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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

When you read it, keep in mind it's from 2018. Otherwise it looks as if Tang was 7 or so when he started to work on the problem. In reality, he already was 17 (*).

(*) yes, I know that it still very precocious.

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She :)

Am I crazy, or does the article seem to go out of its way to avoid using any pronouns for Tang?

maybe they don't know the gender and playing it like at parties when you don't remember someone's boyfriend name.

No because several times they directly quote people talking about Tang and editorialize the quote to use [Tang] where a pronoun would have been.

I used to know a chap called Colin who's dog was called John, or was it the other way around? I could never remember so never used their name.

Would have been easier if the dog was called Fido.

It's a gender superposition, don't collapse the wave.

IIUC at the time this article was written Tang was mid-gender-transition and consequently kind of cagey about what pronouns should be used for her. She now goes by she/her.

We shouldn't be using gendered pronouns anyway.

In very few circumstances is gender relevant. And even when it is relevant, we don't need to bake it into every other sentence, like people should be treated differently based on their gender.

If we baked social caste or race into how we referred to people, on the pronoun level, in every other sentence, it would obviously be ridiculous and terrible. So let's stop doing it for gender.

I agree with you but changing the basic grammatical rules of a language is a difficult coordination problem and you can't just do it by posting that it would be good.

There's an interesting series of fantasy novels by the author Graydon Saunders, occasionally recommended on this website, that almost entirely avoids the use of pronouns: https://www.goodreads.com/series/242525-commonweal . The avoidance of pronouns is a stylistic choice, but not a didactic one—you might not even realize it until you're a third of the way through the book and you start questioning whether a character you'd imagined as male or female might actually be a different gender, or not gendered at all. It's interesting to see how the author achieves this in dense but readable prose, without drawing attention to it.

Ancillary Justice is told from the point of view of a character of a culture that doesn't draw the distinction in language. It is occasionally remarked on, but generally from the point of view of the main character being always a bit paranoid that they'll cause offense by not referring to characters of other cultures and languages correctly.

Which grammatical rule is that? Singular they has been used in English for over four centuries. Using they instead of he or she does not break any rules.

The proposal was to get rid of "he" and "she", which is a very different proposition.

You're connecting something you dislike to a linguistic phenomenon based on a shared link to a concept. You could just as well argue that we shouldn't use names, because all people need to be treated the same.

Removing gender from language doesn't lead to paradise. Chinese and Turkish don't have gendered third person pronouns, but China and Turkey are not shining examples of gender equality.

Your assumption is wrong.

Relative social status is built-in to some languages, such as Japanese. I suspect it fuels a lot of their social constructs, like the whole senpai/kohai thing.

If men and women are the same, then why transition from one to the other? Men and women are different and there are many examples of when they should be treated differently.

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