Switch to Gender Neutral Terms | Hacker News Reader

Switch to Gender Neutral Terms

github.com

22 pointshintymad20 comments

I'm a member of a large Slack group that has a bot that corrects un-PC language, including any mention of the word "guys."

What I find interesting is that the biggest proponents of dynamic language -- the idea that usage evolves over time, such as "they" becoming more common as a singular pronoun -- also tend to treat a word like "guys" as non-gender-inclusive, even though it is extremely common for "guys" to be used in a gender-neutral way when used in the second person. "You guys" and "Hey guys" are examples of this, and what a lot of people ignore is that women have had a large part in moving these terms in a gender-neutral direction by using these phrase to address other women.

I’ve noticed this too. But it doesn’t fit their objectives or worldview of what they find acceptable and what they want to banish. I’ve pointed this out to others before but they ignore their inner contradiction

Best thing is, the automated process broke a link to the Hebrew translation repository (from https://github.com/EladLeev/system-design-primer/tree/he-tra... to https://github.com/EladLeev/system-design-primer/tree/they-t...) by replacing "he" with "they".

Good job breaking it with an inane search & replace bot! /s

What could possibly go wrong with changing dependencies

https://github.com/vuejs/vue/pull/12510/files#diff-5e85e0b2b...

That replacement of Him with Them in a (presumably base64) sha512 is priceless.

So GitHub repositories are being harassed by bots that police their language? I assume GitHub is going to ban their IPs. If they don’t, it’s another symptom of their decline.

I thought the bot was built by github

That’s an order of magnitude more disturbing than I thought, then.

Making up things to be disturbed by is a classic pastime. The bot was not built by GitHub.

It was allowed to force push to the main branch. Not "made" by GitHub seems to be quite uncharitable nitpicking, when the bot has been blessed by GitHub and implicitly its actions endorsed.

In the spirit of your comment: Gas lighting is a classic pastime.

It force-pushed to a branch of its own fork, then closed its own pull request without merging it – both things any account can do. No GitHub blessing was ever involved.

And so we move from uninformed speculation to uninformed misinterpretation.

I'm old and have great difficulty understanding how we got here.

I’m old but I don’t see a big mystery. There have always been crazy people among us. Now some of the crazy people have figured out how to use computers and pay their internet bill every month. So they are no longer confined to ranting to themselves on the bus, but now have Twitter and, apparently, GitHub.

its only crazy if you're not affected by the terms

I think it's 2 things.

1) is the tension between what I mean when I say something - When I say "girl" I don't mean a perfect antonym to "boy." "Girl" to me can be a synonym for woman - vs. what you hear when I say something - I say "girl" and you hear "You are an infant not an adult." I think the resolution of this tension is based on your audiance - the more intimate you are with someone the more leeway you give them in meaning but the world is currently crazy and we all live in H.R. land.

2) This is a political power play. It's a way of establishing dominance not for a means but as end either in and of itself or towards other things.

The response to it is to think rationally about what you say and how someone might actually take it. That's hard to do though in the the current atmosphere.

Apparently the word "sister" is offensive. Use "sibling" instead.

"Sister city" "Brother city" "Sibling city" "Twin city"

For some strange reason, no one ever says "brother city." The term "sister city" is very common. "Twin city" is also conventionally used. I do think it's a bit strange to say "sister city" but not "brother city," and it forces me to think about gender in a context where I do not want to think about gender. So I like the term "twin city" better. "Sibling repo" preferred to "sister repo" for the same reason (if I was reading this Github documentation, having to think about a repo as female gendered would be a highly distracting diversion while I'm trying to concentrate on source code).

I’m truly not trying to be obtuse when I say that not only does it not force me to think about gender, it doesn’t specifically evoke gender for me at all. Our radars seem to be calibrated differently. It’s often said that to seek offense is to find it.

Laughs in French

By the power of Greyskull, this sounds like a job for Theyperson and Theyra.

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