Found this blog post and found it had more insight into the issues around the dev and the toxicity in FOSS
Calling an unspecified gender person anything other than “they” was until recently considered to be incorrect. “They” is plural but now is used to refer to singlar persons because writing “he or she” everywhere is too much. Calling a user “he” does not imply that users are male or can only be male. Not using “they” or “he/she” or obscure gender neutral pronouns does not make something inherently transphobic. Closing PRs that unnecessarily change pronouns as spam is not inherently transphobic, but the accompanying comment is not very inclusive.
The post talks about “white suppremacist language,” but the proposed change did not remove white suppremacist language. It was just a generic anti “woke” message, possibly motivated by people brigading after the original PR to change “he” to “they.” White suppremacists may use also use similar language, but you can’t just pick things that a white suppremacist has done and decide that anyone else who does the same is a white suppremacist. He’s not blameless, but people are intentionally provoking the developer and exagerating the responses for drama.
until recently
TIL 600 years ago is recent!
Singular “they” is older than singular “you.” And note, of course, that the pronoun “you” is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.
until recently
the first known written appearance of singular “they” is so old that it was still spelled with the thorn (þei)
I love þis fact
Are we really complaining about gendered pronouns in source code notes for a web browser?
Is that what we are doing?
There are mountains of bigger fish to fry, y’all. Social change doesn’t happen overnight. It can take decades or longer.
Widespread language changes have historically taken decades or even centuries to occur.
Ask any woman or person of color over the age of 50 about the CONSTANT slights or worse endured every day for most of their lives for some perspective.
Fight the good fight, absolutely, but this isn’t worth getting angry over - at least not from what I’ve read so far.
To be clear we aren’t complaining about the existence of the gendered language. We are complaining that the maintainer has repeatedly rejected friendly contributions which would fix the gendered language, under the premise that it is ToO pOLItIcAl, instead of just merging the very obvious improvement and moving on with life.
CONSTANT slights or worse endured every day for most of their lives for some perspective.
This is part of those constant slights. How can you simultaneously gesture toward the issue at hand and say that its not worth working on?
while you might be right some things are more important. why is your comment not directed to people actively blocking these changes? why not just agree to them and move on with these “more important things”. the PR was submitted. the effort had been done already. blocking it is an statement on its own.
What’s more, it’s attaching strongly negative feelings to a positive change. As a result, it’s driving the wedge down the middle of our society as deep as it can possibly go.
You catch more flies with honey, and you can also use it to heal wounds.
Unless you’re talking fruit flies, you actually catch more of those with vinegar. They love the stuff.
Yeah, can’t say I really care about this, this seems like a bit of a nothing burger.
It does seem to me that complaining about gendered language in source code is about as stupid as a moral panic over daemons in systemd, or vulgarities in source code comments. There is some place for it… but not much
On top of that, ‘he’/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time. I understand the desire to change that, but it’s still a normal thing in English language. Similar to ‘master’ in git repositories and IDE connections, though those are both much more recent and arguably referencing much worse.
If a dev insists on ‘she’ everywhere, or ‘they’ in places that read awkwardly, should we flame and blame? In fact, why not go and convince Firefox to use exclusively feminine language in their source, to balance things out. It sounds more sensible than taking up a political fight over this!
Also while you’re at it, ethical hacking is now done only by natural-human-skin-colour-hat hackers; background process on your computer are called abstract beings; your computer does not boot[strap], (‘pull itself up by its bootstraps’), it has affirmative action from the motherboard to get it started; and when I saw the article headline, I thought the issue would be bigger … that’s what they said.
On top of that, ‘he’/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time
I understand the desire to change that, but it’s still a normal thing in English language.
So is singular ‘they’.
The rest of your post is just a slippery slope argument.
Appeal to tradition bias?
Yes. Turns out languages work by saying things the same way somebody else said them before.
My point isn’t that there can’t be a reason to change. My point is calling ‘he’ out as implying misogyny on the part of the author is ridiculous, and fussing over changing it is, in this situation, in my opinion, petty.
So is singular ‘they’.
Indeed. Some English contexts are used to defaulting to ‘he’ for ungendered animate; some to ‘they’. Neither necessitates an egregious humanitarian wrong.
The rest of your post is just a slippery slope argument.
I did get facetious toward the end. If you like, you don’t have to build your life philosophy on the foundation of the logical integrity of my closing paragraph. Up to you.
This reads eerily close to reverse-ism. Please don’t do that.
I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.
Your last two paragraphs, especially the last one, feel eerily close to reverse-ism.
“Reverse-ism” usually refers to “reverse discrimination”. It’s a big trope in far-right circles and ties directly to the “Great replacement” theory.
It’s unclear what your intentions were when you said this but it felt weird.
The last paragraph was just facetious, to make the point that correcting potentially-discriminating terms can be overdone.
And the previous, also a bit tongue in cheek, but since I’m contending that it’s petty to fight over the Ladybird dev’s use of ‘he’ as default pronoun, I was essentially supporting other options as a sort of faux balance. If ‘he’ were truly inappropriate here, balancing it with ‘she’ in another project wouldn’t make it okay again. But if it’s just not that big of a deal, except for a dominant bias, then adding diversity elsewhere perhaps settles things a bit, and allows those who feel marginalized to asset themselves.
Neither is a solid answer! If you don’t agree with me that the bickering over that source code is overblown, fair enough, you can disagree. But I think my point stands.
By calling reverse discrimination a far-right trope, I presume you mean complaints about reverse discrimination? Or an argument that reverse discrimination solves the problem? (Though I thought that latter was more argued by the Left, under the term ‘positive discrimination’.)
Either way I don’t think that’s what I meant.
Right, I might’ve been more confused with your previous to last paragraph because using she/her pronoun as ‘default’ was and is a genuine feminist practice in French where gender neutrality is more difficult.
Anyhow, I would recommend not arguing your points like that - it just kinda smells like bad faith argumentation.
By calling reverse discrimination a far-right trope, I presume you mean complaints about reverse discrimination?
Yes, that would be correct. It’s the basis of the Great replacement theory.
Hey, this isn’t me.
its already been solvedddddd plus a lot of the people annoyed or mad about it really arent being nice (the one trans woman one was spam) was just non native English language issue not a discriminatory policy (how u go from pronouns to being white surpremisist idk) can we save vitriol for actually bad people an not small mistakes (even if is done by a maybe-conservativ) pls
And then another, where a trans woman is called “spam.”
Pretty clear they meant the PR was spam, not the person.
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And how’s this sjw noise related to free and open source software?
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What the fuck did I just read? You Amerifags are just lost.
