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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

Pronouns.

That way, if someone is named "Billy" or "Alex", you won't be spending years mistakenly assuming they were a man while they could have been a woman.

This also has the beneficial side effect of covering trans individuals who use a birth name while having another gender identity.

Even more useful for usernames such as yours, "dionian". I do not know if it is your first name, last name or made-up username. So I have no clue what your gender is and I'd default to "they". If I knew, I could call you by the right pronouns.

It's just a slow shift away from assuming everyone on the internet is a man.

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It also serves as a flag that allows people to identify you as having bought into the general set of practices which strive to change our culture to support trans and nonbinary gender ideology.

And if our culture doesn't already support trans and non-binary people (ideology? no, it's people we're talking about), then that seems like it'd be a good thing to change.

Support of people may be involved, and this is a poor forum to litigate deep problems -- but if I trusted the diversity-and-inclusion apparatus of Silicon Valley in general to support the entirety of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, including the inconvenient parts about people of differing religions, then I might not been predisposed to choose that word.

Even your reply highlights it. "It's about people." Notice the manner in which you _correct_ my rather anodyne words. The fault is that I did not frame the question as you would have me frame it, and looked at a part of the general phenomenon that is different from you think deserves to be centered on.

You are welcome to your ideology, in any event, and it would be a poor world indeed where one could not act to change the world in accordance with one's conscience.

Would you please stop editing your post?

You've made several substantial changes -- far beyond the scope of a clarification -- and now I'm reluctant to respond at all because who knows what it'll say next.

Not the same person but for what it's worth: the edit period is limited to a few minutes and it exists for a reason. This topic (gender identity/pronoun use) is important to approach carefully and is exactly when the edit window should be used.

The edit window's about an hour

I was within ~5 minutes, mmmaybe 10 tops.

It is unfortunate that there is an excess of ideology around these issues. It hinders communication by confusing questions about the implementation of an ideology with hate-filled attacks on people.

It does not help the matter that similar attacks are real and exist. On the other hand, such confusion of concerns is a common goal of many who advance their ideologies, so there is a possibility some may deem this confusion desirable.

There is no such thing as "transgender ideology". You won't find those words on any credible sources.

There are transgender people who want to access their human rights. Transgender people do not choose their gender identity.

There is very much ideology around these issues. One particularly relevant article of ideology suggests that people who are not trans, and whose names would not ordinarily cause confusion, ought nevertheless adopt a practice of specifying pronouns, in service of the idea that those who are trans (or nonbinary) might not stand out when they do so.

While I am agree that there are human rights issues involved in the issues generally, I would say that is not specifically a human right to have others around you adopt this specific practice to support such a person as he, she, or they assert an identity.

I.e. it's a sort of political armband indicating you've fully submitted to globo-corpo neoliberal ideology.

Not sure exactly what you think pronouns have to do with neoliberalism? I don't really associate the likes of Thatcher, Reagan, Friedman, or Hayek with anything of the sort.

I also think globo-corpo neoliberal is a bit redundant, no?

"Liberal" and "neoliberal" have both been hijacked by progressives thoroughly enough that no one associates colloquial usage of either of those with Friedman or Hayek.

Friedman and Hayek were certainly not globo-corpo, considering that they believed in things like freedom of association, covenants, and other legal protections that work against the likes of Amazon or Wal-mart (who are primarily interested in undermining unions, using strategies to diminish worker cohesion like diversity quotas, and strategies to defang leftism like trans activism).

I'm not sure I would call it that at all. Silicon Valley is not the world and, in the corporate world, this remains a very California / Silicon Valley phenomenon (present but less strong in a few key other places — New York, Seattle, Portland come to mind).

It is of course also a university-campus phenomenon (especially private universities) but those aren't really "corpo". For that matter, the Wikimedia Foundation is only "corpo" insofar as a 501(c)(3) is technically in fact a corporation — unlikely to be within the meaning of what you intended.

On that note, it is more prominent in the nonprofit sector, perhaps due to volunteers being more predisposed to activism in general. (Mozilla was a bellwether.)

I hesitate to call it virtue signalling because there are other forms of social signalling that aren't about virtue. Safe spaces require effort from the members who already feel safe.

Putting (he/him) in does three things. It invites you to provide your own. It also stops someone from starting a side-argument about you assuming 'he/him' in your response instead of you/your or they/their. Which means that we can talk about what we want to talk about instead of gender politics, if you don't feel like it. Or we can if you need to.

It also make it so that trans people won't be outed as trans for having their pronouns in their profiles. If only trans people did that, you'd automatically know who is trans and who isn't. Now that everyone is adding those, you can't say.

It's appropriate that the commenter below uses the phrase "bought in", because that conveys the general sense of mob/unthinking latching onto this movement. One which I'm quite disappointed to see companies just caving to, through little insertions of ridiculous practices like these.

Having everyone declare their gender is a little bit ridiculous, just to serve the desires of a ~1% group who are trying to gain more recognition. I am frankly surprised how people are willing to distort their behavior when they refuse to do so for other groups who are far more downtrampled in their rights in greater percentages. I suppose somehow transsexual people just became popular for some reason.

Frankly, it's a symbol and problem of the modern liberal/democratic mind (at least at the party-level) that these problems rise to the level of national and corporate attention -- and apparently we solved all our other material needs and have time to spend on this in comparison.

You project a lot of problems onto people who provide their pronouns in their user descriptions.

Not everyone is American, and not all issues are about American politics.

I find it interesting how much emphasis has been placed on an afterthought that I edited in. A lot of really emotional reactions like yours. I described it as a beneficial side effect and suddenly the whole conversation is about "evil trans people" and "bad liberals".

Having your pronouns available is beneficial to more than just trans people. It benefits everyone, avoids mistakes and makes conversations more accurate. It also breaks the myth that there are no women online and that there are no computer-savvy women. It also brings visibility to non-binary people who are otherwise invisible.

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