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Comment by poszlem | Hacker News Reader

This is a question that touches one of the cornerstones of the culture war, so you will hear radically different opinions from all sides of the discussion. I don't think we are at the point where we can just pick one way to ask for genders. Even "male", "female", "other" is causing problems, as some people get offended for the "other" option (it should only be "male"/"female") and other people get offended for the "other" options (it should be "demiboy", "nonbinary", "catgender", etc.).

IMO the concept of gender is really not that useful anymore. We should only ask for sex, and if you don't need to know the sex you just don't ask.

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In software it's useful in internationalization. In languages like Spanish or Russian you have to know the gender of the person or thing you're talking about.

This extends to non-living things, in many languages, you can't just do "$THING has been deleted". How you say "deleted" changes depending on the grammatical gender of the thing. "El objeto ha sido eliminado", "La entrada ha sido eliminada".

> In languages like Spanish

I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term (and different animals/objects have different defaults you're supposed to use, which you just kind of have to memorize).

For example, I was taught that if you're picking up a cat off the sidewalk, and you haven't checked its genitals, and you want to ask if it belongs to someone, you just use "gato", and it's understood that "gato" can mean both "explicitly male" and "I haven't taken the time to check." Similar deal for mixed groups containing people of multiple genders, I was taught if there's at least one man you use the male forms when referring to that group.

Admittedly I did have an American education, so it's very possible I was taught incorrectly. I don't put a lot of faith in my Spanish teachers. But it's not like gender ambiguity is a modern thing; scenarios where speakers don't yet know the sex/gender of the things they're referring to are a fairly common issue that will come up pretty often in any culture, regardless of what its gender norms are.

If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something, I assume you can tell that story to a friend in a way where your friend will understand you're not claiming that you were ever close enough to the fox to determine its sex. Again, I don't know, but I assume there are something like default gender-variants that Russian people use in that situation; I assume its possible to have that conversation in Russian.

> I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term

Yeah, but that doesn't work great in many contexts. If somebody already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a man, expect confusion or offense.

In Russian, people's gender applies to verbs and adjectives, so that works even less.

> If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something

Funnily enough, foxes are female by default in Russian, while rabbits default to male. If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation.

> If someone already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a name, expect confusion or offense.

Isn't that's true of every language, including English? Singular "they" has risen in popularity quite a bit in English, but there are still a ton of people who use "he" as a gender neutral term, and once someone tells them their name is Maria, they switch to "she". I'm not sure I see the difference.

If someone tells you their name is Maria or you learn someone's gender during a conversation, as the hearer you intuit that Maria is a common feminine name and starts using feminine pronouns; you stop saying "they told me their name was Maria" and start saying "she told me."

In English conversations with people who don't use singular "they" this is a pretty common experience I run into fairly often. If I'm telling a story about someone and I don't reveal I'm talking about a woman until part-way through the story, at that point the person I'm talking with will fluidly switch from "he" to "she" when referring to the subject.

> If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation.

I worry a little bit we're talking past each other, because I agree with all of this and I'm not sure I'm communicating well enough what my contention actually is. I would expect with any language with gendered verbs/nouns, you're going to need multiple versions of most text sections. But my point is that in situations where the sex/gender isn't known by both the reader and the speaker, there is a default version you can use, it's not untranslatable.

> In English conversations with people who don't use singular "they" this is a pretty common experience I run into fairly often. If I'm telling a story about someone and I don't reveal I'm talking about a woman until part-way through the story, at that point the person I'm talking with will fluidly switch from "he" to "she" when referring to the subject.

Doesn't work in many languages. You can't talk about somebody else or yourself in Russian in gender neutral terms for any length of time. Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific. Gender neutrality like "they" isn't an option. Referring to somebody as a "he" then switching to "she" will be seen as confusing or insulting. So your plot twist is likely impossible to translate to Russian.

> But my point is that in situations where the sex/gender isn't known by both the reader and the speaker, there is a default version you can use, it's not untranslatable.

There are, but it typically doesn't work for people. Yeah, you can treat a rabbit as male by default, but that doesn't work in Russian for people. Eg, if you run over somebody, you can refer to them in neutral terms like "person", but that's going to get weird very fast. It's roughly like talking about running over a "creature" for an extended length of time -- people will quickly start wondering why you keep sticking to such a non-specific term.

> Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific.

I know that; but there isn't a default gendered form to use when referring to people non-discriptly, like "he" is very often used for in English?

I just don't understand how that's possible; it's not a cultural difference -- there is no way that any population isn't going to run into situations where they're forced to refer to someone who's gender they don't know.

Not knowing the gender of a person you're talking about is an extremely common situation that would comes up all the time, regardless of a country's history or language. Is the sentence, "a cloaked figure approached me but was covered in so many layers of jackets and clothing that I could not tell if it had a penis" untranslatable in Russian?

A police report comes out and the police want to say, "someone robbed the convenience store and we're looking for any information we can find about the culprit." That's untranslatable in Russian? That's not a scenario that the language developed to accommodate? They can't default to masculine pronouns, they have no natural way to signal that they don't know if the criminal is male or female?

Even the car example -- it's extremely plausible if you witness a car accident involving a human being that you might not know whether the people involved are women or men. Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?"

Gender reveals are not just plot twists in books, they happen in real life. There is no way that a culture wouldn't regularly encounter these scenarios; people have conversations about events that involve human agents where they don't know basic information about the humans involved all the time. It is just unfathomable to me that what you're saying about the Russian language is correct -- that you could witness an event happening from a distance where you couldn't identify the genders of the people involved, and the language just wouldn't have any way at all for you talk about it even by defaulting to masculine pronouns/variants; that the language was never at any point in history adapted for dealing with situations where you're talking about a person you saw who was wearing a mask.

Gender ambiguity is a scenario that Russians will encounter in real life and I guarantee have encountered in real life throughout Russia's history regardless of their cultural views or linguistic representations of gender. They probably have a way of talking about those situations, or at least understand that sometimes gender in a conversation is being inferred or substituted without factual knowledge of the actual person being talked about?

> Not knowing the gender of a person you're talking about is an extremely common situation that would comes up all the time, regardless of a country's history or language. Is the sentence, "a cloaked figure approached me but was covered in so many layers of jackets and clothing that I could not tell if it had a penis" untranslatable in Russian?

Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using.

> Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?"

Yeah, because there will be situations where you can't maintain ambiguity for long enough. Eg, take a sentence like "I went around the corner and crashed into a stranger", "stranger" is already a gendered word (and the sentence also makes you disclose your own). Yeah, maybe you didn't see immediately who it was, but if you interact for any length of time, the cultural expectation is that you'll include it when retelling.

Eg, in real life you crash into somebody, get knocked down, they cuss you out, and you figure out that you crashed into a woman. When retelling though the normal way to explain it is to say "I went around the corner and crashed into a female stranger".

English allows for more ambiguity. You can say, set up a mystery encounter like: "We're meeting my room mate who works at NASA as an engineer, won a robotics competition and just recovered from an illness", and then boom! It's a woman. Can't do that in Russian. "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something.

You can of course technically do it -- "We're meeting a person who lives in my house", but it only works if you're implying you yourself haven't met them and know absolutely nothing about them, and it takes pretty darn special circumstances for it to make sense. If you know about their achievements because somebody told you, you'd know their gender and just use it from the start.

> Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using. [...] "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something.

Right; while English has more ambiguous tools, even in English many speakers will think it's a bit weird to keep using "they" to refer to someone if you do know what their gender and pronouns are. (For many listeners at least), it wouldn't be natural-sounding dialog/conversation for me to describe my sister exclusively with the word "they".

I'm not saying that in casual conversation people would use ambiguous language -- but there are scenarios where you'll have conversations about something you saw where you don't at any point during that conversation have any knowledge of the genders involved, and of course the language has support for scenarios like that.

Agreed that English has more tools for explicit ambiguity; if you see a car fly off a bridge, you can say, "I hope they're OK." But even if you weren't using 'they', you could say "I hope he's OK" in that situation and the majority of people around you would understand that using the word 'he' wasn't a declaration that you knew who was in the car. The movement away from "he" as a default gender in English wasn't because without singular 'they' there was no support for situations where the gender was unknown, it was a movement away from the social/political/moral implications of default gender in society, and later became expanded into a way to explicitly accommodate nonbinary speakers and avoid misgendering.

I got curious about this and tried to look it up, and while the explanations were a bit limited, my takeaway is that it does seem like the Russian language works the same way? If a car flies off a bridge and you use masculine language to talk about the driver, and then later find out the driver was a woman, my understanding is that people probably aren't going to be offended about that or think that you've done something odd? At the point where you learned the driver was a woman you'd just quickly apologize and switch to feminine forms.

Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do?

Even in gendered language, you need to come up with some kind of "other" category, and you'll likely need to rewrite your sentences to make it work if you can make it work at all.

> Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do?

No clue. But at least you have the data to use whenever you figure out what to do with it, and I imagine somebody tackled that question already, since this is not something that showed up yesterday.

In some languages like English you can go with "they" or such, in others there aren't good options that would be widely recognized. But that's just how i18n goes. Languages don't neatly align with the desires of computer programmers.

I've discovered that for some people, they will feel ignored by not asking their gender identity, or at least their pronouns. Things feel more inclusive to them when they are able to register their identity, even if it's not used by anything in the app. A coworker put it this way: "We want to be celebrated, not ignored"

But if I don't know you, I don't care if you want to be celebrated. How do those people deal with people they don't know personally?

I feel like this is a bit of a mask-off moment that reveals the narcissism behind the movement.

And yet people get lambasted on twitter for suggesting that there is an undercurrent of narcissism when people obsess over pronouns.

Imagine “I want my religion in work profile so my group can be celebrated and not ignored”. My gut reaction is “gtfo”.

(Asking for Pronouns for practical usage makes more sense but that’s not for celebration)

Do you think you could steelman this take instead?

Can you steelman the idea that "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" rather than just criticizing how others have discussed it? It may be more productive to try reframing the issue yourself.

No, I don't think I could do that without being transphobic. If there's a way to do that, please let me know though.

"Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.

The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.

So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label — "sexist", for example — and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?

Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think."

Anyway - if you cannot steelman the "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" phrase you are probably not the best person to ask other people to steelman anything.

Can you please do this without the tu quoque at the end?

Not if your definition of "to steelman" is to "make is sound not transphobic". I really don't consider something being "transphobic" having anything to do with whether it's true or not. I can imagine a statement that is both "transphobic" and factually correct.

I'm not sure where you got that from. My defintion of steelmanning is interpreting someone's argument in the best possible light.

If you can do it without being transphobic, I'd like to hear it.

“I’m not sure where you got that from.”

proceeds to show exactly where they got it from

It sounds like you really want to say, "people who care about pronouns[trans people] do so because they are narcissistic," but you really don't want to because you understand the implications of such a statement. Personally I think the idea is abhorrent, but correct me if I'm wrong about you.

You're the only one who's brought up trans people so far.

Apparently in your mind "obsessed with pronouns and wanting to be celebrated" automatically means trans people. You realize that other people use pronouns right? And you don't have to be trans to narcissistically obsess over them and insist on being celebrated.

I hope you're able to overcome your clear transphobia some day.

Please correct me. I cannot follow your line of reasoning on how addressing transphobia is transphobic. You realize the movement you're referring to is inherently connected to the trans community, right?

What I'm pointing out is that characterization is transphobic. Usually when people point out that a characterization is incorrect, they aren't accused of making that characterization themselves. Typically folks understand the difference and I expect you to as well.

You're the only one making a characterization involving trans people. Trans people use pronouns, so what? You're being transphobic because you're automatically associating trans people with the negative thing I said even though that association doesn't need to be made and you're the only one suggesting it.

This really isn't that hard. As I explained elsewhere, if you buy an iPhone that doesn't automatically make you an Apple fanboy. Likewise, if you're trans and you make it a point to use certain pronouns that doesn't make you a narcissist. I'm specifically calling out SOME people, not even trans people.

Some people absolutely do latch onto pronouns because it brings them attention. These are the people that want to be celebrated, because they're narcissists. I really can't make this any more clear that these are not just trans people. Do trans people tend to care more about pronouns? Sure. But that doesn't automatically mean they want to be celebrated for doing so.

What does transgender have to do with it? Are you implying that transgender people are obsessed with pronouns?

In my experience trans people just want to be called by their preferred pronouns. They’re not obsessed with it. Most don’t care about being “celebrated” they just don’t want to be excluded or harassed.

I hope someday you examine your transphobia.

Maybe you can clarify. I said that the statement that "pronoun obsessed people are narcissistic" is not possible to justify without being transphobic. ie: it assumes transphobia. I'm not sure how that translates into me being transphobic, but I'm willing to listen.

Having preferred pronouns doesn’t automatically mean that person is obsessed with pronouns and wants to be celebrated.

If I buy an iPhone it doesn’t automatically mean I’m obsessed with Apple and want to feel special because I bought an Apple product. That’s an additional step.

Instead of implying an argumentative fallacy has occurred—I don't see it—why not present your own points in a counterargument?

I'm simply referring to the guideline.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

The claim that enjoying to be asked about pronouns is a narcissistic trait is unfalsifiable at worst and unable to be worked out through dialog at best. We could say something about it through surveys and descriptive statistics, but that wouldn't form the basis of a causal relationship.

Instead, rhetorically, it's much easier to ask if there simply isn't an interpretation which doesn't assume the worst in people. Doing so reveals more about the commenter than it does about the topic and kindly suggesting a positive or at least neutral interpretation builds bridges of meaning instead of assuming an argument.

This is a reasonable response, but good faith should go both ways.

Am I operating in good faith if I ask everyone if they are Sunni or Shia for some ulterior motive, assuming they are Muslim? What about astrological signs? I'd argue not, but a similar thing happens when pronoun-talk occurs.

Whether someone finds salience in pronouns' mapping to "gender identity"—insofar as the concept is coherent—is largely a matter of worldview. Many, if not most people, only care about sex. The imposition of worldview here is what motivates the narcissism charge. That and the fact that most TRAs are narcissists, but it could be unrelated.

"Ignored" is a feeling they have. Feeling ignored is unpleasant and can be hard, and deserves empathy. But feelings belong to the person having them.

You can choose to design your products to cater to feelings if you like. But that does not make it an ethical imperative to design your products so that no one feels a certain feeling.

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