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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Autres temps, autres moeurs. It's 2022, and high time to retire gendered language in mixed-gender contexts. No "guys", no "guys and gals", no "ladies and gentlemen". Gender is a spectrum, not a binary, and there are plenty of neutral expressions you can use like "beautiful people" or "fellow space travelers". The safety of the marginalized trumps the comfort of the privileged. Those tired of being lectured can deal with the change; those marginalized by erasure of their identity by the very language they speak must fight harder to be included in the face of such erasure,

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"Beautiful people" is a horribly discriminative term. It excludes everyone who isn't in line with unrealistic modern Western beauty standards, and makes anyone who's ever been called "ugly" or had a comment made about their appearance feel shut out of the conversation.

"Fellow space travelers" is similarly exclusionary. Did you consider at all that the vast majority of people who have ever been to space have been rich white men? Not to mention the extremely problematic imperialistic undertones of the entire American space program. Anyone who isn't from a privileged background is again ostracized by your words.

When I read “beautiful people” I understood it in the sense of the underlying beauty of the fact that we are somehow sentient beings in a universe of chaos and entropy.

Lol, this is 10/10 satire. The scary part is that many lunatics think this way unironically. Books will be written about this time in history.

> Books will be written about this time in history.

Could you just read this again and think about it a little? Amazing zinger there.

Why don't we just redefine guys to be gender neutral, instead of dropping it entirely? It's not like it has a problematic history.

The GP was being sardonic, but if you spend a little while in twitter and discord and you'll find some people out there really are a few cards shy of a full deck. The problem is that they are also the loudest. Truth be told, I think they always existed but the internet has enabled them to display and strengthen their lunacy.

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