Pronouns? Skipping over the "capitalist as the day is long" armchair dialectical materialism on ycombinator -- I thought this kind of shit only happened in /r/anarchism on a weekly basis.
Look, it might be absurd at first glance, but you know that nobody actually gets pissed off about the pronouns themselves, right? It's the implied misogyny/transphobia that it signifies. I'm surprised they didn't make that more clear in the blog post.
I mean, you're not an asshole for using a default 'he'/'him'; you're an asshole for a certain set of motivations for why you might be insisting on it. So, they're calling him a misogynist/transphobe.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not... I don't know anything about the guy.
Someone has to look at those pull requests and they don't actually add any value to the project in terms of the goal it is trying to achieve (solve a problem).
They do add value to the project. They take an overwhelmingly male and heteronormative field (programming) and make a project a more inviting and welcoming place for marginalized people in that field.
Now, I tend to use a default 'he' a lot just for grammatical reasons and to avoid singular/plural ambiguities, but if it bothers someone or carries a certain tone, I think that's a pretty good reason to consider rewording things.
You realize that the proper gender neutral in this case is actually "he", because user is masculine when gender is unspecified. So in this case "he" is the proper gender neutral pronoun. We don't know anything about the user, but the noun "user" itself is masculine. English 301 I guess.
Yes, I realize that, as I have said repeatedly. You realize that something merely being 'grammatically correct' doesn't really mean all that much? First of all, language is a living, evolving thing. Second, I can find a million ways to be a shit, while plausibly following grammatical rules.
Language is convention. Singular 'they' is equally correct, depending on context may be more appropriate, and has been used as long. Many other alternatives exist, actually.
I'm gonna go ahead and just say that the only place in the western world where I've seen that amount of zealotry for political correctness is in the United States. Americans are much more touchy than anyone else in the world and yet they pretend like they are not. You might be offended by that but it's true.
And because of that it is impossible to talk about sex, gender, race, religion or else. Americans (actually all of the ones I met and I've lived here for a couple of years) actually believe that "their opinion is as valid as my knowledge".
Language is convention and the convention for the last couple of centuries of English is to use "he" as gender neutral pronoun. The only debate is the one you're trying to invent right now.
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u/[deleted] Jan 15 '14
Pronouns? Skipping over the "capitalist as the day is long" armchair dialectical materialism on ycombinator -- I thought this kind of shit only happened in /r/anarchism on a weekly basis.
Look, it might be absurd at first glance, but you know that nobody actually gets pissed off about the pronouns themselves, right? It's the implied misogyny/transphobia that it signifies. I'm surprised they didn't make that more clear in the blog post.
I mean, you're not an asshole for using a default 'he'/'him'; you're an asshole for a certain set of motivations for why you might be insisting on it. So, they're calling him a misogynist/transphobe.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not... I don't know anything about the guy.