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Comment by _dwt | Hacker News Reader

"Back in the day", some of us used to deliberately alternate pronouns for these sorts of hypothetical people. The idea was to help nudge people toward perceiving "gender-atypical" occupations/situations/etc. as normal: "The programmer opens her text editor...".

Since then the world has changed quite rapidly when it comes to norms around writing, pronouns, and gender, so perhaps "they" fills the same role for younger writers.

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Large corporations sometimes come up with user personas, which I've always thought are fun to work with. Like alternating pronouns, they're a very reasonable, noncontroversial way to remind people their users might not look like them (busy parents, someone performing the same repetitive tasks all day with your application who would appreciation automation, etc)

I find user personas in your example to be quite "out of the way" and in fact reasonable unlike mere gender "substitution" which I (being a non-native speaker) tend to perceive as some unnecessary (and even off-putting at times) piece of information.

Calling that an "alteration" rather than a "substitution" gave me a different perspective, though.

I'd often find Alice/Bob examples in (programming-related) books, but seeing "she" instead of "he" in situations where gender isn't important wasn't that common in my experience.

Some other commenters pointed out that the practice is quite old in English. My use of English is mostly limited to reading technical information and blog posts so I can only assume that the alteration not being popular is (was?) mostly intrinsic to the technical articles/blog posts.

Native speaker here, and it took me most of a decade of seeing the use of the feminine for the non-specific or neuter pronoun before it stopped being very annoying (it was uncommon outside certain circles, until fairly recently). I still have to catch myself when I encounter it to avoid glancing back over the text to figure out which specific person is being referenced, whom I must have missed in my first reading—IOW, it remains a distracting style, for me.

> I still have to catch myself when I encounter it to avoid glancing back over the text to figure out which specific person is being referenced, whom I must have missed in my first reading

That's funny. Saying "off-putting" I had exactly that in mind.

What? She? I must've zoned out.

Yeah, I don't have a problem with the politics of it, exactly, but it's definitely more disruptive to my reading than favoring the masculine (only because I learned that way, of course—had I been taught otherwise, I'd have the opposite problem) or using the singular-plural form (they/them/their).

Maybe the irritation's worth it for the effect that effort's having on culture. I really don't know. In the end, it's not that big a problem for me, just a little irritating, so I simply hope it's doing something actually-helpful for someone and don't worry about it too much.

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