It’s like making it illegal to not greet your neighbor each morning. The underlying premise is to make things nicer, but it’s also just stupid. A good rule would be “try to be considerate of pronoun preferences”.
The wants of the LGBTQA community are, in the eyes of the majority, probably not this. I like to be polite and respectful. I’ll be honest though, I would guess that less than 0.1% of the English speaking population identifies as “Xir” and that a non trivial portion of those that do are comfortable with the understanding that random strangers are more comfortable using gender neutral language. I would further posit that the portion of those that are not ok with people having points of view favoring even gender neutral language and instead demand the usage of the term Xir have adopted it as a counter cultural stance to combat heteronormativity- which honestly is fine, but it’s also a move made knowingly to make some people uncomfortable which by any metric must be ruder than someone who is just trying to avoid controversy at all by using gender neutral pronouns to begin with. I’m a left leaning adult, and I think it’s pretty bullshit. Especially on the Internet where women have been assumed to be men by default for decades.
If I misgender someone, and they ask me to use any specific pronoun in the future, I probably will. If the responder instead gets angry and implies that I am rude because I made a common assumption, and instead asserts that I’m going to tell them to buzz off.
Rudeness is clearly a subjective concept based around intent. And it’s frankly a waste of people’s time.
Imagine if every post had pronouns at the end, and if every man then demanded a correction for a use of they instead of “he”. That would be a waste of time and disrespectful to the ability of everyone else to be an adult.
Are you suggesting that basic decency wasn't a thing on SO/SE before? I can count the number of rude interactions I've witnessed on two hands, and all of them were either people being angry about their shitty questions being flagged or fundamental disagreements over how software development should be done.
This wasn't a significant problem for the community as a whole. Certainly, any individual might be hurt when it happens, but let's keep some perspective. I've also not heard anything about mods not being able to deal with instances when it happened. There were people trying to be within an inch of the rules (on other issues, I've never seen gender being an issue at all), and they were all easily dealt with because SO never claimed to apply any rules by the letter only.
Granted, I'm speaking for the technical sites, law.se or pets.se may be terrible places, but I doubt it. Where did you witness that lack of basic decency?
throwaway66920|6 years ago
The wants of the LGBTQA community are, in the eyes of the majority, probably not this. I like to be polite and respectful. I’ll be honest though, I would guess that less than 0.1% of the English speaking population identifies as “Xir” and that a non trivial portion of those that do are comfortable with the understanding that random strangers are more comfortable using gender neutral language. I would further posit that the portion of those that are not ok with people having points of view favoring even gender neutral language and instead demand the usage of the term Xir have adopted it as a counter cultural stance to combat heteronormativity- which honestly is fine, but it’s also a move made knowingly to make some people uncomfortable which by any metric must be ruder than someone who is just trying to avoid controversy at all by using gender neutral pronouns to begin with. I’m a left leaning adult, and I think it’s pretty bullshit. Especially on the Internet where women have been assumed to be men by default for decades.
If I misgender someone, and they ask me to use any specific pronoun in the future, I probably will. If the responder instead gets angry and implies that I am rude because I made a common assumption, and instead asserts that I’m going to tell them to buzz off.
Rudeness is clearly a subjective concept based around intent. And it’s frankly a waste of people’s time.
Imagine if every post had pronouns at the end, and if every man then demanded a correction for a use of they instead of “he”. That would be a waste of time and disrespectful to the ability of everyone else to be an adult.
luckylion|6 years ago
This wasn't a significant problem for the community as a whole. Certainly, any individual might be hurt when it happens, but let's keep some perspective. I've also not heard anything about mods not being able to deal with instances when it happened. There were people trying to be within an inch of the rules (on other issues, I've never seen gender being an issue at all), and they were all easily dealt with because SO never claimed to apply any rules by the letter only.
Granted, I'm speaking for the technical sites, law.se or pets.se may be terrible places, but I doubt it. Where did you witness that lack of basic decency?
zzzcpan|6 years ago
wetpaws|6 years ago