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Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

> like the person who corrected the use of "he,"

The person who corrected the original commenter seems to recognized that "he" was being used in a gender-neutral way, even offering the use of "they" in its place, most likely as gender-neutral "he" is offensive to some.

However, english does not concern itself with what is or is not offensive. That is entirely up to the user to decide.

> Grammatically acceptable or not, using "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun here introduced confusion.

That gender-neutral "they" was suggested as a suitable replacement here, I don't think that is the case. The fact that we can find another word that unambiguously removes gender from the subject means that gender is irrelevant to the comment in question entirely, leaving no room for confusion with respect to what the message is about, no matter what pronoun is used.

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> The person who corrected the original commenter seems to recognized that "he" was being used in a gender-neutral way and even offered the use of "they"

Their first suggestion was to use the correct gender-specific pronoun, and then they said that alternately a gender-neutral one could have been used. I don't think it was understood as gender-neutral.

> The fact that we can find another word that unambiguously removes gender from the subject means that gender is irrelevant to the comment in question entirely

Sure, but if it's read as gender-specific then it's still a factual mistake. Would you be so defensive about someone correcting a wrong, but not critically important, date?

Regardless, it remains that gender-neutral "they" was considered a suitable replacement, thereby indicating that gender was irrelevant to the subject of the comment all along. The gender correction seems to be more about pedantry than confusion. "They" could not possibly work in the comment if gender was a required part of understanding it.

Sorry, I just edited in a second quote to my previous comment that addresses that part of your point.

No worries. To your edit:

> Would you be so defensive about someone correcting a wrong, but not critically important, date?

First of all, the usage of "he" is not technically wrong.

I do not know if there is a great date analogy here, but perhaps "tomorrow" carries enough ambiguity across timezones that we can work with it. If I say tomorrow is Tuesday, but you are in a timezone where tomorrow is Wednesday, then you're fine to say that tomorrow is Wednesday, and I'll chime in to say that tomorrow is also technically Tuesday. To continue to argue that the original comment shouldn't have used "tomorrow" as it is too ambiguous to understand is fine, but given that you say it is not critically important, I'm not sure what there is to gain?

If, by "tomorrow", I mean Tuesday and you think I'm talking about Wednesday, does it really matter when it is just a passing fact and not something particularly relevant to the overall message?

> Regardless, it remains that gender-neutral "they" was considered a suitable replacement, thereby indicating that gender was irrelevant to the subject of the comment all along.

Of course it was, as specifically noted in said corrective comment. Your comment could either use the author's actual gender or not involve gender at all./

> The gender correction seems to be more about pedantry than confusion.

No, the gender correction was about getting the author's gender wrong.

> Your comment could either use the author's actual gender or not involve gender at all.

To be clear, I was not the one who originally used gender-neutral "he" over "she".

> No, the gender correction was about getting the author's gender wrong.

Due to overzealous pedantry, or a misunderstanding of what "he" means in english? Understandably not everyone comes here with english as their first language, so I can appreciate that the word may be not fully understood by some.

> overzealous pedantry

Some people might consider it pedantic to insist to someone who was confused by a choice of wording, and offered a less potentially confusing alternative, that actually it's fine because it's technically correct, regardless of how people understand it when they read it.

Absolutely it is. Nothing wrong with pedantry per-se, but with respect to this particular discussion it helps to understand the motivation to understand if the person is not clear on what "he" means, which we can help correct to prevent future confusion when future comments use gender-neutral "he", or is just trying to have some fun, which we can safely ignore.

> The person who corrected the original commenter seems to recognized that "he" was being used in a gender-neutral way

No, the person who corrected the original comment (that would be me) assumed the comment's writer (that would be you) had gotten TFA's gender wrong.

Hence 1. providing the author's correct gender, and 2. noting that gender-agnostic comments avoid this sort of issues when gender isn't specifically required for understanding.

> most likely as gender-neutral "he" is offensive to some.

No, because "he" isn't any more gender-neutral than "she" and may be a mistake of the commenter with respect to the author's gender. Following which you decided to blow a gasket.

> That gender-neutral "they" was suggested as a suitable replacement here, I don't think that is the case.

You think wrong.

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