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Comment by dark-star | Hacker News Reader

If you don't care just use they. It works no matter how the person identifies themselves, and it's really straightforward.

At least in English you can structure sentences to be pronoun agnostic, as long as you have some way to refer to the users

I'm not sure why using 'them' is any worse. It's a nice identity-agnostic pronoun. Mixing pronouns with names is much more natural than repeatedly using the name. I don't get why it's an issue at all.

I'm saying that if you don't know a person's pronouns at all and you're not sure if they/them sounds right, you largely can avoid it altogether. And I don't mean by just repeating their name over and over (which I agree sounds weird), so if we take the original comment:

> Feel like it would be easier if he rewrote it from scratch and then copied the business logic

then using their name is totally pronoun agnostic as discussed:

> Feel like it would be easier if foone rewrote it from scratch and then copied the business logic

but you can also not use name, pronoun or anything:

> Feel like it would be easier to rewrite the app from scratch and then copy the business logic

or:

> Feel like it would be easier if the app was rewritten from scratch, and then the business logic could be copied

English is really flexible, and to be honest I think these look quite natural and don't sound like I'm nervously trying to avoid offending anyone.

Fair point. I'll try to do that as much as I can.

I guess because "they" and "them" is plural, and it can confuse people to think that you're talking about a group of people instead of a single person? At least that's what confuses me (as non-native speaker) quite often when I read someone talking about "them"

Singular "they" predates singular "you" [1]. If someone tells you otherwise, tell them they are wrong. That use of "them" as in the previous sentence has been correct for centuries.

[1] https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...

Not sure why this is downvoted? Only for the "If you don't care"-part? I usually check if any preferences were stated or what pronoun a person uses when talking about themselves, but use "they/them" as generic fallback as well - and am now irritated if that's wrong and for what reason?

(This would probably be a bit much for a HN comment, so feel free to link)

The "if you don't care part" was meant more as "you're being a dick but I know you'll keep being one anyway, so use this instead to not offend anyone", but the first option works better in a comment. I usually don't like provoking people like that, but I really don't understand the downvotes here.

Doesn't matter if you care or not, use the correct ones.

Or else what? you'll be sending the gender cops my way? ;-)

I don't have the time or energy to search for everyone's favorite pronoun before talking about them. If it's someone I personally know or talk to on a regular basis, then I will certainly use their preferred pronoun out of habit. But I expect people to accept that some people just care less about their pronouns than they do. I know this is a hard to grasp concept in this day and age...

I don't want people to call me "buddy" or "bro" but I accept it when they call me like that because I respect their choice

Ok ma'am.

I'm sure you'll accept correction between "he" and "she", so what you're actually saying here is that you're opposed to being corrected to "they".

I have never encountered a correction between "he" and "she", personally, because either the name or the appearance usually makes it very clear.

I admit that it's harder for some names ("Andrea" comes to mind, or "Kim") especially if you have never met that person, but these cases didn't come up in my experience yet, so maybe I just have a small circle of friends or something... ;-)

And you mis-read my comment, I didn't say I'm opposed to being corrected, but I expect people to accept that others might "mis-pronoun" them, and not expect everyone to first search their whole social media presence for the correct pronouns.

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