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Comment by impowski | Hacker News Reader

This is madness

I'm all for fairness and inclusivity. But how far is too far?

Extreme School of thoughts like this have always existed for millenia. Groups of people trying to bend reality to their will.

The human desire... Oops huperson.... oopps huperdaughter .... Ooops huperdaughtx

The human desire for everyone to conform to my worldview.

BRB I'm going to the park with my 2 little individuals.

> But how far is too far?

This could be an interesting question that I think is okay to ask? How far is too far when it comes to existing gendered language? Is it okay to ask that question too?

Your examples/jokes are odd, you've taken already gender-neutral language and replaced it.

> The human desire for everyone to conform to my worldview.

Is that not what's happening relative to gendered language and folks who wish to move away from it?

Maybe it’s because I speak French where my shoes have a gender.

Things that are a non issue in some language are getting other people fired in some other languages

That sounds normal to the point that it's boring. I remember ~10 years ago I was introduced to this concept in a way I was able to understand via an episode of a video program called "Taboo". The particular episode was about gender differences in Romania (I hope I'm not misremembering), specifically about a bit of the culture that "allowed" a biological woman to live their life out the way a man traditionally would.

Someone from that culture could easily be looking at the English-speaking world and wondering why this is even being discussed: it's not even weird.

Someone from your culture seems to be looking at the English-speaking world and wondering why this is even being discussed: it's utter nonsense.

I do love this point about different languages, though. Many languages have gender as a default.

A very small % of the population identifies outside of the conventional gender bounds. If anyone is getting fired, it's for not respecting the preferences and wishes of their coworkers, which seems quite reasonable. If someone refused to call me by nickname, and insisted using my legal name, for example, I'd probably be quite bothered.

Which is fine, but if you want everyone else to use a nickname. This might be a problem

I echo your sentiment.

I am not against gender inclusivity but to call out what is essentially innocent language as inherently “bad” is not a good path to go down.

Where does it say this is language is inherently bad? I'm not sure it does. As members of a software-focused community, can't we look at existing solutions that work okay and strive to make them even better? We all do this quite a bit in code review, for example.

Some are better, like “fireman” to “firefighter”; in those cases, they generalize a concept in a meaning-preserving manner and simplify.

edit I didn’t even see the next comment, that mentioned firefighter, when I wrote this; that makes it all the more to me.

Most are identity politics bullshit, and should be resisted.

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