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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Off topic but I find gendered writing really jarring and every time I read “she” instead of “he” I get jerked out of the flow of understanding.

I get why the authors do it …. they don’t want to be sexist, so they flip he to she.

It’s much easier to read the gender neutral “they” rather than “she”.

For me anyway.

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If you went to school before about 1990 (?) you would get marked down in any writing assignment for using "they" in a singular sense. I did and I still notice it when reading. Sometimes the context allows only a singular interpretation but often it doesn't and it causes a mental stumble trying to figure out what the author means.

We learned that "he" is neutral unless the subject is already known to be male. I agree that using "she" in a neutral sense is somewhat distracting.

Graduated early 2000s. Gender neutral “he” was taught as correct throughout primary and secondary school, neither “they” nor “she” was permitted. “She” didn’t become common in writing-in-the-wild until after 2010. You’d see it in academic writing occasionally before then, or explicitly feminist pieces maybe.

“They” was more common but came off as very informal or low-register (to those taught the other way, at least).

It did take me a long time to stop going “wait, who? I missed who we’re talking about” and start searching backwards in the text when encountering gender-neutral “she”. Did indeed make things hard to read for years.

Classically ‘he’ was used to be more universal. It was always understood to include women as well. But that language is frowned upon. When I read ‘they’ I think plural people not singular like ‘he.’

> When I read ‘they’ I think plural people not singular like ‘he.’

I'm sure you're aware that it's usually obvious in context, like many ambiguous uses of language. For example,

> Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound [their] head on the desk in frustration

Changing "his" to "their" doesn't make the phrase any more difficult to read, imo. Maybe it's just something you'll pick up with practice.

I think there's always been a good case for "they" rather than "he" in those contexts, e.g. "the player" being referred to as "they."

When speaking about "the player," you're not just speaking about one player, but anywhere from tens to tens of millions of players. That's a "they." And as they're all acting individually and independently within tens to tens of millions of individual game sessions, it makes sense to treat that "they" singularly.

So from that perspective, it's not really a desexed reference, but a reference to a multitude of people. But even if you're talking about the person hearing a Catholic confession, and it would always be safe to refer to each instantiated member of the class as "he," "they" still makes sense. They are a bunch of priests.

The article is from 1989 and this used to be one of the common writing styles back then. Of course, times have changed now and (at least to my ears) "they" sounds more natural than "she" in the current century.

>> The article is from 1989 and this used to be one of the common writing styles back then

I’m from the past and that’s not my recollection.

You probably blocked it out in an act of small-minded cognitive dissonance.

Tabletop RPG books c. 1989 were doing all kinds of stuff with generic pronouns. I believe Vampire (1991) primarily but not exclusively used "she". Other games would use "she" for the GM and "he" for players, stuff like that.

Singular "they" was more controversial at the time and was considered ungrammatical by some. "She" is unquestionably grammatical and yet it seems to be persistently shocking for people to read. (I would prefer "they" today, but this is from the '80s.)

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