Apparently, the issue here is that SE removed a respected moderator but isn't telling the community what happened, why, what the removal process was or will be in the future, etc. Pronouns is what was being discussed at the time, but it doesn't seem to be the high-order bit.
No, it's pronouns. More generally, it's "I expect you to conform with the way I perceive the world, even if it's not the way you perceive it."
The entire point of a pronoun is to convey my perceived relation to the noun. We do it all the time with possessives and formalities; if gender is truly a fluid, to-be-perceived, non-biological construct, then why shouldn't we treat it the same way?
I suspect the reason that some people are so insistent on preferred pronouns, is a backlash against people who insist on misgendering them. They've had to fight for every shred of recognition.
This could have been a complete non-issue if there hadn't been so much stubborn hate and disrespect towards transgender and non-binary people. A single case of misgendering would be easy to take as an honest mistake if it wasn't against a context of decades of hate and denial of their identity. So use of pronouns seems to have become the main signifier of whether they're getting the respect they deserve.
That doesn't make one particular view on the use of pronouns right or wrong, but it does make it complex and laden with a lot of baggage that not everybody is aware of.
I get that, and sort of sympathized at one point. But for one thing, if you're not allowed to avoid the controversy except by not speaking at all, then the hands been overplayed.
Personally, I always try to draw the line from a natural rights approach. If one "right" requires the infringement of the rights of someone else, then it's not really a natural right. If your personal belief requires me to have a certain personal belief, it's not a natural-right, it's a form of religious jihad.
People need to realize that if you aren't "normal" in some way (whether it's a personality quirk, weird hobby, odd fetish, or disability, or whatever) that life isn't guaranteed to be easy, and you're going to need to take certain conversations or commentary with a thick skin. (I know "normal" can be a no-no in this topic, but I mean in general terms, which I think is still appropriate for this context.)
And the "coerced" or "forced speech" approach really doesn't make sense in practice if we're strictly looking at self-identity. If it were strictly about self-identity, we'd still say pro-life and pro-choice, instead of pro-woman and anti-abortion. "Racist" would basically be off limits except for the very small number of people that openly embrace it as a badge. Making any assumption about anyone's outward appearance (or any assumption about the underlying motive of anyone's actions) could land you in trouble with the thought police.
People say 1984 and BNW, but I think the whole thing is...it's very Victorian- just with a different set of taboos and standards. Although with the direction me-too is headed, with people being offended (or even feeling harassed or assaulted) just by being asked-out in (what they perceive to be) an offensive manor, we've almost come full circle.
I mostly agree with you. There's two extremes in this: restricting speech because it's impossible not to offend someone, and intentionally offending someone. I think both are bad. I think the best way forward is a good faith best effort. Try not to misgender someone, but if that means you avoid gendered pronouns in general, and not just to single out transgender people, then that should certainly be fine. And when you get it wrong, correct yourself. At the same time, it's pointless to condemn someone for getting it wrong; mistakes happen. But it would be nice if they're just honest mistakes, and not people intentionally trying to misgender people.
So yeah, we need some balance. You can't expect to never ever get offended, but at the same time, we should be trying to accept people who are different.
The comparison with racists doesn't quite work, as they're defined specifically by not accepting people who are different in a specific way. Of course they'd like to see that normalised, but at the same time they oppose the normalisation of others who are not hurting anyone in any way, and that's something that needs to be called out. But transgender people just want to be themselves, not hurt anyone, and not get hurt by anyone. And I think the reason they overreact is because they get hurt so much. I think you and I would react much the same way if we were constantly under attack merely for being ourselves.
This gave me an aha moment. It's really just an attempt at legislating mortality. But I need to ponder that.
>And when you get it wrong, correct yourself.
This is where I strongly disagree. At most, the compromise is to keep it ambiguous. Otherwise you're putting your personal belief system over mine, and expecting me to modify my outward behavior to accommodate your beliefs (and by defying my own).
Whereas my beliefs would require no outward change in behavior on your part, let alone one that you might find internally immoral. You would just have to be tolerant.
Re: the racist thing. The technical definition doesn't fit the applied use of the term. Most people the left labels racist are at most apathetic, if you leave them out of it. And I don't mean forcing them to treat everyone equally. I mean being accused of racism if you don't actively support whatever political agenda is the flavor of the week.
It's the same forced participation that draws the comparison. And it's counter productive because it fosters resentment.
>they oppose the normalisation of others
This has become some sort of fetishisation, 99% of people being called racist want normalisation through assimilation. There's no personal grudge because a person is different. It's the special treatment being demanded that people have a problem with.
>But transgender people just want to be themselves, not hurt anyone, and not get hurt by anyone.
By demanding that others go against these same principles.
Based on Monica Cellio's blogpost (https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html), I think what happened is that, last year, she posted saying that she prefers, when possible, to refer to people in ways that don't require using pronouns at all. Later, this was misinterpreted to mean that she refused to use people's requested pronouns, and she was fired from her position. That might have been reasonable if she had actually said that, but it sounds like she didn't say anything of the sort.
That makes me think that it's not really about pronouns, it's about people using bad-faith misinterpretation and unjustified accusations to hold a witch-hunt. Pronouns are just the purported subject.
But I'm new to the whole kerfuffle, so I may be missing something.
You're giving them too much credit. She said she'd prefer not using pronouns at all. They said if she avoids using pronouns, she's just as guilty as using the wrong one. Then they fired/de-moded her based on her stated preference, assuming she would not follow the future rules.
They also did this at 6 pm on a Friday. She's Jewish.
> They also did this at 6 pm on a Friday. She's Jewish.
In fairness, there really isn't a good time to fire someone. I would normally think that the end of the work week is one of the least bad times to fire someone.
Agreed, but I'm speaking more to the hypocrisy of being expected to be sensitive to the personal beliefs / self-identity of the person you're addressing. The very principle they "fired" her for.
Edit: Also, even if that's the best time, you should ensure you make personal contact, and not just do the equivalent of a ghosting.
No, I agree. There is a minimum level of etiquette that should be followed when terminating someone, even if it is for cause, and even if they are a volunteer.
> They said if she avoids using pronouns, she's just as guilty as using the wrong one.
People that think like this baffle me
When I refer to people online, I rarely use 'pronouns'. IMO in online communication, it's most clear/neutral to just refer to people by their name or username, e.g. if I'm referring to you I might just say @beerandt. I can't imagine how that could be seen as offensive in any way
Basically yes. Using their own standards, they should have known that she wouldn't be able to receive any notification for at least a day. Not only didn't they discuss it privately with her before taking action, they essentially allowed rumor to spread unanswered for a full day, if not all weekend.
The way she writes about a sharp distinction about a "negative commandment" vs "positive requirement" in the rules here makes it sound like she's really against respecting people's preferred pronouns and looking for a loophole that doesn't require her to do so. I don't have anything against gender-neutral language, but that kind of seemingly-motivated reasoning makes me uncomfortable, and I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of thing made SE think she was looking for loopholes to get out of respecting the CoC.
If it were a common expression of homophobia to to refer to gay people's husbands/wives/boyfriends/girlfriends as their "roommate", SE made a rule against doing that, and a moderator asked if it would be fine if they always referred to the partners by their full names ... I wouldn't really get the impression that the moderator is trying to follow the spirit of the CoC.
Maybe not every user needs to be on board with the spirit of the CoC, but the moderators that are responsible for enforcing it probably should be.
That's what I'm saying. Pronouns (of all types, not just gender) should convey the speakers perception and intent, so there's nothing to keep track of. Think of vous/tu or thou/you. If you have kids, it's the difference between saying to your spouse "our kid drew all by himself" and "your kid drew on the wall".
The pronoun selection conveys meaning perceived by the speaker, and not always the literal categorical noun substitution. But it's for the speaker to decide.
I'll leave you with this. An older gay friend was involved in gay rights stuff back in the 1970's. He said there were two kinds of activists in the organizations. Those that wanted to achieve goals and those that wanted to involve themselves in internecine politics. His experience is the latter win.
There's two ways of reading this. You can read it from a technical perspective and take the message of something along the lines of "Don't invest your ego into unnecessary technical questions because it'll stop you having logical and productive discussions". But if this were written today in the context of something like this SE issue you could read it as tone deaf - a trans-man/women doesn't choose to face discrimination, they don't have a choice over their identity, they merely express their identity, so telling them to "Keep your identity" small is basically akin to saying that they shouldn't express their identity - something that PG as a straight white male doesn't have to worry about.
Disclaimer: It was written in 2009, read in context it's very clear the first interpretation is the correct one, there's an entire concept of identity that didn't exist in the public discussion when this was written.
I see what you mean. I guess perhaps another way of characterizing PG's advice would be to keep your identity as small as possible, but no smaller.
I think it's a pretty good idea to think about how to not be a "Java programmer" or a "kitesurfer" (to pick two things that I could be identified as), since the former sets my brain up to be implicitly against, say, Kotlin or Haskell, and the latter sets my brain up to be against windsurfing. And I like all of those things too!
But certainly, there are things that are core to someone's identity, and I guess that's where each of us needs to find our own boundaries.
Not that I expect this to become universal mores, but wisdom traditions from Buddhism to Deleuze advise us (generally speaking, blurring important distinctions) to have no core identity.
Identity can be a tool and a crutch. My feeling (as someone who identifies as human and has been hanging out/coping with the world for 3-4 decades -- a feeling, informed by a lifetime of good and bad situations) is that identity politics hurts more the identity-assertion people; the opposite faction is merely annoyed.
PG's essays contain a good amount of quote-unquote "real talk". His SJW-isms espoused on Twitter and the like are obviously only superficial, a defense mechanism widely recognized as a necessity among semi-known, substantially-wealthy persons.
This is pretty common amongst business leaders; comparing their statements against their serious work quickly shows that it's not all so warm-and-fuzzy.
Virtue signaling may be its own reward to the masses, but it serves a real function for the well-to-do in preventing or at least confusing a Marie Antoinette effect. If there's any "let them eat cake" to be found, they can point to an abundance of more recent "truth to power" statements that will create enough ambiguity to tamp down the fervor of the mob, if and/or when it comes to that.
Some people would say that "keep your identity small" is functionally (although not in tone or spirit) the same as saying "gay men, stay in the closet" because in the absence of anything saying otherwise, people will assume you're part of the majority.
Furthermore, some people would say that everyone staying in the closet is bad advice for the gay community overall, as it means the average person will only hear about the 1% of gay people who are arrested for sex crimes, not the 99% of gay people who are perfectly nice people living normal lives and minding their own business, or the great scientists and inventors and authors who happened to be gay.
This is, as I understand it, an area of substantial strength of feeling in the gay community - it's part of what underlies concepts like 'gay pride' and the famous chant "we're here, we're queer, we're not going to disappear".
And although I've used gay men in the example above, it applies to any minority group - although with different details, I've never seen a female programmers' pride march!
I'm not gay, but I'm chronically mentally ill. I get (a version of, at least) the whole closet thing.
But here's the nub: the mental illness belongs to some contexts (therapist, friends, intimate relationship) and not others (trying to sell a project to a client).
The part about preferred pronouns feels a little too abstract and counterproductive. This is a personal feeling, coming from a personal interpretation of sources of wisdom. And it's not because it makes other people react in this or that way -- the point is not conquering the Other, you can't do this anyway. It's about how you set about to cope with the world and grow with it; how you deal with your own subjectivity.
Maybe I'm wrong. It's a very different minoritarian perspective.
Because given the prominence of identity as a central cultural debate, this essay comes across as tone deaf. I said it still might be because there's a tendency to judge past works by todays moral standards. For for instance, look at the twitter kerfuffle that ensued when Netflix decided to carry the old television show Friends.
This reads as a blasé swipe at LGBTQ+ attempts to achieve equal rights, societal acceptance, and common decency from others. I'm guessing that's not what you intended?
Disclaimer: I don't have a strong opinion about the specifics of the stackexchange case. Without knowing all of the details, it seems the actions and new policy was a bit extreme and will do more harm than good.
Really?
You got all that from "Keeping your identity small has certainly gone out of fashion"?
How? This is a serious question, I absolutely have no idea how you're getting from point A to B here.
On a topic about pronouns, is "trans identity" not the obvious meaning/aspect of "identity" here? Yes, I know the PG essay. The PG essay is great when applied to not thinking of yourself as a "X programming language developer" so you don't get too caught up in language wars that really don't matter as much as they feel like, but it's pretty offensive to use it to argue against identifying as LGBT.
As far as I can tell, no one is arguing against identifying as LGBT in any of the comments here. Try to be more charitable when reading what other people have to say.
The obvious interpretation of "'Keeping your identity small' has certainly gone out of fashion." in this context seems to me to be "caring about pronouns is a big identity; people should have smaller identities than that".
That's not necessarily saying people shouldn't be trans. The charitable reading [aside below] is that it could be saying that if they're trans, they should still expect to be disrespected and we should be fine with that.
I think that there are respectful ways to make that point. What are the exact limits to how much respect we should be expected to extend to people who defy our preconceptions of society? The line exists somewhere. But that kind of conversation should be approached with care and clarity. To just hint at that point doesn't imply a nuanced view, but implies a general disrespect to a lot of the hard-won acceptance of LGBT people.
Aside: I don't think I'm wrong calling it a charitable reading. Charity doesn't mean I'm going to think endlessly until I find a non-offensive thing it could mean; I'm still going to weight my reading by how I expect most people to have read it. Ultimately I'm publicly arguing against what other people are reading, not the intention that exists privately in the writer's mind. Even if the author just happened to think now was a good time to remind people they should avoid Ruby vs Python holy wars, it's little use for me to read it as that and respond to that if no one else is reading it that way. If people really think the critics' reading (that the critics have explained) is so off-base, there's been plenty of time by now for them and others to elaborate on whatever the intended reading really was.
I'd put it like this:
"Caring about pronouns to the point where you attack someone who, for stylistic reasons, chooses not to use any pronouns at all, on a site dedicated to answering questions from almost entirely anonymous people... is a big identity; people should have smaller identities than that."
You are obscuring the details of the case to make your case and you should be ashamed.
It's not really a good essay though; it's "I'm a rich white dude who never has to think about how politics might affect me and I don't see why anyone else should either."
It'll be here soon enough and it'll be interesting to see how it's handled, especially as the parties pushing for change tend to apply pressure as a group to those in authority (in our tech world, project leaders and moderators, but beyond it's appeals to universities or the media…) and flag/downvote (or worse) against those who show any dissent.
The Opal project's little kerfuffle[0] a while back comes to mind, and the subsequent adoption by several Ruby projects of the Contributor Covenant[1] (of which, it never seems to be applied to its supporters - maybe that's just me being cynical). It convinced me that the best way to go is no code of conduct (I favour the delightfully named NCoC[2]) for most projects.
I can't help but feel that NCoC isn't scaleable. "Let's all be reasonable" is a great strategy when a handful of people are working on something and they are all more interested in getting the job done than talking about it. But it runs straight into the fact that there actually are people - particularly in the open source community that are perfectly willing to shout abuse at other contributors until they quit: https://adtmag.com/blogs/dev-watch/2014/04/linus-torvalds-ra...
I agree. I've had other devs call me all sorts, in public, and it's not nice. One Ruby committer called me an "asshat" on his Twitter feed, simply because he failed to read my pull request properly and then seemed unable to admit it. Weird. One maintainer on another project called me a troll for opening an issue. Recently, I had one of the Rubygems maintainers be rude to me for the heinous crime of… suggesting client side validation in an issue thread! I think they have the Contributor Covenant but it doesn't seem to apply to maintainers. I get this stuff so often now I'm never surprised.
Still, like many things, it's a choice between one bad thing and one worse thing, and these "covenants" and other well-meaning straitjackets have the same old free speech arguments applicable to them - it's not nice to hear people be nasty but it's worse to have some jumped up little authoritarians choose how us plebs should be "nice" while they get free reign to be horrible.
I wonder, has Torvalds ever acted like that to people's faces?
I think the really obvious point is that there is actually a middle way. You don't need authoritarian enforcement of speech, you need communities willing to just step in and say "That's not appropriate". Someone confident and willing to just step into a Torvalds rant and say "Hi Linus, let's step away from the technical issues, this isn't the way you should be communicating your issues". Often here what we're seeing is that these bad acts are actually allowed to continue by the community and only challenged by the people at the receiving end of the attacks.
Ben would you mind then being called she/her then if that is so silly? I'm a hetero woman and I've been called a male few times when gaming and this is not silly, people are rejecting your identity and I can't even imagine how bad this is for trans/NB people.
I run a product/community of teenage game developers. The girls in my community do not want to reveal that they are girls, probably because they do not want to stand out. So basically everyone thinks it's full of boys (especially the boys), but in reality 50% are girls. So it definitely depends on the person and circumstances how they want to be perceived.
With European names, I also saw plenty of times when wrong genders were assumed, but those things shouldn't be taken as malice. It would be weird for an adult to use that a a means for insult, so why not assume it's an honest mistake?
But that's their choice. It was used as an insult in a pretty straight forward way (I was there you know?) and I didn't mean honest mistake of guessing wrongly based on name or nickname. I have experience being told that I can not be a woman because women don't play wow on fridays.. yea or because I'm a programmer. This even wasn't a one time incident.
The same insult doesn't really work on men in that same setting, since we're not really a minority. So we're more armed against someone calling us "she".
But I can imagine it's hard to have to justify yourself every time for being a woman. Yeah that sucks, a lot of jerks out there and not much to do about it.
Some people are. There are people who intentionally use the wrong pronoun, exactly because they reject someone's transgender identity. We cis-gendered people may not notice this, but to transgender people, it is every-day reality to be confronted with someone who insists on denying their identity. Consider the stupid bathroom bills in a couple of US states for example.
So against that background, it's entirely understandable that they react more emotionally also to accidental mistakes. That doesn't mean overreaction is a good idea, but it's a backlash against a long history of having their identity denied. If we don't like the backlash, maybe we should work harder to address the original hatred that it's reacting to.
I don't think the pronoun movement is about people using the wrong gender by mistake, and that's definitely not "rejecting your identity".
I'm male, and sometimes people outside my native country misread my name and read it as the feminine version of it. I've answered phone calls and gone to appointments where people were actually expecting a woman, not a fully grown man. That's people being silly, not rejecting my identity.
But I don't want any part in this discussion, like the OP in the article, I'll keep using "they" to refer to people on the internet.
Could all of this been avoided if SE had a field in user profiles that is basically "Please use the following pronoun when referring to me: _______"? The user could fill this in with She, He, They, Qwotzl, whatever.
You'd need to ask for at least three grammatical cases: nominative, accusative and possessive.
We considered trying this a while back with our organisation's personnel tracker, but concluded it needed a disproportionate amount of user effort. So we abandoned it in favour of just stating the user's name and/or singular "they" everywhere (in line with UK GDS guidelines[1]).
Which is partly why I find the pronoun database at "Pronoun Island" interesting/useful because its a database of most of the common substitute pronouns and almost all of their English grammatical cases.
Though, as you determined singular "they" is a simple enough implementation without needing a database lookup and keeping a pronoun database on hand.
[ETA: It's a small shame this particular DB is AGPL, keeping it from being maximally reuseful as a shareable standard library. Though data is not code and AGPL may not technically apply, but there's no separate data license such as a CC license mentioned in the repo, so one must assume AGPL-like conditions.]
Great resource, thanks! It would be interesting to see more context for each of the entries, such as examples in published work—I certainly noticed they'd incorporated ones used by science fiction authors that I like. Though I understand that such examples may still be quite thin-on-the-ground.
Right? Like, just accept people and call them what they ask to be called? Why make a big deal out of someone who prefers they or xe or he or she or whatever?
more like people cant use Bob in an example and say He because "what if Bob is trans" comes up. cant even say "they" to be neutral because apparently "singular they" is offensive.
this is dumb. its not a real problem for the site. the rest of us dont need to deal with all that because some people have nothing better to do.
I keep seeing this notion that the singular they is offensive. I thought its whole purpose was to be more inclusive. At what point did it become offensive and why is it considered to be offensive?
I was just recently at a gender-inclusivity seminar. The speaker asked everyone in the room to give their name, but specifically asked for NOT everyone to state their [preferred?] pronouns. Why not? Apparently the speaker is currently in a community were certain transgender members feel quite strongly that stating pronouns is itself problematic and hurtful.
For those of us not quite up to date on social movements, and for slow-moving organizations, this is obviously tricky to navigate. My workplace is just starting to encourage everyone to state their "preferred pronouns" prominently when introducing themselves and on all correspondence (e.g. in email signatures), and to avoid gendered pronouns when possible in many situations or at least use "singular they" (e.g. in abstract examples or documentation). Last week I thought that was quite progressive. This week I have learned that "preferred pronouns" is no longer an acceptable phrase, that "singular they" is offensive to some, that avoiding pronouns itself is problematic (at least in SE's CoC, apparently), and that asking someone to give pronouns is problematic and hurtful to some. I don't know where that leaves me or my workplace.
Just do the best you can, try to be respectful of everybody, and be understanding when someone is not unhappy or offended. It's not something that needs to be a fight.
when its getting to the point that its turning into hr classes and laws that get you fired or jailed for being in the 99.9% of the population then yea people should fight back against it all
You obviously shouldn't be (and aren't) getting fired or jailed for being in whatever percentage of the population. But if people are going out of their way to hurt a minority, then something needs to be done to stop it. That's what those laws and HR classes should be addressing.
And if that's the thing you intend to be fighting, then yes, you've got a fight. But this shouldn't be a fight. Respecting people for their differences should be a normal part of being a decent person.
define hurt. you cant just make up rules. people can say whatever they want. its free speech and its important. and are you seriously ignoring all the people who do get fired and jailed? lol wait till it happens to you
i find your comment offensive so youre banned for life from the internet. is that what you want? or should my offense be my own problem? ill let you figure out which one is better
In this context, intentionally denying people their identity. Those bathroom bills that force people to use the wrong bathroom, for example. But anyone who insists on calling a transgender woman "he" or a transgender man "she", even after having been corrected, is intentionally hurting them. It's intentionally being an asshole to someone.
> "you cant just make up rules."
We can do. Hopefully after some careful deliberation, or you end up with stupid rules like those bathroom bills, but yes, rules get made all the time.
That doesn't mean we should legislate everything. We can't and shouldn't. But what should and shouldn't get legislated, or captured in less formal community rules, is an ongoing discussion.
> "and are you seriously ignoring all the people who do get fired and jailed? lol wait till it happens to you"
I'm not. Lots of people are indeed getting fired and jailed for being LBGTQ, belonging to the wrong minority, etc. But nobody is getting fired or jailed for belonging to a demographic that is 99.9% of the population.
> "i find your comment offensive so youre banned for life from the internet."
There's a massive difference between accidentally offending someone, and going out of your way to offend. I'm addressing the latter. If we manage to address that, it becomes easier to assume that the offenses we do experience were not intentional.
It's a unbelievable that we take the output of these seminars as gospel. They are just groups of people - with no more authority on what "proper behavior" is than the rest of us.
...and yet the community that supports them vehemently punishes anyone that strays from their constantly changing and often contradictory directives.
It's not gospel, it's a view. It's useful to understand people who have a different perspective. Their view may not be universal, but it's still a valid view.
It is tricky, yeah. Everyone has their own preferences, and no one set of rules will apply 100% to everyone. And, unfortunately, some people are simply acting in bad faith.
There was a discussion a few days ago about how a few people say that the terms "assigned male/female at birth" should apply only to intersex people and the trans community appropriated them. But if you look into it, you find that the trans community invented those terms, and the people who originated the claim are outspoken transphobes who want to invalidate trans people in any way they can. And there's probably some well-meaning people who were taken by those assholes, unfortunately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21139083
At the end of the day, all you can do is respect people's individual wishes when they express them, and when they don't, go with the consensus and try to extend the benefit of the doubt. Someone who's been hassled and harassed their whole life is gonna be high-strung about some things; you don't need to agree with them, but give them a little slack when you can.
Edit: I'm curious what their rationale for asking people not to state their pronouns was. I can't think of any way that could benefit anyone. Do you recall what they said exactly?
lol civilly? yea 99.99% of people dont have a problem and get along just fine. whats not civil exactly? oh you mean demanding that literally everyone else treat you special? got it.
heres some articles since i think youre being ignorant on purpose:
It's not. People are having a hard time adjusting and overreacting. It's only a problem if you using singular they specifically and only for trans folk, ie singling them out.
Quite literally, Monica said she avoids singular pronouns in general, not just for any particular group or person, because she doesn't feel that singular pronouns are required to moderate a community in most cases. That was the problem that lead to firing her and starting an undercover witch hunt, with SO leaking private chat excerpts and talking to media to bash her.
This isn't about singling anybody out with pronouns.
The problem is a very small minority within the trans community assuming everything is a targeted attack when people are actually just acting naturally, living their lives.
Everyone shouldn’t have to adapt to appease the 0.0001% hyper-sensitive. That’s not a reasonable proposition.
I think the point was that 'singular they is offensive' only when people have specifically asked for certain pronouns (ie you're blatantly disregarding people's requests)?
im not going to write bob and alice and then worry about "well what if these fake people in this example i made up are actually trans" lol give me a break.
Agreed. If you're the author and Alice and Bob are the imaginary characters in your example, then you get to decide their gender.
Same as an author who is writing a novel, is free to invent characters and assign gender, sexual orientation, and any other character traits they want.
It's your story, they are your characters. You decide if it's a he, she, xe, or whatever.
its the same people that are on twitter and then go to work and school and bring this with them. they should be ignored in real life too but nobody wants to deal with the hysterical accusations from the far left
most people on twitter and a lot of the verified people basically police each other for how "woke" they can be with social justice
and if anyone steps out of line against the insane number of rules about who you might slightly offend then you get mobbed and "cancelled" by being called a racist/sexist/bigot/transphobe/nazi and whatever cool word is in use until you lose your job and lifestyle and are permanently branded a terrible person
The other side can view it similar to past bigotry in history. It's unfortunate when people in society don't blend in for the correct pronouns to be used automatically and even more distasteful when other people dismiss the effort of an unfortunate person in trying to liv life without being reminded by others showing no care in the world for the person. In any case I doubt stack exchange will be hurt by this conflict.
