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.
‘They’ has always existed in the English language as plural or singular, context dependent. Hence it’s natural transition into a pronoun. Non-native English speakers can be excused for using gendered pronouns because the problem isn’t them not knowing and using it in the first place, it’s them refusing to update the language after a reasonable explanation to do so.
People are brigading, sure, but it’s such a simple change to make, one that only helps the world. So, yeah, fuck the devs honestly. Just accept the PR and move on, there was no need for any of this.
Well, not always: Plural ‘they’ is a borrowing from Old Norse ca. 1200 AD, and the earliest attestation of singular ‘they’ is about a century later.
But, yeah, you’d think 700 years of continuous use would be enough to make it uncontroversial…
They will come with any bullshit argument to try and defend their anti-human opinions.
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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.
“You” was both singular and plural throughout the history of Middle English. Singular “they” emerged in Late Middle English around the 14th century.
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
also in that regard, there are languages (swedish, and my native language german are among them) with a grammatical gender to nouns. Coming then from a language like that to a language where everything is the, you really need to think twice which pronoun is to be used.
Sure, but does that also cover accusing someone of inserting their politics into things when they suggest a change? Especially one that has nothing to do with politics at all?
As I said in the other thread regarding this topic. The initial MR changed one he to they while ignoring other glaring issues in that very same file. That MR was less than half assed which makes me wonder what the actual motivation behind that MR was.
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?
Compassion is not a zero-sum game. We do not have to reserve our capacity to care about issues only to issues that affect people we think are deserving.
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.
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.
This is such a weird thing for the dev to decide to die on. I understand, although i don’t agree, with the “there are TWO genders” issue, and the desire for folks who are in that genre of people to avoid the whole thing, perhaps even forcefully. I don’t understand why including women, one of the two genders they do approve of, is considered overly “political”. How dare someone suggest girls might like tech? Ridiculous! I almost get the first instance, as a mistaken attempt to not support trans folks (which, again, is stupid anyway) but the constant rejection means they are CLEARLY just misogynists.
To be fair, it’s also kinda dumb to point out something as an issue when it clearly wasnt, and saying “assuming the user/developer if the OS is a male” means that the person complaining is assuming that this dev was assuming something because he used the word he.
The issue was that the person decided that it bothered them so much that they needed to ask the dev to change it.
This has idiots on both sides written all over. Why is that person being nitpicky over something so stupid. Women use she/her in their writing all the time, just like men use he/him, and people with other pronouns are more likely to use what is familiar to them such as they/them.
I say this as someone with a child that has been reading books to them and noticed that an authors gender and the pronouns they use seem to correlate more often than not. Unless the book focuses on topics of or relating to understanding and accepting the differences in people. Both people are dumb in this scenario.
Edit: let me put things into a perspective that maybe some of you can understand. Let’s take anything related to gender or being PC out of the equation.
I ask you to make a change to your documentation because I don’t like the way you said something, then accuse you of being or believing a certain kind of way because of the grammar you used.
That is what this person did.
Now let’s assume (yeah I said it) for the sake of my argument that the person doesn’t feel any kind of way about the thing that they were accused of being. I’m pretty sure that person might just take offence to that. Which in this case is exactly what happened.
Had there just been a change that said something along the lines of just a simple grammatical correction. It probably would have be pushed and ignored.
In this case the dev definitely seemed like an ass, but that’s not the point. The point is the whole fucking situation is stupid.
They didn’t just ask the dev to change it, they submitted a pr that would’ve fixed it. All the maintainer had to do is click merge
The maintainer was the one that brought politics into it!
I understand that, but the whole point behind it was them making an assumption about something and proposing a change because they didn’t like their term that the dev used. Yet there was LITERALLY nothing wrong with the term.
The guy definitely made an ass of himself with his responses.
Like I said, both of them are idiots over this. It was pointless to make an issue out of it to begin with, and then then the dev making it even worse didn’t help.
I understand that
I’m not convinced
I understand
No, no clearly don’t.
You seem very, very sure of there being “LITERALLY” no problem with the gendered pronoun being used for an unknown user.
Instead of hand-waving it away as the author being male and just prefering his own pronouns in his writing, we could maybe consider where it is being written and why it might feel particularly non-inclusive? ie: a field that has historically been very intentionally uninviting to women?
Also, it’s not like this was someone petitioning for a boycott over one assumed pronoun, they just quietly fixed the grammar and submitted the change. Absolutely nothing idiotic about it.
There literally wasn’t a problem.
Until the person that asked for the correction literally assumed that said dev was assuming. Since thats what they said in their comment.
So I can understand being a little pissy at someone pointing to you and accusing you of assuming something. It’s stupid.
I may have been a little irritated too if someone accused me of assuming something. I wouldn’t have reacted the same, but I would have been clear that I in no way assume anything related to gender identity.
If the person wouldn’t have put that assumption into their comment, the change may have been more likely to happen.
Instead they assumed something and got push back which turned into the scene we see now.
Ass u me… I mean it’s pretty clear.
Ah OK, I think we’re getting to the heart of why you are saying that this wasn’t an issue.
When you say that the author wasn’t assuming anything, what exactly do you mean? If, for example, I write in a guide that if a user of my software does ‘a’ then he can expect result ‘b’, do you disagree that I am assuming my users go by he/him pronouns?
I might not have done it with intention, but there is an assumption being made there. Words mean things.
Exactly this.
Just because you wrote your documentation a certain way, doesn’t automatically mean that you feel a certain way about any particular group, or that your users are primarily a certain gender. It may just be writing what pronoun you are most familiar with.
In this particular case, we can see that the author didn’t exactly make the best case for himself.
However, there was never a problem to begin with until the person that requested the change also accused the the author of assuming that the user/dev of the OS is male.
If that little bit of accusation would have been left out, and they just put a note like “grammatical correction” it may have just been accepted and moved on. Instead they asked for a change while accusing the author of feeling a certain way.
As an outside observer, who is a male which is important for this sentence, if something said “if a user of my software does ‘a’ then she can expect result ‘b’,” I wouldn’t assume I couldn’t use the software, I wouldn’t be mad about the gendered pronoun, I wouldn’t assume anything about the author, I’d say “cool so if I do A I can expect result B.” I don’t think I’d even give it a second glance, at best/worst I’d think “oh neat I wonder if the devs are women” and move on with installing the thing.
the whole point behind it was them making an assumption about something
What makes you think the change suggesters assumed ill intent?
The submitted PRs seem to reason improvement, not accuse the original author. I see them suggesting a change, neutrally. With (minimal) objective reasoning.
/edit: I see the later ones did. But the first one didn’t. And the second one arguably didn’t.
Look… I certainly (particularly verbally) will probably use “he” a lot more than I should… And no one cares.
But if someone makes a PR changing these into “they”, I would reply with “shit, you’re right, this is objectively better, thanks for your work”.
Instead, these contributors get their PR shut down with the most terrible, supremacist excuse. That’s the problem. There’s the true idiot.
Obviously. It was a nice small PR to fix a typo and a pronoun in a readme file. This is the kind of change where you just press Accept, Merge, and go on with your life.
I don’t think it’s “kinda dumb” to point out the issue all, unless you’re an insufferable twatwaffle like 90% of the fucking STEM community in 2024, who can never be wrong or challenged.
Like, I’d consider myself pretty progressive, maybe even “woke” if that still has any meaning left, and even I might have just used male pronouns because I myself am male;’not for malicious reasons but just because I wasn’t thinking in that moment.
But if I was like “oh yeah, that makes sense, and cool you even did the work of fixing it for me! Merged.” and went about my day, no one would have brigaded me, no one would have posted it all over socials, there wouldn’t be blogs and articles, and I’d probably have a leg to stand on if anyone still wanted to make a big deal.
The way this dude reacted was a self-report. The community was right to push back, even if some people ended up taking it too far.
The original text had ‘he’ where ‘it’ was correct. Which supports part of your premise.
They also merged a change request that changed those instances alongside ‘they’ instances. I don’t know if the original author and denier was involved, but it’s certainly important context missing from OP blog post.
The guy is German, and the German language traditionally uses generic masculine pronouns, although that has become a big political issue in the past years. Some new gender-neutral forms have developed, but some of them have even been banned by the “center”-right-wing clowns in two state governments, and it’s all a bit of a mess. The guy probably thoght “they” in English is a similarly experimental concept, and while it’s still dumb and he should just try to be as inclusive as possible, it’s probably not a matter of him purposefully excluding women from the documentation.
That makes more sense i guess, although even with that context as you said, it is still dumb. It’s political in the US as well to use non gendered pronouns. It’s generally aimed at hurting trans folks more than anything or anyone else. I could see the first time having it be a flippant meh response, but multiple times? Having had it explained clearly? Someone else has however said it has been fixed now. People can change, so my current plan is to assume things are better, cautiously, and hope they continue on a more pleasant path.
I wrote elsewhere that based on everything I read about gender the logical conclusion is that there are only two genders. Male and political.
This whole thing has jilted-lover vibes. There is no other reasonable explanation for dredging up a three-year-old PR denial than simply shit-stirring for the sake of trying to embarrass or hurt the dev in some way. It reeks of simple childish revenge.
Except there’s recent examples, and it’s in the docs (On the “ideologically motivated changes” point at the end), this is established
Great gods. They did as asked, but they weren’t sorry enough? I don’t even know what the complaint is. I’m obviously not the only one.
Political correctness makes my teeth hurt.
Yeah im super left-wing but this situation just stinks
Same here and agreed. I deeply believe that people deserve equal respect and recognition no matter what form their genitalia takes. This situation is not about respect or recognition. It’s either a personal vendetta or the Eternally Offended and Perpetually Outraged cadre went digging for a new target. Either way, what’s happened here over the past couple of days is wrong.
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There have been many improvements in making documentation more inclusive across the IT industry which shouldn’t be scoffed at. The first that comes to mind is changing “master” and “slave” to “primary” and “secondary” (or “replica” etc.) because references to slavery is inconsiderate to many.
I don’t think pile-ons are productive, but I think inclusive language and thinking is important.
You must construct additional pile-ons.
I know. I just put it there for those readers not necessarily in the know.
And I specifically thank you for it. I didn’t know there was a meta reference going on. Upvoted @[email protected] for excellent joke craft on account of it
Ah gotcha I thought you were correcting my spelling haha. My mistake!
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How about when there are folks who have been harmed by people with agendas?
They’d prefer their code or commentary to be inclusive, not exclusive?
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make
Imagine you have been purposefully targeted for harassment or excluded from activities in the past due to your preferred pronouns or perceived gender. Seeing “he” with that context would likely feel excluding, which is a reason someone without an ‘agenda’ would want to see it changed.
someone … would want to see it changed
So, by definition, “someone” has their own agenda.
It’s worth understanding that “agenda” has a negative connotation. In this context, it’s used as a dogwhistle against women and queer people.
By definition, an agenda is “a program of things to be done or considered” which does not equate to wanting to do something. It more closely resembles a daily planner or task list.
So in as much as you and I have an “agenda” when we get out of bed, you are right, the person submitting the PR did likely have an agenda of waking up and going about their day. There isn’t a ‘woke agenda’ at play here, however, as the person I replied to seemed to imply.
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
can we save vitriol for actually bad people an not small mistakes (even if is done by a maybe-conservativ) pls
yeah that would be best.
Edit: in regards to vitriol: don’t be like https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648 LiEnby in that thread after the code was merged. It makes us all look stupid and hateful.
It makes us all look stupid and hateful.
I’d argue that it does a lot more than make people just look hateful. Plenty of assholes out there using progressive causes as justification and shielding for their poor behavior.
The dev could have avoided this easily by merging the original PR and moving on with their life, but there is negative reason for the dogpiling that occurred. It’s open fucking source. Fork it and make your own inclusive competitor.
The behavior of the community around this is reprehensible, and is the perfect ammunition for opportunists looking to draw people into right wing radicalism. “Look at what they did to someone for using he instead of they! Imagine what will happen if we let these people have any real power?”
TIL GitHub doesn’t appear to have a “Block User” function.
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.
Your entire comment is argument from fallacy. Lol
I thought they gave a pretty good rebuttal in regards to the singular ‘they’. Just because they mentioned a fallacy in the begging doesn’t mean it’s an argument from fallacy.
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.
Yeah, can’t say I really care about this, this seems like a bit of a nothing burger.
It is. Both SerenityOS and Ladybird are courageous projects, easy target for this drama.
@drwankingstein @Luci agreed
in the end they actually fixed their documentation:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/commit/a2a6bc534868773b9320ec3ca7399283cf7a375b
this was the original commit by king that brought this into existence: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/commit/ec91d2eb9febafd82de3b30bd76fb621f3da5026 4 years ago.
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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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