Gender neutral language - An FAQ | Hacker News Reader

Gender neutral language - An FAQ

alexgaynor.net

27 pointsxs_kid30 comments

When a user visits the website, they will be assigned a session ID, and it will be transmitted to them in the HTTP response and stored in their browser.

There will always be people who resist this kind of construction, not because they're sexist but because the singular 'they' sounds clumsy to modern ears, its long history notwithstanding. Instead, try something less periphrastic:

Visitors are assigned a session ID, which is transmitted in the HTTP response and stored in the browser.

Shorter, clearer, more direct, and gender-free.

Results may vary depending on the number of singular his and hers in the original paragraph:

When visitors are each presented (the visitor's) personalised session page, each visitor will need to enter the visitor's name, credit card, as well as the visitor's birth date.

> not because they're sexist but because the singular 'they' sounds clumsy to modern ears, its long history notwithstanding

That's the thing though: it doesn't "sound clumsy to modern ears" for many people.

I use "singular-they" completely without thinking; as far as I can recall, I've never explicitly decided to use it, it just comes naturally when it is appropriate. The same seems to be true for many others as well.

However for some people (such as yourself, I presume), this obviously isn't the case.

From there, it's simply a numbers game.

I have no idea where those numbers stand today, but I don't recall anybody ever even noticing my usage, so it can't be too disturbing for those I interact with. It's hard for me to judge how many other people use this construction simply because it's so natural that I don't tend to notice it when they do.

Still, given that it perfectly addresses an otherwise awkward deficiency in English, in a way that fits in naturally with other English usage (e.g., singular/plural "you") and has both historical precedent and widespread modern adoption, the future of "singular-they" looks pretty bright...

> Shorter, clearer, more direct, and gender-free.

Also very passive, which I think has been frowned upon in writing styles since the latter half of the 20th century.

"...hostility isn't about intent".

Wrong, it is about intent. By alexgaynor's logic, all traffic accidents are assaults.

I think the point here is more that perceived hostility is not about intent. Perception is reality when you are not there in the user experience to give more information about your intent.

Another good argument here is that gendered language is intended to be hostile (as much as a cultural narrative can have intent) and you might just not realize it.

"perceived hostility" is not "hostility"

The article had me until it basically said using "he" in documentation makes you an asshole. It does not. Period. You can say it's better to use they, and I would even agree with it. But the article did not stop there.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/he

There is a prescriptivist movement that has branded the use of a generic "he" as not generic and therefore sexist. I refuse to feel guilty because someone else has decided that they can declare language to have officially changed, and dictate what I meant by words I used.

> The article had me until it basically said using "he" in documentation makes you an asshole

I don't think that the author intended any hostility towards you.

touche

...

Although it's hard to read the following as not calling a figurative-me hostile, for my choice of pronoun.

    Q: They said I was being hostile!
    A: I'm sorry, but you were.

I guess it depends whether calling figurative-you hostile is itself hostile. Is it offering advice on how to communicate better, or implying that figurative-you is an asshole? You could interpret it either way.

The actual problem here is that English has become an essentially gender-free language, with its vestigial gender closely linked to sex. He doesn't necessarily indicate a male person in English; it just usually does. (Sex and gender are not interchangeable terms. European languages tend to get hung up on masculine/feminine/neuter, but it could just as easily have been human/animal/food/etc., or long/flat/round/etc., as in other languages.) They, them and their are the closest thing we have to sex-neutral third-person pronouns (if one does not wish to engage in the grammatical acrobatics required to consistently use one), but then there's the prescriptivist idea that those pronouns can only be used as plural forms to deal with. (Shakespeare used them in the singular.)

Agreed. The author here is talking about being offensive and/or insensitive (which is subjective and not related to intent). Hostility is something else.

A better gender-neutral pronoun FAQ: http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/. It compares the alternatives that can be used as a gender-neutral personal pronoun (both words already in common use like "they" and neologisms) and points out the advantages and potential problems of each with a deliberately constructed text (http://www.aetherlumina.com/gnp/faq.html#one).

As a monolingual English speaker, I've always wondered how this works in languages that use gendered pronouns for referring to inanimate objects (French, German, etc.)

Does the classification of nouns into masculine and feminine reflect gender stereotypes at all? Is there a similar movement towards neutral pronouns for all nouns?

No, not for all nouns. But if the noun refers to a person, there are usually two different nouns for each gender and the male form is often used to include females. There are modern attempts to fix this by introducing a new noun (ending) that includes both male and female (or more) genders.

Given that many neologisms are already added to the Oxford English dictionary every year, I don't see any compelling reason why a singular gender neutral pronoun (such as the Spanish "su") cannot simply be created.

Such a word might seem strange at first, but if major broadcasters such as the BBC instructed staff to use it, larger society would soon fall into place – at least in written English.

The point of the article, is that it does exist. It is spelled "they". I happen to agree with (this part) of the article.

In chinese, the pronoun is pronounced as "ta", but written as 他/她/它 depending on male, female, or it meaning.

Thankfully, this is a European innovation of Chinese that we mostly ignore.

The sentence is inaccurate, as the user is not assigned a session ID. Instead, generally the visit is. The user is only the controller of the browser, and hence for the most part doesn't see any of this. You can also get rid of the passive voice and make a stronger statement at the same time. Doing all this reduces the need for any gendered language.

When a user visits the website, the site assigns a session ID to the visit and transmits it in the HTTP response. The user's browser stores this ID.

/pedant (n.b. there is at least one grammatical error in the above pedantry)

"an FAQ" -> "a FAQ"

depends if you say F-A-Q in your head or not. Interesting discussion:

http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1016/do-you-use-a...

Maybe "a FAQ" is sexist, and "an FAQ" is neutral?

I know you are joking, but I find the title consistent with the overall tone of the post. I mean, the writer knows that everyone writes "a FAQ", but he doesn't care, he'll do it the way it should be, the right way, the correct view. in other words, in his way.

In both cases I find an attempt to create an issue where I see none, but then again, that doesn't mean that my view is right either.

I really had no idea that everyone writes "a FAQ". I read it as "eff-aye-cue", so I naturally used "an".

I admit I don't follow the grammar rules (and am not insane enough to think I can force my variations on others). My plan: I try to write a/an based on graphical clues (is the next written letter a vowel or not) and speak using sound clues (is the next phoneme (or whatever you are allowed to call it) vowel like or not). My twinge-worthy moment is the way-over the top British "an 'ospital."

If you expand the acronym, you're saying "a ... questions" though...

Does someone have already heard or said something like "I've been offended by the gender of the documentation of Sendgrid, so I chose to go with Mailgun!" ?

Unrelated to documentation but relevant to your example companies: I specifically went with Mailgun instead of Sendgrid for a small project recently because I remembered how Sendgrid dealt with Donglegate.

The joker in me wonders if now would be an opportunity to become the biggest contributor to GitHub of all time by running a script that changes the pronouns on all repositories.

Nobody can afford to reject such a pull request now...

Or what would happen if we started pestering Linus about including a pronoun check in git by default?

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