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Comment by greglindahl | Hacker News Reader

The policy is talking about situations where a person's preferred pronouns are 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.

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.

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.

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.

It's an extremely unusual choice.

But, her main complaint is how Stack Overflow treated her. I've known her for 25 years via a hobby, and she's an extremely well-reasoned person.

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.

That’s a convenient opinion for a married woman going by “miss”. Also, an opinion I agree with.

"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.

>His entire ethos, hell his entire telos, is to maximally hurt and control those who are not white, straight, preferably-Christian men

Shapiro is Jewish.

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.

> It upsets me because it's removing utility from the language.

> "They" is plural.

It's not though. We use the singular "they" in conversation all the time. You're probably just so used to it that you don't notice.

"The Uber driver is still ten minutes away, maybe they got stuck in traffic."

"Somebody left their book on the bus."

Nobody would think there are multiple people driving the car or that the book belongs to several different people.

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.

Where does it mention that? And is asking what a persons preferred pronoun is considered rude?

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