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Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

"as long as he gives a good talk/presentation"

Given the content of your first remark, I'm strongly inclined to suspect this use of the explicitly masculine pronoun is first-degree trolling.

This serves as a counterexample to your point, because as statements go, it would be simply be factually (rather than politically) correct to have said "they" rather than "he", unless you really do hold an expectation that all conference speakers are male. In other words, neutral language is more rational, not less.

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I have no way of knowing whether the poster you're replying to intended to use the masculine pronoun as a purposeful declaration that all conference speakers are male, but I'm having trouble understanding why you would immediately jump to the conclusion that they are engaging in "first-degree trolling". To be frank, the tone you seem to be taking in assuming that what could very well be an unintentional mistake should be used as an indictment of the poster as a troll or worse is one of the reasons I find myself somewhat fearful of posting on HN.

English is not my native language, and the language that I first learned to speak has very different rules for gender specific pronouns which results in me being very careful in how I write in English. Despite this, I sometimes(often) make mistakes. One common mistake I've noticed myself making is when I write about a specific person, male or female, I sometimes tend to then use that person's gender as the default pronoun for the rest of my sentence. I have no problem being called out on my mistakes but it makes me nervous that any error I make can be grounds for me being called a troll or a sexist.

Using the male pronoun by default is simply common practice in English, dating back at least hundreds of years. I wouldn't read into it.

I notice a fairly common tactic for trying to change norms is to pretend that the norms aren't norms and then aggressively shame people for doing a normal thing.

This leads to a toxic atmosphere where people can't be secure in their words, social reality keeps being pulled out from under their feet.

When the normal thing marginalizes people, marginalized people are hurt. In recent years, they have started to defend themsves in force, the ks to unifying power of the internet.

The insecurity you observe is feeling of the erosion of privilege.

I'm sure it is.

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hot-allostatic-load/

Where should boundaries get drawn? And when should they change? In the past, gender and race were dividing lines for privilege. What about animals? Don't they have the right to not be murdered and be free? Are they not conscious pain feeling beings? Is it OK for me to constantly call everyone out on their meat eating murderous ways? Many people are offended when people talk about eating steak.

I've made this argument before, and not surprisingly, it didn't go over well.

For PC, Norm need to be changed often, it's like changing passwords often.

http://tomwoods.com/podcast/ep-726-how-and-why-progressives-...

There is thought that changing your password often might make passwords worse... Don't have a citation at the moment (phone) but, the tl;dr is that often changing means you're more likely to pick smaller passwords that are easier to construct, and to remember, making them weaker than something you'll commit to for a longer time.

So... maybe not the best analogy, but understood.

I absolutely agree. Being "PC compliant" is more about staying informed of what is considered, that moment, to be proper language. As much as I would like to not offend anyone, I find such extreme scrutiny of language to be unnecessary and quite honestly, arbitrary. If one generally does not encounter the "liberal elite" and say, one is not a native speaker of a language, they can easily be misconstrued as being racist/sexist or as possessing any other undesirable traits.

Having grown up in a society where sexism/racism/casteism is extremely blatant (in urban India), I sometimes find it hard to comprehend the utility of labelling people harshly for what might be innocuous comments. I almost feel those energies must be spent in condemning the "real" racists/sexists, many of whom are still allowed to scream whatever offensive nonsense they please (I have seen many growing up). How do people feel genuine outrage over harmless comments? Are we allowed to ever call out on hypersensitivity?

Also, as a vegan, sometimes I do feel genuinely sad when I see lots of meat being eaten and relished. I feel like giving my friends an explanation or at least attempt to convince them to cut down on the meat-eating but I also realize it can be highly offensive and have never voiced my opinion.

Brigading forum threads and dog piling social media of people you have a perceived grievance with does not help 'marginalized' people. In fact your trying to marginalize and bully people.

Cry bully trolling and aimless power tripping under the banner of 'social justice' does not provide you any magic cover. I think most people can see thorough it this point and realize your only contribution is harassment and its destructive to communities like this one.

You assume the parent is privileged (younger white male) for having an opinion that conflicts with your own?

Another point - educated white males are not your enemy. If you're looking for racists, sexists, etc - you need not seek them out by reading between the lines of comments here. There are people proudly spewing garbage you can speak out against (on their own forums and blogs). Why fight against your allies in this?

I think the disconnect is that the vast majority of people, regardless of gender, do not consider these things to be marginalizing anyone. Why you can't see that and why you want to patrol for everything that only superficially resembles that is puzzling. When the number of people who are complaining about these "normal" things is about 1 in 10,000, it should make you stop and think. Are you really an early adopter of significantly better social norms and a heroic defender of the chronically marginalized, people who are so downtrodden that 99% of them don't see or don't have the energy to complain along with you? Or, are you just the crackpot on the street with the sign saying, "The end is near," whom people walk more quickly just to get past?

Or perhaps the marginalization is felt now, but certainly once wasn't - it's an artificial, unnecessary and divisive perpective. But I can imagine that just like misheard song-lyrics it's something that people pick up on, and won't let go.

It's aggrevating, but it's a battle that may already have been lost.

If you wrote some software instead of talking, like Grace Hopper, Barbara Liskov and thousands of others, people would respect you automatically in this space.

Ugly words from a throwaway account. Do you really believe that women should be seen and not heard?

That is not what they said. You are creating a strawman.

In fact, it is pretty much the opposite of what they said.

Really? What did I misunderstand here?

Likely you did not understand that the clause starting with "like Grace Hopper [and] Barbara Liskov" applies to "wrote some software" not to "instead of talking". '10938101' is actively praising women who write code, and disrespecting those (of both sexes) who only talk. The attack is not directed at women, but at empty talk by non-practictioners.

Here's the thing; I am technically from a "marginalised" group and yet I still often use what you'd call marginalising pronouns. I use them not to marginalise anyone, but because they're commonly used and there's no reason to not use them. When I say "he", it's probably because I am a male so I default to "he", but that DOES NOT mean that I mean to "marginalise" women, in fact be free to substitute "she" in if you feel like it, it is sort of implied if you're a female and I am technically talking about all genders. In reality, it's just faster to not watch every word your write for "inclusiveness" or "marginalisation", because I assume you're able to infer the inclusiveness from context.

If you're searching for offence, you WILL BE offended, even if no offence was meant by the original poster and by doing this you're actually marginalising the real problems marginalised groups face.

People aren't saying that you are trying to marginalise women and transgendered people. And if they are saying that you can safely call them idiots and ignore them.

What they are saying is that switching from "he" to "they" is simple and easy, and will make life better for many people. It's correct English, and has been in use since the 16th century, albeit with some push from prescriptivists.

You're right that in the face of things like rape statistics (women are far more likely to be raped by men) or domestic violence (women are far more likely to be killed by male partners) worrying about "he" vs "they" is a small thing.

> What they are saying is that switching from "he" to "they" is simple and easy

I get that and if I remember to use it, I will, but when I instinctively do not use it, because well, "he" still comes more naturally to me than "they", it should not be assumed that I am sexist, bigoted etc. because I made a particular choice of words that can be reasonably interpreted as not meant to explicitly exclude people, unless they're looking for it.

> will make life better for many people

It's true that it may make them feel better, if they're looking at every use of a gendered pronoun from a "it's sexist" perspective, but I'd argue that's unproductive and not really making their life any better in a meaningful way

> It's correct English

That's good, but that doesn't mean that it's "intuitive" English for everyone and they shouldn't feel bad for it.

Just for the record:

- rape has largely been defined so that it is physically close to impossible for a woman to rape a man.

- The official numbers for IPV are very close and there is a strong reason to believe that female on male IPV is dramatically underreported (female on female IPV apparently has levels similar to male on female). The only statistic I could find for murder was murder-suicide.

Maybe it depends on your origins or age, but I'm over forty and attended a conservative religious school, and it boggles even me that anyone considers "he" the current generic/default pronoun.

Maybe focus on the actual meat of the argument rather than the plate it's served on and you'll enjoy your meal more.

Ok sure. In that case, I'll point out that being "a common practice going back hundreds of years" should lead you to question something, not accept it.

It reminds me of the time I recommended (to the Unix team at a major financial institution) that they use ssh rather than telnet, and being rebuffed with "that's the way we've always done it".

In this case, since you want to be specific, the practice of defaulting to "he" correlates with hundreds of years of treating women as chattels, with economic consequences and imbalances that persist today, and continue to be reinforced through structural, unconscious, and explicit biases, and that we'd all be better off without.

The notion that language should reflect thought is as old as Plato.

I know languages where literally every word is gendered, and languages where almost nothing is gendered and haven ever seen any correlation to how women are treated.

> the practice of defaulting to "he" correlates with hundreds of years of treating women as chattels

Er, no. It just means it is the unmarked/unremarkable case corresponding to males being generally worth less and discardable ("save the women"...).

It is also a quirk of some of our languages that the gender-neutral pronouns are considered derogatory when applied to people. German and English have this problem ("it", "es"), whereas French "on" seems to be okay.

So the language requires gendering when no gender is semantically intended. In German, every noun is gendered. So "person" is "she", whereas "human" is "he", "Civilisation" and "Society" are both "she", "state" is "he". "Lampshade" is "he" whereas "Lamp" is she, etc. You can try to read deep meaning into these quirks, or you can just not.

TL;DR: Not only are you reading way to much into linguistic quirks, your analysis is also at best shaky.

But the way that sentence would normally be said where I'm from (Australia) would be "as long as they give a good talk" - no need to use specifics when you're talking about a specific person. I find it disjoining when I hear otherwise.

I also find it weird that German and Spanish inject gender into every noun, although I do get that there's little meaning behind it (from the little quizzing I've given speakers of each)

> But the way that sentence would normally be said where I'm from (Australia) would be "as long as they give a good talk"

Yes, language evolves. Currently, this is almost certainly grammatically incorrect, "they" being the third person plural and (not shown here, but assumed) the speaker being singular.

"They" is being pressed into service as the non-derogatory, gender-neutral third person singular that's missing in english. So "they" has started to mean both third person plural and unspecified third person singular. The previous solution was that "he" meant both "male" and "unspecified". So previously women got their own pronoun, men didn't, now we have a harder time telling whether there's a single person or a group.

Both solutions have their quirks, both work at some level.

I pondered this exact thing, but came to the thought that you actually are talking about multiple people.

"As long as they give a good talk" - you're not talking about one specific person but in fact a general population of speakers.

Original was: "problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as he gives a good talk/presentation."

The pronoun refers to "speaker", singular, yet indefinite, we don't necessarily know who it is.

Let's substitute "they: "problems a speaker at a conference might have, as long as they give a good talk/presentation."

Yep, works for me, but I think the "they" definitely talks about about that single (if indefinite) speaker. Yet we use the plural of the verb ("give"), so the sentence is confused, grammatically. I wonder what will give as this evolves, whether "they gives" becomes acceptable or we simple leave "they" grammatically plural even when it is semantically singular.

Language. Fun times!

> Currently, this is almost certainly grammatically incorrect, "they" being the third person plural and (not shown here, but assumed) the speaker being singular.

"They" has been grammatically correct for single person of unspecified gender for hundreds of years. Do a little research before saying ignorant things.

Only "on" in French is specifically for persons whereas "it" is for things and not persons. It is properly considered derogatory to refer to a person as a thing - hardly a quirk. "On" is also non-specific and can't stand in for he or her. The advantage or quirk in French is the singular possessive pronouns follow the gender of the thing possessed not the possessor. Edit: to clarify, my objection is that "on" is not an example of a gender-neutral all-purpose or sentience-neutral pronoun. Not having one of these is hardly a quirk (just a pita).

>Only "on" in French is specifically for persons whereas "it" is for things and not persons.

I think that's what I wrote.

As in english you use 'an apple' and 'a girl'. It's just linguistic quirks. Not a demeaning term

I learned English in my teens and I use "he" as the default pronoun because that's what everyone uses.

Indeed. It would be great if everyone who claims that gender neutral pronouns should be used could give a few examples, at least for us non native speakers. I get strange looks whenever I refer to people (hypothetical, or not) as "it", which would be the obvious gender neutral pronoun.

Currently it's 'they'. Yes, there's some confusion about whether it refers to one person or more, but that confusion already exists with 'you', in all except regional usages.

The difference is that "you" can be grammatically singular or plural, whereas "they" is definitely grammatically plural.

"they gives me the shivers"

In, "they give me the shivers", they is singular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

You did see that I made a distinction between grammatically and semantically, right?

Grammatically, the "they" is clearly plural, as it is used with the plural verb form "give" and not the singular "gives".

Look up "subject verb agreement".

"they" and "you" act exactly the same way. Which is no surprise, because both are originally plural. What difference are you referring to?

I've noticed this online, and I actually find it quite bizarre.

Maybe it's my age or culture (24, brought up in regional Australia then moved to the city), but I actually find it really disjointing when people use gendered pronounce when talking generics, regardless of whether it's 'he' or 'she'.

My default, myself and everyone I interactive with just default to gender neutral pronouns - not out of any sense of 'political correctness', but it just makes for easier conversation.

Also, the uninvited speaker is male, so in this context it makes sense that that's what was first on OP's mind.

Take care, someone might say you should be fired for it.

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