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Comment by dgan | Hacker News Reader

I feel triggered when a recruiter contacts in a non-gendered form, while I clearly look a like an average MALE on my picture. Do I look feminine? Haven't you seen my picture? Is it a mass-message designed to be as much sly, sneaky and greasy way as possible?

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Well, it turns out people are more interested in avoiding upsetting people through gendered language than through non-gendered language. You can't please everyone, and your worries do seem less important if you ask me.

My worries seem important to me, if you ask me ...

Well, thoughts and prayers. We're fighting a different fight.

This is a great example of how a lot of these methods of "avoiding upsetting people" seem to really be ways for people to make themselves feel good for doing something that they think is nice, like how almost every latino has no problem with the gendered form and has never heard of "latinx".

Why? Using non-gendered language avoids misgendering people, and even though there are people who are offended by not being gendered this seems like a great trade off.

I am all for trying to be as inclusive as it gets and to be honest, English’s gendered pronouns are just unnatural to me due to my native tongue not being gendered to begin with.

But other than the old “he/she” (annoying) repeated thing or perhaps “they”, some other constructs feel pretty forced. I feel that without starting a conversation where both sides partake, no consensus will ever happen. Or, probably the foremost should be the actual targeted demographic be consulted, because in plenty of cases these are not coming from them and they don’t even approve of these changes, making it the old feel-good changes for the sake of it.

But your argument boils down to "it's what I want, and even though there are people who don't want it, who cares?" Here is your argument, but adjusted to argue for my position. I didn't have to change much!

"Using gendered language avoids not gendering people, and even though there are people who are offended by being gendered this seems like a great trade off."

It's because, even though I'm a cis male that has never been misgendered, I can empathize much better with the pain of a misgendered trans person than with the pain of any person that was treated by as a "they". To be completely honest I can't even understand why someone would be offended by this. So yeah, I prefer to run the risk of offending by using gender neutral language. And this seems to be the consensus among most institutions that are actually thinking about this kind of things.

To some people, using non-gendered language is offensive. I recall a woman who got upset because someone else referred to her as "they". She was offended because her profile picture was very clear. She felt the other person was making it seem as if it was unclear whether she was a man or a woman.

Filtering out people who get upset about nonsense like this is a feature, not a bug.

>Well, it turns out people are more interested in avoiding upsetting people through gendered language than through non-gendered language.

You mistakenly wrote "people" when you meant to write "Google and those who ascribe to the same ridiculous cultural mores as Google".

Can I ask what sort of traumatic experience would lead to such a trivial thing triggering you? Understand completely if it's still too raw to share publicly.

Most males have traumatic experiences with that. And anybody that has been bullied has very traumatic experiences with it.

Honestly, never noticing that is even strange.

Are you receiving letters written in third person rather than second person? Or in a different language?

I was talking about French specifically

How does that look in French?

Par exemple: https://www.blog.eninclusif.fr/post/professeuse-et-professeu...

Ugh that looks horrible and forced. I'm not a native French speaker and i really don't have a solution for neutral forms of nouns in gendered languages, but all the stuff I've seen looks really.. off. And complicated to pronounce for me.

In an email to you, in what ways are you being referred to in a non-gendered form? I'm straining to think of how I would include "they/them" pronouns in an email to someone.

EDIT: I did assume English, and it is fair that other languages treat genders differently. I was wrong here! That being said, I think the likely answers are, in order, 1/ mass-sent emails 2/ just not being worth offending someone.

The world doesn't revolve around English.

That can be offensive to include they/them without knowing their situation. Keep it neutral use singular non gendered pronouns.

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