out the mistake. My sense is that this is a vocal minority in the LGBT community, but also highly influential, and that influence comes through fear of being called out.
If you'd like to see examples of some of the toxicity inside the LGBT community itself, just do a search on TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=TERF
The LGBT community is managing to alienate those who used to vocally support them. I think all of us hoped that we would some day be one people. Instead there is a persecution underway of anyone who is not LGBT - and merely pointing this out will see me accused of engaging in hate speech.
As a side note: The comment thread here is a bloodbath, in case you hadn't noticed. Massive swings up upvoted and downvoted posts. The LGBT community will no doubt explain this away as haters and extremists who waded in and downvoted anything supportive. In fact many of us are supporters of human equality. We just don't support persecution, witch hunts and people who need to bring others down to elevate themselves.
The thing with HN and other forums which utilize an upvote/downvote feature, is that it will always devolve into using downvote as a way to disagree with a post, or to discourage certain opinions, then coming up with justification for the downvote only after being called out on it.
I've accepted this inevitability, but that doesn't mean my opinion on issues will change, the best you can do is to ignore your karma when it comes to controversial topics or don't bother posting on them at all.
This is a case in which a Code of Conduct actually creates confusion instead of dispelling it. The more I think about it the sadder it is. It's tragic when there should be a rule but when you reach for it you find instead there is an empty space surrounded by razor wire where a rule should be.
The SO Code of Conduct was - I believe - not intended to create nor dispel confusion. It was created to legitimize/bless authoritarian site management/moderation practices with no due process. Before that code, there was a general "be nice" principle, and informal customs regarding what happens when you don't act nice. After the code, it became the accepted, hallowed norm that you can be kicked off or otherwise harshly penalzied on almost a whim, no input from by your peers, no public record of what had happened, no opportunity to argue in your defense etc.
I don't find it to be unreasonable. If a trans person clearly states that her pronouns are "she/her" and you twist your sentences around to avoid using pronouns at all, that could certainly give the impression that you don't recognize her identity as valid. I am not saying OP did this or did this intentionally but it's not an unreasonable policy. It sounds to me (without being intimately familiar with the situation) that OP has esoteric stylistic preferences that are not transphobic but happen to be consistent with the language that transphobic people will use.
Pronoun use is pretty straightforward. If someone says their pronouns, you use their pronouns to refer to them, just like you would anyone else. It may feel a little disorienting if you don't talk to many trans people and, for example, they use singular "they" or have a pronoun that seems different than the one that you would naturally assign to them based on their appearance, but it's not difficult and you can get used to it pretty quickly.
The reason that people are so sensitive and strict about this is because the stakes for trans people are very high -- some people don't believe trans people exist, should exist, or should have the same rights as cis people. Refusing to use the right pronouns reveals either a benign misunderstanding about trans people or a willful hostility towards their existence. The latter is extremely common and can be both hurtful and often scary, as trans people, especially trans people of color, are often subject to violence because of their identities.
Singular they/them is not esoteric -- it is recognized by most major style guides, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Chicago Manual of Style, among others.
Especially since so many posts complaining about singular they use singular they. A few of them take a look at their own post, rethink it, and decide they're actually fine with it.
I think this is a fairly descriptive term. This happened fairly recently for me in another context. After I saw Star Wars Episode VIII, I let it be known that I thought it was a bad movie. In this cultural moment, some folks will take that innocent opinion from a lifelong Star Wars fan as a signifier of my stance in favor of every controversial thing that a terrible person who also disliked the movie said. It feels like everything is taken as a dog whistle.
This exact same thing happened to me at a party. There is a very odd amount of belief around SW8 in terms of equality and rights. It doesn't really make a lot of sense; and feels similar to the way people think The Babadook is somehow related to coming out of the closet.
> Furthermore I suspect this is less about he/him vs she/hers but some of the more esoteric pronoun preferences.
Is that the case here? I would think it is a bit too avantgardist to expect people to contort their sentences to include singular pronouns beyond he/she/they at this point. I get the impression that those esoteric made-up pronouns tend to be mostly used for straw-men arguments.
The stakes being so high justifies good decision making, not instant compliance.
When you're arguing with those who are actively hostile towards your beliefs, you're usually only able to convince the undecided middle, who watch your argument and take sides without contributing. I don't think firing a moderator who was to all appearances LGBT-friendly and causing this level of drama has been a net reputation gain for either Stack Exchange or trans people.
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.)
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?
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.
>I don't find it to be unreasonable. If a trans person clearly states that her pronouns are "she/her" and you twist your sentences around to avoid using pronouns at all, that could certainly give the impression that you don't recognize her identity as valid.
...and why should I? Why is this a given? Reminds me of when Andy Bernard goes to therapy and when he comes back he asks people to call him Drew.
Because trans people exist, and this isn't really up for debate, it's accepted by all mainstream medical and psychological associations and is demonstrated in practice by the lived experiences of millions of trans people.
In short ...
too many people take themselves too seriously.
too many people reading the intent to malign from internet postings made by people intending to help.
It seems all sites that rely on free labor for moderation end up with similar sorts of problems. Moderation is time consuming, tedious, and thankless work when done well. Who wants to spend hours doing this each day without any financial incentive? You end up getting folks attracted to having some degree of power over people, or ability to enforce or espouse their own views/values/ideologies, and so on. But all of these motivations are completely antithetical to what the position 'ought' be about - which is essentially a digital janitor.
Pay moderators and the problem goes away since you now attract a pretty normal pool of people whose motivations might be earning a buck, or career advancement. I think we can see that clearly enough here where it's self evident that the moderators are paid. The problem of course is imagine a larger site wants 100 moderators. OK, you can get 100 people who are going to do a mixed job at best, but for free. Or you can pay $3,000,000 a year for the same team. Most companies? Easy decision. That's a $3 million executive bonus right there!
I see no reason to believe that the involved mods are power-hungry. You generally need to have invested tons of tedious unpaid volunteer work (raising flags, reviewing questions/answers etc.) to become elected in the first place, and the subsequent duties are more of that nature.
I mean, there surely is some merit to your thesis, but I have no idea how you think this is relevant to the situation in question. The people gravely mishandling things are exactly the paid employees, not the volunteer moderators.
You have to try to see things from their perspective. Any option they could choose is going to be bad, so they're incentivized to choose what they perceive to be the least negative one. Sexual/gender groups tend to be hyper active on social media and organization - they are also extremely vigilant in trying to socially damage any perceived enemies. Had Stack Exchange chosen to not act they would likely be facing an angry mob of people who are hyper active on social media hounding them about not being inclusive, engaging in [--]phobia, bigotry, etc.
They probably simply felt that firing one moderator was easier than dealing with what was likely to become a deluge of public relations damage if they did nothing. Depending upon the laws in New York, there would even be the potential of them facing discrimination or other lawsuits. Regardless of the merit of the claims, it would be enough to severely hurt the company. For instance see Ellen Pao vs Kleiner Perkins. Even though she decisively lost every single claim, their company's name and image was dragged through the mud for months in many major media outlets that draw tech oriented readership. And that's a company that doesn't, in the same way, rely on general populace brand value.
The solution, like many things, is to never put yourself in this position to begin with. And that starts with paying for your labor.
--
As for the mod selection process itself, it's the same thing everywhere. In general moderators are hired from the community. The problem is the people you don't want to be mods are the ones that'd be most interested in such a position, whereas the people you do want are generally not going to be willing to do it without compensation. There are some exceptions of course, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that they are indeed the exception.
This was touched on briefly in the article, but maybe someone else here can shed some light on this here.
Is it not super confusing for gender neutral to use the 'they' pronoun? It's already in use in the English language. Every time I've heard people try to use it in conversation it's sounded like an Abbott and Costello routine.
I find it pretty easy to use "they" when the gender is unknown, which fits a lot of writing online.
I find it much, much more difficult to remember to call my friend's partner, who looks in every way to me very feminine, and has an unambiguously feminine name, "they" rather than "she".
I don't really find it any harder than picking up someone going my Mrs. rather than Ms. or someone changing last name. There's usually an adjustment period, of course, but it's not that hard to pick up personally.
With an indefinite referent though (from you link: "a man", "a person", "every one"). Not with reference to specific definite person. "Jack got their jacket" does not usually parse as Jack getting his own jacket.
What? "Jack got their jacket before saying goodnight" scans totally reasonably to me as commonly used English? I suspect the degree to which this sounds fine is colloquial.
But it's not that hard of a transition to make either. It might seem awkward for a bit, but it settles in pretty quickly.
The point is that it's not an unknown, made up word that came from nowhere. It has been used in the English language for hundreds of years. It's not confusing to use because one can infer from context.
No more confusing that any other words that have two meanings. When you hammer a nail, you certainly don't want to hit your fingers. But if you miss the nail with the hammer, you might hit your nail, which would be painful. And you have to be really careful asking someone if they want a date. If you mean the fruit of a palm tree but they think you want to start a romantic relationship, things might get tricky.
And certainly less confusing than words that are spelled the same but have wildly different meanings depending on pronunciation (read, past tense meaning to have finished reading a section of text, or read, future/present tense meaning has not finished reading a section of text).
I guess it's better if I give a concrete example of a conversation I recently observed.
Bob is gender neutral. Uses the 'they' pronoun. In a conversation with people, instead of saying "Bob helped me out with this problem", someone says "They helped me out with this problem", referring to Bob, and no one, including Bob, has any idea who they are referring to.
Every language has confusing pieces like this, which is why context is important. Your example could certainly be confusing, but if even Bob doesn't know who you're referring to, there would likely be confusion in "he helped me out with this problem". It would likely make more sense to say "I talked to Bob. They helped me out with this problem."
Pronouns in any form will make a conversation more confusing if there's no context. If you want to be absolutely clear in your communications, you'd get rid of all pronouns completely. "I talked with Bob. Bob helped me out with this problem. I want to thank Bob for Bob's help. Bob can we talk after this meeting?"
"They" have been used like that for ages. It is certainly less clunky than writing "he or she" in cases where you are not referring to any particular person.
They avoidance of ‘they’ as a singular personal pronoun is a recent occurrence, historically it has been used frequently when gender is unknown or unclear. The Oxford English Dictionary did some research on the history last year https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
The only recent change is people expressing a desire to use they/them as their own forms of address, but this isn’t an invalid use.
What's the confusing part? It's often used in both plural and singular, for the latter mainly when you don't know the identity of the person. Not totally confusing to use it for an identity you do know IMO.
I have never used in conversation, but sometimes use it in writing. My native language has a gender neutral pronoun, so it did not take too much getting used to in English. You say the double usage of 'they' might be confusing, but in pratice believe it has been around for long enough on the internet that I have a high enough confidence that most readers will understand it's use or at least not be too distracted by it.
As a non-native english speaker, using singular "they" is confusing. It may even negatively impact some people.
I've seen a recommendation that we should use "on another hand" instead of "on the other hand". Because, you know, we should avoid seeing things as black and white. I agree. Things often have more than 2 sides.
My English teacher said "on another hand" wasn't acceptable. You might be deducted point in a situation like TOEFL exam.
Another example is "I ain't" in some other dialects. We don't want to discriminate against certain groups. But, at the same time, it's wrong to use those phrases :S
Using a singular "they" is on a different level of being problematic. You don't wanna look illiterate in a situation like TOEFL exam and some other official situation. On another hand, you don't want to be publicly shamed and ganged up for misgendering others.
> My English teacher said "on another hand" wasn't acceptable. You might be deducted point in a situation like TOEFL exam.
That is likely because 'on the other hand' is what is known as an idiom; a fixed saying. Even if some people are advocating for change of certain idioms, as a (second language) student of a language you are ill-advised to take the liberty of promoting such a novel phrasing, because people may find it hard to tell if you are making a mistake (and that they should adjust their language to your perceived level) or are in fact advocating a different way of saying things.
When taking an exam you are of course expected to use only language that is currently seen as obviously correct, because the examiner cannot tell the difference either.
> "on another hand"
This seems silly. You use on the other hand to contrast two viewpoints. There are other idioms for enumerating more than two.
> You use on the other hand to contrast two viewpoints. There are other idioms for enumerating more than two.
I sometimes find myself using "on the other hand" to contrast three or more view points, and end up saying "on the other hand" twice. Occasionally, I'll use "on one hand...on the other hand...on another hand/on a third hand".
> As a non-native english speaker, using singular "they" is confusing.
I am non-native as well, but my native language doesn't have gendered pronouns. To me, using singular "they" is actually easier as it is closer to how I speak and think in my native language. The normal English (as well as most other Indo-European languages) way of using she or he, always meant I have to stop a bit to think, to add this extra bit of information I wouldn't have to if I were speaking in my native language.
Let's imagine a language that doesn't have a word for red, but has "wine" for darker shades of red and "rose" for brighter shades of red. You just can't talk about "red" in general, you always have to specify if you're meaning the darker or the brighter kind. That's a bit how I feel always needing to specify she or he.
You already use "you" as both singular and plural. Historically, "you" used to be the plural form of "ye". Grammatically, singular "you" works just the same as singular "they", so it's not confusing at all (I'm also a non-native speaker). See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you#Usage_notes
The references to "on another hand" I've found have been mostly historical (e.g., a Senate speech from 1830) and/or discussions whether it is correct. I can't find anyone advocating its use.
"Context clearly matters. If you are training English students for the TOEFL or IELTS exams, you should emphasize that using “they” for a singular pronoun will cost students points. Hence, it must be avoided on standardized exams. Yet – like many American advertisers and recent Presidents (Obama, Trump, Clinton) – I find the use comfortable and legitimate."
TOEFL/IELTS really needs to publish official guidelines on these new words.
It only became more acceptable a few decades ago, and relatively recently surged in popularity. "They" was first used like this hundreds of years ago, so it's not a new concept.
Many EFL curriculums in foreign countries are out of date, because languages change all the time.
If TOEFL or whatever says otherwise, they are wrong and out of date. Not that anyone seriously thinks those standardized tests actually reflect any meaningful grasp of a language.
Anyway. "They" is perfectly fine as a gender neutral, singular or plural pronoun. Anyone that says otherwise is clinging to prescriptivism and is in denial.
First of all, I want to remark that I'm a non-native english speaker. I have no issue with using singular "they". You are the owner of the language. Just tell me what to use. Avoiding misgendering is great. Yeah, I wanna do that.
The real issue is: TOEFL actively punishes people for using singular "they".
But we also tell everyone to use singular "they". If they don't, they will face a heavy backlash (e.g. being called bigots).
My opinion: never look at TOEFL or any test for how to actually speak a language. They're always out of date.
English doesn't really have an entity that dictates "rules". The guidelines vary between dialects, so I can only speak about American English...
You can read the Oxford Style Manual or The Chicago Manual of Style for reference, but sometimes people disagree. Previously people looked at Strunk & White's Elements of Style, etc.
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On this particular issue, "they" is fine as singular, and is being used like that very frequently these days.
> never look at TOEFL or any test for how to actually speak a language
I agree with you.
However, TOEFL is the gatekeeper for applying to a US/UK university. They have real power to punish you for using what they think is wrong, in this case singular "they" is wrong for them.
We study English to take TOEFL exam, so we can get into great universities.
At this point, we need to balance between being punished at TOEFL exam or being punished by public shaming.
TOEFL could have just published a blog post saying that singular "they" is acceptable. It probably takes 2 minutes to do so.
Yet they don't, even though singular "they" has been used for decades (as many comments point out).
It's dumb, and that's why I suggest we scream at TOEFL's leadership instead.
The difference between "using the language formally correctly" and "using the language in a way to pass the exam" (and of course "using the language as it is actually spoken") is not a problem specific to English or foreign-language speakers. Many (most?) countries have even stronger regional variance than English, even more than e.g. American vs. UK. TOEFL-takers are not idiots; they can understand what is correct in one context is not in another, especially hyper-formal, artificial contexts like taking tests. And the overwhelming majority of objection to singular they does not come from people who have deeply tied their identity to TOEFL.
I agree with what you say, but the problem is rather specific to american culture. Being called names (like bigots) because you don't wanna use a singular "they" is a regular occurrence in the present time in US.
While you think a singular "they" is correct, one of your authorities (TOEFL) who gatekeeps prestige US universities doesn't agree with you.
Many (including me) don't care what you think (not in a bad way). You aren't authority who can punish us.
We want (1) great points on TOEFL (to get into various opportunities) and (2) to avoid hurting others (i.e. misgendering). This configuration is impossible at the moment.
I hope you don't suggest that we can misgender people as long as it's a TOEFL exam. It doesnt sound ok.
I didn't know TOEFL was so devious as to make all their test scenarios concern non-binary people or people of indeterminate gender, but then demand you discuss them without also explaining your pronoun choices.
That said, it used to be rather uncommon in more recent times, which is now changing again. Standardized tests currently consider its use a mistake, just as »[i]n the 1600s, some writers objected to the use of "singular you" (compare objections to the "singular they")« (wiktionary). Languages constantly evolve.
I know this isn't what is at issue here, but I can't help but feel it's connected:
Gendered language runs deep, especially in languages like Spanish. Essentially anything ending in 'a' is considered feminine, and anything ending in 'o' is considered masculine. How could one hope to bring equality or neutrality to such language? It almost seems like a new language altogether would be easier than fighting to modify thousand-year histories and trillions of written words.
I'm all for healthy dialog that leads to ending oppressive norms, building compassion and inclusion. This situation feels like its own form of oppression, and as such ought to be questioned, if not resisted.
I honestly think everybody at the table here is trying to do the right thing as they see it, yet almost everyone is going to walk away hurt; there are no winners.
I don't understand why this has become such a common theme in the tech world. A small clique of non-binary/LGBTQ+ people who wield undue amounts of soft power and use that soft power to fight pseudo-political internet battles. I've yet to experience this with any other subculture I'm involved in.
A few years ago when I was a member of a relatively high profile open source project, I myself was once (informally) accused of non-inclusive behavior towards a trans person. It was a very confusing experience because I didn’t even know that person’s gender up until that point, much less whether they were trans or not; I only found out after the accusation. Nor did I ever care about their gender before or after the incident — the only thing I gave a damn about was the code they produced. Turns out my complaint against a poorly thought-out feature of theirs (which was greenlighted by the project lead, landed despite much opposition, and subsequently caused quite severe breakage) was distorted as an attack against their gender.
That experience and experience from other clashes against the broader CoC-wielding crowd, either firsthand or secondhand, tells me that people who are determined to inject identity politics into software are either (a) honestly over-sensitive, can’t imagine other people not giving a shit; or (b) using CoC as a convenient tool to end technical debates (when they’re out of arguments or don’t want to argue further) with folks who prefer a more blunt communication style.
>Turns out my complaint against a poorly thought-out feature of theirs (which was greenlighted by the project lead, landed despite much opposition, and subsequently caused quite severe breakage) was distorted as an attack against their gender.
You can subvert any community/organisation/process this way. Social "grenade" in a sense. Scary.
No, I mean folks who criticize other people’s work directly instead of qualifying every criticism with three insincere compliments. Where did you get the idea that I ever throw a single homophobic slur? Your comment tells me that you’re actually the kind of person that CoCs or guidelines or whatever should actually regulate. Flagged.
> There was a TL discussion about gender-neutral pronouns and then "preferred pronouns".
Reading the post right here at the beginning I'm like "Oh here we go..."
And reading the rest went just as predictably as I expected. A tiny minority wielding their power. Sane people attempting to stay sane and reasonable, but failing. A terrified company acting in panic.
Future alien archeologists will wonder "So they were facing
imminent extinction, how did they respond to this threat?" ... "Well they seemed to spend a lot of time arguing over what they should call each other"
PS: before anyone likes to shame me, I _might_ actually be a woman...
The SE Inc. authoritarian moves are not, AFAICT, by non-binary/LGBTQ+ people but virtue-signaler staff/management who feel that behaving like the Spanish Inquisition will get them some sort of morality or PR points.
An LGBTQ+ individual resigned over the fact that people where discussing the coc change.
That’s not virtue-signaling staff, that’s someone throwing a hissy-fit that they can’t get things their way by with no questions asked.
> A small clique of non-binary/LGBTQ+ people who wield undue amounts of soft power
It's often not members of these groups, but "allies" acting "on their behalf" (and likely hurting the cause because the extremist and witch-hunting behavior gets associated with these groups).
There is an awefull lot of gender neutral references in the CTO’s apology, even though it obviously knows that the fired moderators preferred pronouns are the female gendered ones. Someone should edit to remove all the gender neutral references to make a point how silly such a policy is.
“3) Use “they” “them” and “their” as gender-neutral pronouns. Almost a good plan, but it doesn’t work. Too often I’ll be talking about two WBW characters, and when I say “they,” readers can’t tell if I’m referring to the one I was just talking about or to both of them.”
Do you have a hard time to understand from the context whether "you" is plural or singular? It seems like it is the same problem but nobody is out there arguing that we should find a way to disambiguate this.
I've seen first-hand people whining online that someone used the initialism "LGBT" which apparently can be considered exclusionary by some people. It seems that "LGBTQIAGNC" exists and may be more expansive, however I can't rule out the existence of some person who objects to even this.
The problem is the people who object to LGBT would see a wildcard expression in the same way that "black lives matter" folks see "all lives matter": as an attempt by an oppressive majority to erase their minority identity. For me the problem is how these things come up in a professional context. The culture of "bring your whole self to work" seems good at first reading but what it really means is bringing a lot of irrelevant things to work, none of which are contributing to the well-being of the workplace. I don't want anyone on my team to feel excluded at work but I also don't want anyone on my team to feel like that one non-binary activist from the adjacent team is going to report them to HR because they overheard them saying "LGBT" and "LGBT" is exclusionary to nonbinary people. That stuff belongs at the cafe or library or the debate salon, not in the workplace.
I've literally never seen a LGBTQ+ person object to LGBTQ+. Some folks prefer other formulations (e.g. QUILTBAG), but I've never seen objections or offense at LGBTQ+.
I've seen folks object to LGB, or LGBT as exclusionary for sure though.
The "black lives matter" movement is a protest against the fact that black people are killed by police officers at alarming rates. The phrase "all lives matter" is a deliberate attempt to draw attention away from this fact and undermine the goals of the protest.
Thanks, I'm aware of the etymology. This is the exact way that people with particular self-expression view attempts to claim that "*" or "people" is as inclusionary as LGBTQIAGNC.
Accepted by some people, yes, but how will you know in advance whether it is acceptable to your audience? You could be treading on someone's preferences just the same as if you use the term "themself" in reference to a person who turns out to prefer "zirself".
At the risk of making mistakes here, where I've come to personally, in a journey to understand myself, is that the idea of gender seems artificial in general, for the most part. I've been in a relationship with someone who felt strongly about being identified "correctly" when they had transitioned, and also with people who absolutely assume they'll be identified "correctly," when they had never particularly explored an alternative to how they were designated at birth. For me, I'm not upset when gender pronouns are applied to me, but I'd prefer to not be identified this way, even though I often feel since identification with the cultural experience of being identified as gendered.
I've had some frustration that "they" has become the "neutral" pronoun, when earlier I felt more personally identified with pronouns that still disambiguated plural and singular more clearly, but a friend pointed out that if referring to an unidentified singular person, "they" is perfectly grammatical (i.e. "did someone deliver the mail?" "Yes, they did."). I am concerned that so much of the focus is placed on the problem of the word, without acknowledging the more fundamental question of willingness to consider if gendered pronouns are necessary.
What seems problematic for me is trying to strike a balance between personal identity and "correct" speech. Most of the time, "making sure" that a gender is assigned in speech doesn't feel relevant to actually understanding general meaning. I appreciate language that better avoids pronouns rather than uses them as a means to add clarity. It feels to me that is possible to respect gender identity without requiring language to be gendered in a general way. At the same time, I've myself tried to take gender out of my speech and I fall constantly.
Fundamentally, it feels like a cultural moment where it feels like we're focusing on very black and white ideas and feeling that others are "not listening," or on the other hand, "forcing me to do something I feel uncomfortable about and lying in wait for me to make a mistake." When there's a possiblity for openness, there's also the possibility of vulnerability, whereas in a cultural context, it seems like we're moving towards walls and fortification, which makes me pretty sad and concerned that there's not space for nuance.
> The tone of the answer was pretty combative and people downvoted for that reason (as noted in comments). OP interpreted downvotes as transphobia. There was another answer that said something like "cultural awareness / different cultures, as part of D&I" that was presented positively and got a lot of support. (I know gender != culture; I'm pointing out that another D&I answer, presented constructively, was well-received.)
Seems like an age old tale of management assessing a situations potential liability as high, and promptly responding with a zero tolerance policy and throwing someone under the bus to protect themselves.
Stack Overflow has handled the communication and PR side of this about as badly as a company can, and I started - and still want to be - on the side of the moderators.
However, as near as I can tell from piecing together the different leaks, it turns out a core issue was that Monica Cellio refused to use the singular "they" construction, including when she knew that was someone's preferred pronoun.
In my view she is 1) objectively grammatically wrong and 2) just being needlessly rude. And ultimately, I can't bring myself to support this position at all. If you lost your moderator role because of a refusal to use a widely used and accepted English construction, even though you knew this refusal would hurt people, then uh, I hope you're happy with your life choices, but I have no sympathy for you.
When you say 'refused to use' it sounds like you're saying Monica insisted on the wrong pronoun. But my understanding is that the argument was around drafting to simply avoid the use of pronouns entirely.
I've never previously seen it described as rude to write text that simply didn't use pronouns, in and of itself.
I don't feel like I'm working for free when I contribute to stack overflow. I feel like some company is running a mostly free site (until recently just job ads you can turn off).
I volunteer to help others. I assume most others do the same. It just feels good in the same way I'm assuming other volunteer activities feel good. Of course not everything feels good but over all when I've managed to answer someone's question it feels like the same feeling I get helping someone on a non-tech way.
Stack overflow just hired a ceo to extract as much value as possible. They should pay you or reward you for years of service. You've saved them personally over 250k if you have been doing this for 5 years or more.
Volunteering so a for profit company feels helpful but who are you helping? If no one volunteered then someone paid would perform the same tasks...
Same reason many people contribute to open source projects for free, often without any control (ie. they can be removed from a project for similar violations as the one linked here).
Power is what it usually boils down to - power to control what may or may not viewed, power to revoke privileges, power to ban, it's very tempting, look no further than Twitch mods of large streamers.
True. Wealth, at the scales most of us are familiar with, gives you autonomy over your own life. The motivations described here have more to do with the desire to exercise power over others.
If referring to someone by the correct pronoun is respectful, referring to them by their name is even more respectful in my book. Or avoid talking about them in the third person where possible and only talk to them, for example. These are among the ways of "writing around" the pronoun, and they're both more respectful than using the pronoun. I suspect they're more constructive and efficient in other ways too, but would have to pay attention to see whether that's true. Anyway, if English is like code, all the pronoun solutions are currently hacks, so I'm all in favor of refactoring to avoid them.
I think what you’re saying is true in the case where you apply it consistently to all people you talk about. When someone knows many people’s preference of pronouns but singles one out with “they”, name or avoidance of pronoun, that’s where the disrespect starts creeping back in.
Language is a sensible thing, and draws all kinds of demarcations. A single word can shift the perception of a person. A circle might identify an outlier by just a slip of tongue.
If you are from another socioeconomic stratum (or somewhere else in the capital quadrant), you might never learn a certain language, that provides a common ground. There are unspeakable things, I can think of, that I would never ever bring up in a conversation with a random person.
These exclusions and inclusion have already been there, it seems like some fights are more naked now, uncovered, harsh and sometimes meaningless to someone not involved.
I was a top SO contributor and very much enjoyed the site - and still enjoy finding answers. I fear, I will be policed at some point for something - but maybe not, because I am usually agreeable - but who knows: only time will tell.
Edit: I am usually not that impartial, but there is a discourse (where this particular thread might belong to), where I am not able to take sides - because my gut feeling says: you cannot shift the responsibility you have, when you interact with another person, to some abstract law, entity, or something else - it has to be you, to show respect and to allow for a common room for everyone - which does not mean, that the room is just there of one.
I identify as a gender akin to a math wizard. The correct pronoun is a newly discovered prime number, unique each time. You know my preferred pronoun so please don't use "they."
Now this seems absurd but dare you call me out on it and tell me I'm not actually who I am? Are we all entitled to commanding everyone's use of the language by constructing and dictating pronoun usage?
I've had an easy time with gender issues in my life because I'm pretty carefree and accommodating. But I'm trying to understand where it goes from here.
I don't see how we can go past he/she/they because it opens the floodgates to an infinite number of more pronouns, does it not? How does any group get to decide which new pronouns have enough subscribers to be added to the official list?
It feels like in a gender fluid model, pronouns just don't work. "He" and "she" are legacy and "they" is the catch all. So I kind of get this idea of just not using them anymore. But does that feel manifestly absurd to anyone else?
This is also why I enjoy the internet so much. Gender doesn't matter and I have mastered picturing everyone as a cat on a keyboard.
This storm is really _not_ about gender pronouns, nor about the use of singular "they", nor about inclusivity.
It is all about how StackExchange Inc. is managing the StackExchange network; and the liberties it allows itself vis-a-vis individual moderators and the community at large.
The fiasco is that the answers to these two questions are really bad.
I don't think anybody is in the wrong here. These types of forums are communal in nature, they are the sum of the people who use them. There is really no right or wrong here, if a thing bothers enough people within a community for them to speak up then rule changes should be made if that is the consensus based o. The power structure. If those rule changes push community members away then that is a natural consequence.
But all of the above is why I feel that it is unwise to engage with these types of communities or at least that you need to be very selective when you do. It's either a dictatorship or mob rule and if you buy into these communities as part of your identity with out being sure your values are aligned with it's, you're bound to end up frustrated.
It's hard to know what people want to be called, but there's a technical fix for that: add keywords to comments, etc., so that Stack Overflow can know it for you. E.g.
"%pronoun% was a legend in %possessive-pronoun%'s own mind."
Just another markup feature. Let people enter their pronouns in their profiles, and simply substitute them as needed. This at least relieves the burden of knowing the intimate preferences of strangers. Use something neutral, like xe, and xer, for the default, and let users choose their own defaults.
But if this is about something other than sparing people's feelings then this wouldn't help.
The argument came down to "call people what they want to be called" vs. "don't call people what they don't want to be called". The banned moderator preferred the latter. Either seems perfectly fine to me but I don't belong to any of the impacted minorities myself.
Firing someone, even from a volunteer position, over that specific argument seems like a severe overreaction. Assuming we got the whole story, of course.
Sort of, yeah. Dreamwidth is a fork of the codebase and has some of the original developers. Technically, Livejournal is still around too, but a lot of people migrated when LJ was bought by a Russian company and later when the servers moved to Russia as well. LJ is a total ghost town now.
Seeing that the instigator's post is the most downvoted I have ever come across on Stack Exchange, I thought of the saying "the Revolution devours its children".
Why shouldn't it apply? The participants of the chat are entitled to their privacy. If there were some harm to the public at large I'd recognize that as being an extenuating circumstance but in this case even the party claiming to be wronged sees the issue of privacy as taking precedence[1].
This is a topic no one can talk about today. Previous discussions on this on HN quickly dropped off the page.
I've always found the concept of preferred gender pronouns to be problematic from a pure technical perspective. But I was so afraid of the stigma I haven't really written about it. Recent events made me finally publish this last night:
The summary: pronouns reduce cognitive load, because you can refer to someone by a broad category. With custom pronouns, you now create a way to offend someone in the base language.
Moreover, those personal pronouns are untranslatable. If someone’s wants to be referred as “xir” in English and use of “they” is considered offensive, there is no “politically correct” way to refer to such person in at least some non-English languages unless xir defines the pronouns for other languages too.
I'm sorry I don't understand this argument. Let's say we're talking about something on a website, I say I want to be referred to by the pronoun "xir". "No,because I can't translate that into Swahili" seems like an odd response to me. It seems irrelevant to an average conversation I'm going to have. And even if you are planning to translate the conversation into another language you could just.... ask what would be reasonable in the other language?
Of course not, it wouldn't be a "no, you can't request this pronoun".
It would be "sure, but mind you that I have no clue how to talk about you in non-English languages". And in some languages it's more than just the pronouns - for example, in some languages verbs may be declined according to a grammatical gender (a concept that almost doesn't exist in modern English and not really inferable from just "xir").
I've seen a few and that wasn't even online but in a meatspace, at a software conference. A few persons had bagdes with pronouns other than "he/she/they". Suppose that was a request of sorts. Although I haven't really talked to... err... such people ("them"? "xzem?" "xirzey'm?" what I'm supposed to use for "xe" and "ze" as a generalized group?), only saw that *ey (okay, does it work?) exist, so can't really tell more.
Once or twice. But everyone I've met who prefers Xe/Xir/Xirs will often append that with, "Or she/he/they. Fuck it, they're all wrong, use whatever makes you happy."
That's what they want you to do, because they think they're special somehow. Best is just ignore, and hopefully their house of cards will collapse at some point by their own doing.
They is pretty novel. Yes, singular they has existed for a long time, but when was the first time anyone ever demanded that their only pronoun be "they"? I suspect only within the past 10 years or so.
60 million starving children in Africa. Something like 25,000 people die every year to war. The US president, leader of the free world, is facing possible impeachment.
And what are we worried about? Pronoun use and codes of conduct on software Q&A websites.
Give. Me. A. Break.
Almost 2,000 words on it, no less. Talk about 15 minutes of my life I'll never have back.
I'm trying to think if there's something dumber to argue about than this, but right now I can't.
Not sure how the world will continue to spin on its axis what with the bloodbath of moderators on StackExchange but somehow the universe will find a way to carry on.
This is actually extremely poignant, because it's a neat encapsulation of the entire political climate in the US. While the far left are busy arguing and cannibalizing themselves over pronouns, the Republicans are busy getting elected.
Imagine if these people spent a tenth of that energy on striving towards positions of actual political power. But no, they must really want four more years of Trump -- why else would they spend an iota of energy on this nonsense?
This is not only happening in the US, but also Western Europe.
Left-leaning social and political elites have jumped the political correctness shark so hard that they're not being taken seriously by a significant amount of the population which feel patronized and lied to and turn to voting anyone that will at least validate their concerns.
These issues aren’t mutually exclusive, and it’s not “dumb” to argue about something that affects the the software engineering community personally and that we can have a meaningful impact on.
I mean, those are all good things to do. But the software engineering community is largely isolated from those issues, so it’s natural that our conversation shifts to things like pronouns instead.
Oh really? So if you had an open chest wound you'd say, "Worrying about bleeding to death is specious. There are always mortal wounds to worry about. That doesn't mean I can't worry about what color my fingernails are"?
If we apply degrees of severity, urgency and closeness to the two problems the use of pronouns on programming websites does not rank as severe or urgent relative to...almost anything else in the universe.
But please, spend more energy arguing this point -- definitely a productive use of everyone's time, complaining about pronoun implementation.
It's pretty clear you don't want to follow. The point is quite clear. This is a subjective issue. Your ordering of what problems should be tackled first is not likely going to be the same as anyone else's.
To someone else, this may be a the most prioritized problem for any range of reasons from being the most important or being the one that they can make the most progress on at the moment.
But please, continue to hide behind burner accounts and spend more energy arguing this point -- definitely a productive use of everyone's time, complaining about which problems other people focus on.
LOL, OK. You go ahead and make how we use pronouns on software Q&A websites "the most prioritized problem" right now -- definitely makes sense.
Women face real harassment in the tech every day, I see it firsthand.
If you're LGBTQ it's even worse.
But you know what? Let's not focus our energy on solving those kind of real-world problems. You're right. Definitely let's spend weeks writing long-winded blog posts arguing about pronouns.
You've demonstrably made the world a better place.
> LOL, OK. You go ahead and make how we use pronouns on software Q&A websites "the most prioritized problem" right now -- definitely makes sense.
To trans people, it very well could be.
> Women face real harassment in the tech every day, I see it firsthand.
And so do trans people. I see it first hand.
> If you're LGBTQ it's even worse.
Lol, you bring this up, but you don't realize it hurts your argument.
> But you know what? Let's not focus our energy on solving those kind of real-world problems. You're right. Definitely let's spend weeks writing long-winded blog posts arguing about pronouns.
Yes, because they're not connected at all /s.
> You've demonstrably made the world a better place.
LOL OK. If anything this kind of frivolous, nonsensical argument you're proffering here undermines the rights of the LGBTQ community, allowing conservatives to easily dismiss their actual meaningful concerns as liberal hogwash.
So, please, keep setting back the cause of minorities and those discriminated against by making pronouns the hill on which to die on.
Way to fight for the oppressed! If we had 10,000x of you maybe all rights for the discriminated would be repealed, no?
> LOL OK. If anything this kind of frivolous, nonsensical argument you're proffering here undermines the rights of the LGBTQ community, allowing conservatives to easily dismiss their actual meaningful concerns as liberal hogwash.
It's sad that you don't think dehumanizing behavior is a problem worth confronting.
> So, please, keep setting back the cause of minorities and those discriminated against by making pronouns the hill on which to die on.
So please, tell us how we can move forward if people won't even treat them with basic respect.
> Way to fight for the oppressed! If we had 10,000x of you maybe all rights for the discriminated would be repealed, no?
Your sarcasm is sad and pathetic, much like your argument.
Tech behemoths, full of privileged people on top, use the false pretense of respecting pronouns or other minority demands, to actually oust people that care about such issues in the first place?
This is what happens when corporate codes meet kindergarten mindsets.
The longer this continues, the worse the blowback is going to get - I'm just happy to be far enough away to not have to care (protip: get the fuck out of the anglosphere as soon as possible)
Yeah this seems an issue in the anglosphere, but similar issues are arising in Spanish though. There's also push to change the language in weird ways from the left, although it's true that is not as widespread.
Oh yeah, there are attempts all over the world, but for some reason it seems to "stick" better in the anglosphere.
Also, while this is all coming from the left, it's not really coming from the "mainstream left" - it's coming from a fringe of troublemakers. The mainstream left, respectful as they believe themselves to be of the "other", are just letting it happen. And they're going to continue to let it happen for a while longer, until... well, I don't want to speculate too much on what happens when the house of cards falls down, but I doubt it's going to be pretty.
(I used to be a "leftist" myself, but now consider myself apolitical. I moved out of my home country and can no longer vote, but to be honest, I don't miss it at all)
The really interesting thing about all this CoC nonsense is how it's making strange bedfellows between some on the right and the left who have a keen interest in civil liberties. I'm a lifelong social democrat and have a lot of issues with barely-regulated free markets, but holy hell am I ever sick and tired of this identity-politics BS. I just want poor people to have free healthcare and educational opportunities, man. I didn't sign up for this personal-pronoun-crusade crap.
If I ever start a project where I need to implement some kind of CoC, I'm going to base it on the friggin' Discordian Five Commandments and call it a day.
I'm basically in that place. I'm also a social democrat, yet I'm seen myself distanced from the left, be it parties, social movements and so on, as they seem to embrace this more and more. I also studied sociology so I can spot the BS from miles ahead, even from people who pretends to be thoughtful and so on.
The problem is that my threshold for this BS has become so low that I'm basically rolling my eyes every time I see it on TV, press or anywhere else. It looks like the media is really pushing for it, be it because of profits or some conspiracy-agenda. Sometimes it causes me anger to see how people is completely distracted from very deep problems that we have to face, be my country or the whole humanity.
I even lost contact with some lefty "friends" and acquaintances because of my stances on this, which I found very sad. It made me avoid to talk about politics, which was something I talked with everyone in the past.
Contextual languages like Korean and Japanese omit pronouns/the subject entirely, unless it's ambiguous. It's common to use their name instead of "you", etc. It's not like English where the subject cannot be omitted.
It's also a cultural thing. You're not going to see any of this craziness in any Slavic country, or in most of Asia.
Ideological extremism is everywhere, but this particular strain of it is mostly concentrated in the Western world, particularly America, Canada, Sweden, and Germany.
AFAIK in Slavic languages you don't even have a cop-out like English "they" and the only way of expressing non-gendered pronoun is a neuter pronoun which has very strong dehumanizing connotations when applied to humans. So I think if it ever reaches Slavo-sphere they won't be as an easy solution as using they/them in English, unless the English solution would be just copycatted - which is quite alien to Slavic languages but I guess learning newspeak would require to give up on oldthink.
I welcome you to enlighten me. Unless you're going to suggest that all Slavic people are homophobic (as many Westerners seem to believe), in which case you'd be dead wrong.
I meant for example in Russia. The reason they aren't bickering much about pronouns there is because gays are happy to survive a parade at all.
I'm going to not argue that all Slavic people are homophobic (that would be completely impossible to back up with facts). A more reasonable claim would be perhaps that people in Slavic countries today are more homophobic on average than e.g. an OECD or EU average. Not sure if such surveys exist, however - so that would have to be a guess and subjective at this point.
The opinion that people should try to be gay "in private" (if they absolutely have to be gay) is of course extremely homophobic, and is exactly my point. If e.g. kissing in public risks you a punch, or if gay marriage isn't recognized etc - that's a sign that a country (or city) is homophobic.
Kissing in public in Poland generally doesn't risk you a punch. I don't know where you're getting that, though I understand it's a pretty common — though completely misguided — Western view. My local gay club is quite peaceful (though inside they all have a grand ol' time — it's by far one of the rowdiest gay clubs I've been to).
In Slavic countries generally, who you have sex with is your own business. It's private. Nobody wants to know.
I have a WIP theory about this type of person on social media.
This isn't about validation or inclusion, if it was, it'd have been over years ago. We're deep in malingering territory now.
1. Creating a divisive persona / Integration
Their bio may mention their membership in an off topic, but sensitive, divisive and prickly issue. The goal is to draw attention to the sensitive issue in the next phases.
They join the group, sometimes not even in the actual working parts of it, but after party social/meta scenes.
2. Exposure and Hijacking
They will tend to put themselves into conversation, conferences, etc. in preparation and in compulsion recreate the issue. The goal is to shift people focused diligently to shift their attention to being a caregiver not for their project or teammates, but to them.
3. Special VIP treatment
Then they get a big smirk when people when management get tongue tied trying to navigate it gracefully. We've seen many surprising public concessions to these types, sometimes based off very flimsy reasons. Which tends to really annoy people who just want to work.
Passerbys also unwittingly aid their endeavors, mistakenly believing they're helping someone disenfranchised and in need.
4. Consolidating (destruction)
When they get the thumbs up on being VIP, they can now consolidate their gains and show what the world is like when only their feelings are cared for.
Cancel culture, trying to ruin people's careers, get them banned, getting in fights with their bosses and chain of command etc. This way they can solidify their need for special treatment.
It's a continual loop of positive reinforcement for them. Since people in power and passerby always cave to them, unwittingly creating more division in an already annoyed community.
5. Preservation / Preemption
To draw the sting of critics, they beat them to the punch by calling them entitled and privileged. Further accuse critics can't grasp and judge their unique plight and never can. Demonstrating evidence of hypocrisy simply validates their presupposition they're underdogs being hounded. So they can repeat and get more concessions and attention.
Other facets: My original theory is it was validation based. It maybe play a role, it's a multi-faceted thing, such as feeling ashamed of their activity some how and want to "come out" in public. But if it was just that, wouldn't they get it off their chest and just over it?
SO seemed all crazypants to me years ago when all of the moderators started zealously closing down topics as off-topic or duplicate that the moderator had clearly misunderstood.
That desire to maintain some precious perfect garden of facts drove me to leave and never look back. Glad I did.
I've been watching Ken Burns' "The Civil War". There was a bit that got me thinking about something which I've had trouble fully defining.
In one of the episodes, a historian talks about the simplicity of the values of the soldiers in that war. He marvels at how they were willing to march a mile and a half across an open field against a fortified enemy position. Think of the Union soldiers at Fredericksburg or the Confederate soldiers under Hood at Franklin. The historian also talks about how, were he in that situation, he feels like his response might have been "Sir, I don't believe that's a good idea sir" but how they bore it year after year and slaughter after slaughter.
Someone misgendering another person is a cruelty, just like any bully teasing a vulnerable person. There have always been cruel people though.
Juxtaposing that example of historical resilience against the increasingly baroque etiquette we require to insulate ourselves from experiencing garden variety cruelty, there's an incongruency that bothers me. Why could they bear that but we cannot bear this?
I think the opposite. Instead of polite consideration for others, we filled the airspace with dictatorial edicts and draconian overreactions. The backlash will be such that any hint of it in the future will be vigorously put down. A shame all the way around.
Getting downvoted, but there is something worth discussing here.
Originally you had sex === gender. Pronouns being words to address them and describe them per their sex/gender.
Then there was a split between sex and gender, and a push for pronouns to describe gender rather than sex. A bit confusing when the person in question just transitioned or does not "pass" (for lack of better terminology), but all around pretty simple. While there's been trans and non-binary folks forever, it's still a recent thing in term of large scale awareness.
Then things moved forward with genders being much more complex with a ton of variations, but we still only have a few pronouns, so it no longer quite works. So things moved from pronouns matching genders to "preferred pronouns" Logical for non-binary where things aren't as simple as men/women (and thus he/she doesn't map cleanly 1:1), but it gets really confusing with things like people who identify as one of the binary genders but wants to be addressed by the opposite pronoun (eg: a woman requesting to be addressed as a he, but still identifies as a woman).
At that point keeping this straight in one's head gets seriously confusing and complicated, and has a lot of parallels with Asian languages that have deep complex hierarchies of ways to address based on status. Obviously it's possible since those other cultures can do it (albeit in a different context), but foreigners have a pretty hard time with it (you need to learn LOT about the language and the people to do it correctly).
So realistically, especially while we're transitioning to this new world, it's a heck of a lot easier to stick to gender neutral. Personally, I'm old and have a lot of decades behind me of habits that need changing to make people happy. If I'm in a group and it's not completely obvious what to use (or I don't know folks personally), I'll just stick to gender neutral everything until I catch on or get corrected. Never offended anyone (or at least no one told me so) that way, and it makes things a lot simpler.
I mean, I can't remember people's first name until I hear it quite a few times, and its (generally) a fair bit simpler, assuming western names since thats where I'm from. Fortunately people generally don't take it too badly if I ask them to remind me a few times or I get it wrong a bunch, but first names aren't as emotionally loaded.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Getting rid of gendered language would eliminate so many misunderstandings and bigotries (both accidental and intentional) that it seems like the obvious choice, especially when you consider that future generations will be raised with it sounding natural.
This line of thinking is so bizarre to me, but seems to be increasingly common (or at least loud enough in the right places to be noticed). There is a segment of the population that seems intent on being able assign and punish that assumed thought crime.
Now your lack of a specific behavior is suspect!