On the way to being the most downvoted post ever on StackOverflow:Meta
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I was very late to the whole StackOverflow Saga, and didn't spend much time reading through all of its causes and comments at the time it happen.
And when I did, the thing that struck me most and has been in many other places including HN ( Sometimes ) is the use of English presumes others are Americans, especially in technology sector. This completely ignores people all over the world using English to communicates. And this is not about cultures or values, but what is a pronoun? How do we use the correct "pronoun", how do we tell which one to use. I suspect many native English user will have cognitive load and may decide it is not worth the hassle and walk away.
What about those that uses English as 2nd or even 3rd language.
I remember a story my British Colleague once told me, our German Colleague is so good with his English, so precise that sometimes it is borderline rude if you didn't know he was German. i.e The tone is wrong, but Germany tends to be very explicit about things in their culture, not the same could be said about the Brits.
It is important to understand the meaning, and messages that is trying to come across behind its written or verbal form, and often not literally what it meant.
If we have to nitpick every single word, phase or grammatical mistake as well as whatever political issues it is with the usage of the word, we will very quickly end up with people not communicating to you ( or in this case Stack overflow ) in the fear of constantly being bashed and disrupted.
We have very few signals in this medium that can tell us if someone is acting in bad faith, or just simply made a mistake. The scary thing about this code of conduct change is that it's mandating required behavior, which is a little unusual: most items in a code of conduct remind people of things they should not do, but speak in general only about behaviors that promote inclusiveness. This new bit is very specific, and lays out rules for how to use language. English itself is not a particularly consistent language even within English-majority countries like the US or UK; differences are huge between countries, especially when English isn't the primary language, due both to cultural convention and personal skill with the language.
I do think we should refer to people using their preferred pronouns when known. But we need to make allowances for mistakes; sadly I expect that the norm will be an assumption of bad faith when simple mistakes are likely to be the most common case.
This is a huge problem, the assumption that everyone should be forced to share Americas liberal political views. Software is global and much of the globe is still struggling with concepts like equal rights for women and not criminalizing homosexuality. Now all of a sudden people in those countries are being penalized for having perfectly normal attitudes for someone from their culture.
"Inclusivity" is alienating most of the world and destroying diversity for the few people in the world privileged enough to argue about pronouns.
I pick up grammatical oddities as I read, and if I had to guess i'd say your first language is of Asian origin, possibly Filipino.
Of course that doesn't mean you aren't American, but I assume you are not vs are in this kind of situation.
It probably depends on how "American" the forum for discussion is vs global, I see HN more American then say, Reddit.
Mind sharing? So I can improve on it, it is funny as this is not the first time someone said I am Filipino, which I am not XD.
I find myself starting to subconsciously just use "you" or "them" and avoid any specific gendering altogether- in this day and age it just seems the least tiring route to go.
BTW, English is gendered, just not as much as Spanish, French, and Italian are.
All nouns in Spanish require a gender article (el/la or los/las). In English, you do not have to figure out whether "día" should be prefixed with el or la -- and in the case of "día" despite it ending in "a" which usually implies feminine and la, it's actually masculine and is properly "el día."
That doesn't even bring into it examples like ellos/ellas ("they" or "them" in English) referring to a male group or a female group where the standard rule is to use ellos if referring to an unknown group or even a group of 100 women and one man, the only application of ellas should be when you can verify every single member of the group is female.
It's typically carried over in suffixes from Latin: Words ending in "a" are feminine, words ending in "um" are masculine.
Or, look through common English names and see how often they follow Latin gender suffixes. Adam / Ada is an example. ("Am" is a male suffix.)
This reminds me of an interview I had with a recruiter from Slack HQ.
The first question the interviewer asked was which pronoun should I be called?
The question threw me off for a moment but after reflecting about it for a while I thought it was a good strategy to make themselves look inclusive. If you are in California and want to work at Slack, know that at least their interviewers will respect whatever pronoun you want to be called.
PS. In Russian there are two second person pronouns and sometimes people will ask if it's appropriate to use a less-formal singular "you" instead of default plural "you" but this makes no sense in English. There is just one second person pronoun.
I assume that your native tongue is one where pronouns necessarily indicate plurality, and also that your English education almost always uses they to indicate the plural. But there are languages that have independent subject pronouns that do not mark for plurality; they indicate plurality when necessary with other words.
My kid's best friend is now a they. After knowing a 'her' for three years, it's been hard to switch. I have a hard enough time some days stringing the right adjectives into sentences without also worrying about pronouns too. It's easier for me to do when typing, but I can't speak for everyone.
Since their first name is a single syllable, I've found myself avoiding pronouns entirely when talking about them. Because accidentally saying 'she' more than once in a while causes stress for everyone. It's a big deal, their father is not okay with this, and we are frequently the safest house for this group of kids to hang out at.
Our kid has always gone by a nickname. When she got older she decided she wanted a change. I was the first one in the house to use her new first name reliably. I'm not sure why I'm the one having trouble with pronouns.
I thought that "they" is too ne used instead of he or she (3rd person) - which I find useful to avoud he/she or (s)he
EDIT: I had an epiphany under the shower, sorry I misunderstood you and you probably meant that you now have to say "ask your friend Jane if they want chocolate"
Sometimes I forget I've spent a lot of time in a LGBTQ+-heavy community where this sort of basic respect for self-identity has been the norm for years. I think a lot of folks screaming bloody murder today will accept it once they acclimate and realize the requests were nothing extraordinary.
People who are used to he and she based on appearance and they when you don't know may need some time. They'll get there.
I feel like the idea of choosing your own pronoun is fine and happy within an insular LGBTQ+ forum or venue. When it tries to take over the language everyone else uses, it's gonna do more harm than good. People that push it just seem to be selfish to me.
By the way, EVERY trans person I know has been EXCEEDINGLY kind and understanding when I've made a mistake with their gender. Now, if I don't know it already, I ask what they prefer to be called the same way I would ask how to properly pronounce someone's name. "Pardon me, what are your pronouns?"
If they've stated what their pronouns are then use them with the same respect you would muster to call someone by their proper name and pronunciation and spelling. The value here is no different, just more broadly applied then you're perhaps used to.
If you deliberately misgender someone (show me a nerd hasn't had this or some similar slur used against them) then you're just a jerk and should be reprimanded.
As an aside, to all the people complaining about non-English speakers doing enough work already participating in our idiom: 1) proper use of pronouns is essential to speaking English with or without neopronouns. 2) Many languages and cultures require VERY refined and strict understanding of a persons A) Age, B) Marital status, C) Gender and especially D) Social status before even beginning to address them.
There's a difference between childish behavior in real life, versus an internet forum where someone's name and profile picture don't really say much.
This may be easier to understand by using a comparison. When I talk about the Muslim prophet I say Muhammad. However, many Muslims would say Muhammad pbuh (peace be upon him). This isn't that problematic, but let's say they the term was Muhammad ttp (the true prophet). Now I as a non Muslim believer would never use ttp because that would be insulting for whoever I believe in. If SE required that whenever I mention Muhammad that I append ttp, I would refuse as it would be extremely offensive to me.
Similarly by referring to a person with XX chromosomes as she, is offensive to people who believe that genders cannot change. A reasonable compromise would be to let whoever is righting chose what they want, or even allow gender neutral pronouns. But what SE chose to do was to say that people who believe that XY is a guy are wrong and deserve no respect for their beliefs.
It is worth pointing out that there are non-transgender XX males [1]. They are very rare, but it can happen. If the part of the Y chromosome which contains the SRY (testis-determining factor) gene is translocated to the X chromosome, an individual can be an infertile XX male. I don't think anyone would try to argue that such a person is not actually male (assuming they in fact identify as such), in spite of their XX chromosomes, since their external appearance from birth can be completely male. (XX male individuals vary: some appear anatomically completely male, albeit sterile; others show incomplete masculinisation.)
Biological sex cannot be reduced to chromosomes, although chromosomes can be used as a rule of thumb valid 99.99% of the time. In fact, I don't think there is any one single factor to which biological sex can be reduced; both maleness and femaleness are composites of collections of traits which usually occur together, but none of those traits is absolutely necessary to being of that biological sex. People who talk about biological sex as if it was completely determined by chromosomes are ignorant of the whole story.
I write a question referring only to myself “How do I...” Or I write an answer with “you”, or I reference another poster by name.
I don’t quite understand why the admins thought this was a good use of energy, but I am also all for inclusivity. If I find the need for a pronoun, I will use “they” and not be bothered by it.
That will possibly get you a warning and, if you keep doing it, a ban. If you're using any pronouns and the person has written their preferred pronouns on their profile, you must use those.
I believe that the whole issue is virtue signalling. It has none to very little actual practical value but is highly contentious (especially with draconian punishments for minor infractions), it's great as a signal and useless as a policy.
> Q15: Is it expected that people go to "About me" to check whether someone has pronouns there when interacting in Q&A?
No. That would be good practice, but it is not required.
Yes, if those are stated by the individual."
Therefore if someone says their pronouns are all Apache Attack Helicopter (and someone will), and you are aware of it, you are obligated to say things like "I think Apache Attack Helicopter made a good point". If I'm familiar with it, yet choose to say "I think they made a good point", I would have violated the code of conduct.
That leads me to assume that I am unwelcome on this site and to look down the FAQ for the answer to the question, how do I delete my account?
P.S. It's not in this FAQ, but https://stackoverflow.com/help/deleting-account.
This would be obvious trolling. No one sincerely identifies as an Apache Attack Helicopter. No one doing this is making a worthwhile contribution, so there would be nothing worth engaging with. Report and move on.
In practice, you won't encounter them often, and it should be obvious if they're a troll. Those should be reported and otherwise ignored. You can worry yourself sick with these hypotheticals. You are more dynamic than you give yourself credit for.
No, I don't think I will waste my time Googling every little thing to avoid manufactured outrage.
You do you. I'll be over here learning new ways to expand on the human experience.
Others have rightly pointed out that there are some StackExchange networks where your pronoun matters. And I'm sure in those, it's worth putting in the effort. But for StackOverflow, MathOverflow, Electronics, these things are absolutely, positively irrelevant to the subject. It neither adds nor takes away a sense of inclusivity because _it's not relevant_. It's a neutral thing.
https://www.google.com/search?q=apache+attack+helicopter+pro...
I mean - it's a clear-enough defined problem to solve with software and I've found that if you mess up a gender pronoun on accident people sometimes get deeply offended. I've gone 100% to the "they/them/you/their user name/etc." route because I just don't want to step on toes.
I miss the days when everyone was just a silly textual username that didn't have a gender, age, religion, race, etc. I've gone years communicating with people without actually knowing their gender.
That some people may use a pronoun other than the one on their birth certificate is the way things are going in the modern world, so polite use of the language must take this into consideration.
I have living aunts and uncles and grandparents who still think it's okay to refer to dark skinned persons, and with all politeness, as "Negro." I take it on to school them and, yes, compel them to use polite and accepted speech.
By the way, there is no society or culture without compelled and enforced norms, which by the way are what's under debate underneath all this.
The policy is not about "recommending" anything, it's about "requiring". That's the essence of most of the negative reaction. There are plenty of things that I will usually be happy to do voluntarily but will strongly oppose being required to do.
I can't truly relate but I can be empathetic. Folks bug me sometimes when they assume in conversation that I'm close to my family (because most people are). In reality I come from an abusive family and tend to not want to talk/think about them.
I understand that it's a completely different thing, but I'm using it to illustrate that _all_ of us should be good to each other, and realize that sometimes we can hurt someone's feelings without a single bit of intention to do so!
There's a difference between someone who knows you don't have a good relationship with your family and then really just being in-your-face about it (that's intentionally making you feel bad about your family), vs someone who doesn't know.
Yes you feel bad in both cases, but you probably feel much worse when it's an intentional thing.
Of course. I don't want to make people feel bad regardless of intention so my personal SOP is to try not to hurt people in regards to gendered language by keeping it as neutral as possible, and that's pretty easy when it's typed out IMO.
> Is using someone's personal pronoun really "showing respect" if you get banned otherwise?
My proposal would be:
1. "he" becomes gender neutral, and always refers to the first person in the sentence.
2. "she" becomes gender neutral, and always refers to the second person in the sentence. You can think if it as standing for "second he".
3. "tehe" is a gender neutral pronoun that always refers to the third person in the sentence. Think of it is standing for "tertiary he".
4. "quhe", "pehe", "hehe" are the 4th, 5th, and 6th persons ("quad he", "penta he" and "hex he"). If your sentence has more than six persons, rewrite the damn thing.
For example, in the sentence "Alice, Bob, and Carol took his car, she drove, and tehe paid for the gas", they took Alice's car, Bob drove, and Carol paid for the gas.
If they took Bob's car, Carol drove, and Alice paid, that would be "Alice, Bob, and Carol took her car, tehe drove, and he paid for the gas".
Even most of the people screaming bloody murder in here say they're okay with they/them. I'm not sure who SE consulted on Q9, but xey are not representative of any neopronoun user I've met. They recognize it's a lot of extra mental load beyond the much more common they/they/their and make a small accommodation for people who struggle with it.
I don't see any other issues on a skim, but that seems to be what's setting people off anyway so maybe that is it.
Regardless, this policy means that I'll be contributing even less frequently than I already do and, if/when that happens, I'll just keep using the second person.
If I somehow slip, use the third person and someone ends up saying anything about "misgendering", I'll just delete the answer/comment and spend my time better doing something else.
If you're getting angry that you (might) upset someone else you need to take a hard look in the mirror. Not only because you're immediately acting like their feelings don't matter because you didn't MEAN to offend them. But also, why don't you have a hobby? If you do, apologize to the person you upset and move on and reclaim that time to do something productive.
Essentially it boils down to: if you know someone's preferred pronouns, use them. If not, use gender-neutral pronouns. They even specifically point out that there's no requirement to actively seek out someone's pronouns if you don't know; just use something gender-neutral and move on.
I do see some issues, like: what if someone makes up a pronoun in bad faith, with the intention to troll people? There's some discussion around that in the comments, but the current policy seems to be "go along with it, but raise the issue with mods and they'll look into it", which is... not really a satisfying answer at all? And what if someone puts down a pronoun in good faith that you're simply unfamiliar with? Is it really reasonable to expect that answering a SE question will sometimes require googling someone's stated pronoun, followed by a value judgment to guess if they're trolling or not?
I come to SE (well, mostly SO) for answers to technical questions. For the vast majority of them, gender has nothing to do with the question or answer. Someone in the comments links to a question where someone put their pronoun preference at the bottom of their question, followed by an edit war removing and re-adding it[0], plus there's a meta discussion of the question[1]. Pronoun discussion in a technical question that doesn't even have to do with people is just noise, plain and simple. But it seems the consensus among community managers is edging toward leaving the pronoun notification in there, even though their FAQ explicitly states that the right place for a pronoun preference is in the About Me section of the user profile. This is getting to be a bit much.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/posts/58336846/revisions
[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390301/would-a-note...
Sometimes I wonder if we should all adopt thick accents so we can just use 'e (instead of he or she); hm (instead of her or him); and ha (instead of his or hers).
(Please laugh)
Maybe stop waving your fists about?
What I'm trying to say is that we should all be aware that our actions occur in a context, and thinking about the possible implications of those actions is a good thing. This is true whether that action is a physical action, or speech, or even inaction etc. The attitude of the OP appeared to be more "I am free to do x and I'm not going to give any thought to what the possible consequences might be before I do x", which isn't particularly fun for everyone else.
English is my second language and I should have worded my comment differently.
The odd thing here is that in most cases, rules regarding speech revolve around what _not_ to say. (cursing, hate speech, attacks, etc).
But in this case, these kinds of things feel like they belong more as a list of good manners. But in this case, you aren't being told "this is what we feel are good manners", but you're forced to say certain things, but those rules can be all over the place (physically, on different pages, and complexity-wise). So now are people supposed to check each profile before responding? What's wrong with just saying s/he, or OP, or the various internet-isms? Do they cause so much harm? They are totally harmless and neutral, and not offensive. Or are they offensive now?
Again, it's one thing if it was a guideline (like when we talk about manners), but this seems like users are being forced to say certain words (compelled speech), knowing which words to say requires them to do additional research, and that research usually has nothing to do with the content of the actual post.
That question is specifically asked—and answered—in the linked article; the answer is no.
Hopefully they'll look at this, see the amount of dislikes it's getting and change course again/revert this mess to the way it was before.
The wants of the LGBTQA community are, in the eyes of the majority, probably not this. I like to be polite and respectful. I’ll be honest though, I would guess that less than 0.1% of the English speaking population identifies as “Xir” and that a non trivial portion of those that do are comfortable with the understanding that random strangers are more comfortable using gender neutral language. I would further posit that the portion of those that are not ok with people having points of view favoring even gender neutral language and instead demand the usage of the term Xir have adopted it as a counter cultural stance to combat heteronormativity- which honestly is fine, but it’s also a move made knowingly to make some people uncomfortable which by any metric must be ruder than someone who is just trying to avoid controversy at all by using gender neutral pronouns to begin with. I’m a left leaning adult, and I think it’s pretty bullshit. Especially on the Internet where women have been assumed to be men by default for decades.
If I misgender someone, and they ask me to use any specific pronoun in the future, I probably will. If the responder instead gets angry and implies that I am rude because I made a common assumption, and instead asserts that I’m going to tell them to buzz off.
Rudeness is clearly a subjective concept based around intent. And it’s frankly a waste of people’s time.
Imagine if every post had pronouns at the end, and if every man then demanded a correction for a use of they instead of “he”. That would be a waste of time and disrespectful to the ability of everyone else to be an adult.
This wasn't a significant problem for the community as a whole. Certainly, any individual might be hurt when it happens, but let's keep some perspective. I've also not heard anything about mods not being able to deal with instances when it happened. There were people trying to be within an inch of the rules (on other issues, I've never seen gender being an issue at all), and they were all easily dealt with because SO never claimed to apply any rules by the letter only.
Granted, I'm speaking for the technical sites, law.se or pets.se may be terrible places, but I doubt it. Where did you witness that lack of basic decency?
Do you actually believe this, or are you using it as an insult?
>I don't care how downvoted I get
This hurts your comment so badly, especially as a leading statement.
I believe this, and mean it more as a matter of fact in a literal sense, and not as an insult.
>This hurts your comment so badly, especially as a leading statement.
To each their own. I know my audience. I lean conservative on a heavily west coast populated forum. I'm usually pretty easy going, but did draw a line in the sand on this. If every SE community trends this way, I'll pursue other interests.
In other words, the commenters have an issue with the poor execution of a noble idea.
It seems like anyone who respects how other people identify will have hard time running up against this policy.
Because the policy isn't about respecting gender identity; it's about having a political battle where there are no winners.
For example: if I put an unfamiliar pronoun in my profile, and someone sees it, are they obligated to refer to me that way? What if I'm just trolling? Should people be required to google my preferred pronoun and then make a value judgment on whether I'm acting in good or bad faith?
If they err on the side of assuming good faith, and I'm really just trolling, then we get an answer for all to see that includes someone falling for a troll, which reduces the value of that answer. It also normalizes trollish behavior, which is bad.
If they believe I'm acting in bad faith, and they're wrong, they could get banned from the site, which is an overreaction to what I'd expect will be a common, innocent mistake.
And that's just one example; there are plenty more in the comments.