yea these pronouns affect like 0.01% of people but go ahead and worry about them instead of everyone else and youll ruin every community

when are people gonna figure out that you cant make everyone happy and the people who whine about pronouns wont ever stop

nice downvotes lol, cant handle the truth?

Who else remembers the world before SE, when people just did exactly the same thing as SE, but on mailing lists, and we found answers via web search, and we didn't need all this moderation, categorization, voting, etc?

Stack exchange has had issues from the beginning with absolutely horrible people being mean aggressive and deflective, telling people they are idiots for not providing 110% of available information in their first answer. Moving to close questions as duplicates or irrelevant while the answer still hasn’t resolved anything. The site supported this because it helped promote their “one true answer high on google ranking”-value drive

It’s been an extremely toxic environment, which however was very useful for searching out answers to common questions after the fact.

Now not too long ago I thought from their public communication that they wanted to fix this, or at least make some serious headway towards reducing the toxicity and vile. But no. Instead they decided to hire the assholes and have them be assholes to the community moderators. This time over something as silly as the right to not always actively referring to people in gendered terms.

> That 99-97% of people don't really control their public identity; have you ever seen someone trying to shake a nickname they don't particularly like?

Yes? "Hey, I don't really like being called that." "Oh shit, sorry, didn't know."

> That 99-97% of people don't really control their public identity

What? Sure they do. They were clothing that puts them in a particular group. (Or do you feel you'd have a hard time identifying punks or businessmen?) Or they'll wear religious symbols. Or speak with an accent. Or carry a firearm. Or any number of other external identity markers beyond gender.

> It is complicated and context specific

It really, really isn't. If you are unsure, ask someone their pronouns. If you make a mistake, quickly apologize and move on. Literally end of story.

Yes, if Bob asks you to use they/them pronouns then you should use they/them pronouns for Bob, just like if they ask you to use the name Robert.

Intentionally using the wrong name or pronouns for someone is disrespectful, and would be considered an HR violation in a California workplace.

That number is likely under-reported, and there has been a significant rise in the number of people who feel comfortable identifying in the past few years. A study performed in 2017 found that 2.7% (of roughly 80,000 surveyed) identified as trans or gender non-conforming: https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/14...

I've seen the numbers that range from ~1% (or a little under) to as much as 3%, like the study above.

whos that person then? you wont find a name because its not about specific people. if it was then it would be pretty simple to just use the pronouns when talking to them and there wouldnt be any issue

but this is about editing posts to be gender neutral. why do we need to do that? if YOU dont have a specific pronoun then whats the problem?

Health and Care Utilization of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Youth: A Population-Based Study

Pediatrics Journal

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/14...

Participants included 2168 (2.7%) students who identified as TGNC and 78 761 (97.3%) students who identified as cisgender.

There's a reason I give such a wide range. Maybe I should widen it to 0.5-3%, but I believe that in the past 5 years we've seen an increase in the number of people who feel comfortable with a trans or gender nonconforming identity.

Plus how many of them care about pronouns other than he/she?

yea theres a difference between what you CANT say and what you MUST say

guess what, rules against what you cant say are fine but you cant make me have say something. thats tyranny. youre welcome to be as outraged as you want in your own home but you dont get to control my life because of it. its called freedom.

Just standard anti-trans fear mongering then. If you cannot tell the difference between they/them and your majesty then it's hard to take you seriously. I hope I never have to work in the same team as someone with such poor judgement.

Currently not much. But maybe in the future if someone mentions a man page they will be banned for not calling it a people page

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/07/justin-trudeau...

It's only because the events got out of hand, not because of the action per se. The same person has been doing this for many more cases where it was just fine and this is perfectly clear by the tone of the CTO.

This was an interesting read. If you wrote more of these stories out into a longer blog format I'd totally read it!

So you're telling me there's a dude named Dang out there with an incredible wealth of porn knowledge? That's really cool in the weirdest way and I bet you he can't even tell anyone about it for the rest of his life

Dang, dang.

> if the employee responsible for firing the moderator did such acts repeatedly despite management warnings than perhaps it's a good idea to fire that person

> There are some people who refuse to behave in the best interests of the group, no matter how much direction you give them

I think we agree on this.

If an employee refuses to change behaviour despite multiple warnings he/her is fair game for dismissal. However I think firing someone without prior warnings is abusive unless it's for something criminal or malicious. You can probably guess that I don't care much for at-will employment...

Sara Chipps.

> I’d rather have ten duplicate questions for every question

Sure, unless it really happens. I'd been burned by over-moderation as well but when I look at the process I think it's not arbitrary. There are controls and voting by more than one person. Remember, there is nothing a moderator gains by doing any of this.

when 99.99% people agree then we dont really need new rules

like its pretty simple, use it if someone asks but otherwise just stick with the defaults that everyone understands

This should read 'the pronouns of the binary identity they are now claiming.'

It seems pretty simple to me.

If you don't know what pronoun to use then the correct one is "they", and if you do know then using the wrong one or deliberately going out of your way to avoid one is just rude.

Obviously, lots of answers will flow perfectly naturally without using pronouns and those should be fine like that.

"Don't confine me within your normative definition of 'pronoun'!"

What's the "reddit future" a reference to?

Didn't know that - thanks!

Mods are volunteers, but most mods on SO take their responsibilities very seriously. The terminology that has been used during the last few days has been "firing" rather than "removal of moderation privileges," so I stuck with that.

Monica mentioned in her post that she was the second choice candidate for a community manager position, which is an actual job at SO, but I'm not clear on whether she was actually offered a job and if she accepted. Either way, this indicates she was a fairly active mod if she was being considered for a job.

You might be underestimating how commonly Alice and Bob are used in algorithm explains.

An edge case on the programming sites certainly. But they've grown beyond that.

The site in question deals with religion.

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.

You assume that was an error, based on what?

It is not a mistake when you tell someone you're female and they're saying your not, at least where I come from :)

Even with the quality slipping from the early days I think it's quite remarkable how high the quality is when you consider the distribution of quality of questions that get posted. The low quality review queue on stack overflow is just brutal. Part of what makes it a good resource is that the worst of the questions just don't get seen by many people.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that rolling back to the old CoC would make every LGBTQ+ person feel unvalued. Everyone, regardless of community membership or not (you can probably tell that I'm struggling for appropriate language here), has differing levels of sensitivity to any issue. Some people are glad when others make an effort to do the right thing, others won't be pleased unless their individual needs are met 100%, and some are angry that society is moving in one direction and they can't be openly bigoted anymore.

However, if you're looking at it from a policy perspective, rolling back the CoC or not can be viewed as a signal, which every person is free to interpret as they wish. This is probably going to be dependent on whether you like the changes or not (some LGBTQ+ people have spoken up and said that the changes to the CoC are actually harmful). My interpretation: rolling back the CoC signals that SO wants to go back to a point when the mods were happier, work things out with the mods from there (there are several other complaints the mods have), and that the LGBTQ+ issues take a backseat. Not rolling things back signals that SO wants the LGBTQ+ community to feel valued and included, but tells the mods that their complaints won't be dealt with the way that they want. I don't think it's possible for SO to send the message that everyone is valued equally- even if they say it their actions won't reflect it.

but if you "cut them a little slack" then there is only overflow left

that's why it explodes

I ask questions there because I get good answers quickly. Sometimes I see questions in my field of expertise and I answer them. Which other site should I go to instead to have that?

Can you give an example on how to word a question?

> ... nonsensically-bureaucratic : I ...

Maybe you put a space before a colon, and the eagle-eyed moderator spotted it :-)

(English rarely has a space before a punctuation mark — except for a dash in British usage. Americans—I think—do this.)

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.

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.

http://pronoun.is/

[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.]

On a mod and employee chat group, they were discussing a new future code of conduct. One element said "You must use people's preferred pronouns if given". A mod (volunteer) (Monica) said "Is it OK if I never use any 3rd person singular pronouns?" She got no answer for a while and was then fired as a mod on Friday at 6pm less than 1 hour before before Shabbat and Rosh Hashana (she is Jewish and a mod of the Jewish Stack Exchange). Stack exchange published a note saying she broke the code of conduct. 73 other mods then either resigned or went inactive.

why? its literally the points right here https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2064709.html

see the linked article the other comment posted. its point number 1

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?

Seems like there was a disagreement regarding the use of gender pronouns that resulted in 73 moderators getting "fired" or leaving.

The author of that summary mentioned one thing I found especially egregious, which is a policy that stated avoiding using pronouns was out of alignment. If I understand correctly, when she asked how they would know if she was avoiding pronouns or just naturally not writing them, she was fired. I may have this wrong as I just skimmed the summary. Also it seems she had multiple disagreements on this front before.

Moderator got fired for wanting to not use pronouns at all, because they though preferred pronouns were confusing to non-native English speakers instead of preferred pronouns.

Based on GP's link: Controversy over gender pronouns

Thank you. There is a tendency in tech people to dismiss politics as less than important ("just politics", "just political"). It's a fundamental part of our social fabric.

I love the comments stating "everything is political", is there a book that can convince and help delibrately build better politics?

Politics is how our society has wars. It is vastly less destructive than hot wars but exactly the same as far as being based on what you can get away with rather than what is right or rational.

This essay would be harshly criticized if it was written today. It still might be someday.

I concur. You can see the same thing on HN, if you look closely. For a new or infrequent user, all comment threads are randos talking to other randos. For a frequent commenter who's been here for a while now, it's a community with a lot of transient commenters, but also a lot of regulars, who recognize each other's handles and sometimes carry discussions across time and multiple comment threads - and it's a big part of the value of this place. If HN was to suddenly replace all usernames with their SHA-1 hashes, being here would get much less interesting.

Perhaps my reading of the situation is way off, but at the risk of making a fool of myself:

My understanding is that Monica wanted to use gender neutral pronouns throughout her writing as a general case, but that this was deemed "not good enough" (or indeed hateful) in the cases where someone has chosen specific pronouns. So I suppose this is what the GP is referring to. And I can't argue that it seems like a rather extreme position - although I'm happy to be persuaded otherwise.

It was a matter of one party being insufficiently SJWist for another party. SJWism is a continuum, not a binary.

I've read elsewhere that if a radical lives long enough he'll eventually be chastised for being insufficiently radical. I don't know if it's true, but I for one will find it hilarious in a decade or two when today's SJWs are having to apologise for deriding the idea of human-animal marriage or for opposing lettuce rights in the backwards years of 2019. Or will, anyway, if I haven't died in a re-education camp by then.

You work as an unpaid content author for ycombinator.

Have you ever answered a question on stackoverflow? Or upvoted something? That's the same thing, just to a lesser degree.

Well, it is a pretty hateful way of doing things. I mean, that's how I treat people I hate; shun them, ignore them, not reply to them. So there's an argument there.

I agree though. It seems to me to have more to do with aggrandizing power and influence than with hate. What better way to get rid of competitors than to bait them into behaving "bigoted"? Look at the Monica case. She never refused to use someones chosen pronoun. She was baited into admitting that she already avoids certain ways of addressing people out of kindness and politeness and a desire not to rub people the wrong way. Now she's out. This has nothing to do with bigotry, and everything to do with a group of people that want to kick everybody else off every position of power or influence.

> The question is a duplicate, sure, but the correct answer is now different.

Also, often I see newer and better answers under the 'original' question, but they never get the upvotes or the 'correct answer' badge. Sometimes I completely overlook them because they are just not as visible.

Sounds like they are so important they should have been compensated. I mean, if they were so critical to the success.

The self-promotion is the main thing that makes Quora useful though. If you want to know what are all the startups that have attempted solving problem X, it's usually impossible to get a complete answer without using Quora. Just searching Google / Crunchbase / HN / ProductHunt etc. will miss the last third of startups, that you can only find mentioned in the relevant Quora thread.

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.

> theyre editing posts for perceived or pretend offense

Who are "they"? Monica in that part is upset about people coming along and adding weird grammar into her posts. Those people could be other mods, or could be even regular Stack Exchange users. At no point does she say Stack Exchange staff are editing her posts, or that the editors were following a Stack Exchange rule.

> then you would just use the pronouns and there wouldnt be any issue

Monica has said she never uses 3rd person singular pronouns. So no, she would not "just use the pronouns". And people have taken issue with the fact that she never uses 3rd person singular pronouns, that's the reason she was fired.

> they dont talk about anyone who specifically wanted different pronouns in that story

Just because Monica doesn't mention a specific person by name in the blog post doesn't mean there wasn't a specific person involved with the situation. I think it's very likely the story Monica is talking about involved a specific person.

At least it feels pleasant until a moderator or community manager starts interfering with it.

> Sorry, kids, but investors get stock.

Ironic phrasing, considering that we parents invest insane amounts of time and money into kids. And no, we don't get stock. Not even a percentage of future earnings.

Yet we keep investing more and more anyway. Not all returns are financial.

They invested time and effort with the goal (presumably) of building/maintaining the community. You may think that is a poor decision on their part; but it is still an investment, and they are still volunteers.

As I understood it, Stack Exchange didn't say anything. They just fired her for asking.

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.

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.

Yep - in fact it would make more sense to me if SO not only allowed duplicate questions, but also added a decay such that even highly-rated Q/A pairs would eventually get overtaken by newer content.

Questions and answers just aren't evergreen things that one can expect to last through the ages. And even if they were, treating them as such means that SO's new users generally can't contribute anything.

I find SO's current model really bizarre.

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.

PG has an essay with that title: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html#f2n

uh but using "they" as a neutral way to talk about anyone is just fine. people have been doing that for literally centuries, its called "singular they"

this is all about people wanting to be outraged for no reason

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?

> apparently "singular they" is offensive

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)?

“Bob, a cis heteronormative middle aged white man from Seattle, wants to send a message to Alice, a bicurious housewife from Kentucky”

SO is marvelously designed and I often discuss this with friends and colleagues. First imagine this: Experts who are often paid big dollars per hour are coming over and spending time in answering your questions for no apparent reason. The quality of content is very high when you compare with any other Q&A or even general social media website. I often find 50% of my programming answers at SO. If there is an accepted highly voted answer for a technical question, I would probably have better than 80% of chance that it works for me. I have saved enormous amount of time because of SO. It has accelerated my learning by 2X or 3X on specific language or framework. In many ways, general productivity of developers and in some cases their entire professional careers hinges on quality and content of SO. Now think about it: Why these highly paid people coming over to answer your questions? Why SO has not already became trash like many of its other predecessors and contemporaries? What is the magic resisting power it has?

The answer lies in its magnificent design. SO has community based voting for almost everything. Almost everything is gamified. There are people literally writing essays on why everyone should vote them to be an "officer" for X and how they will work hard on keeping quality bar high. There is an extra-ordinary passion in what they do. Its HN on steroids but with much better mechanics. It is almost completely decentralized and operates without needing people blessed with special dictatorial powers 99.9% of the times. Again, lot of these volunteers are highly paid IT/tech folks, not your ordinary 8chan Joe. They could have been doing anything else in their free time instead of technical answering questions at SO. This is much harder than dishing out fact-free opinions on non-technical websites as armchair expert. Again, no one gets paid for anything they do on SO. This is the beauty of gamification and extremely well designed community driven completely decentralized governance at its extreme. Its almost magical to me and I haven't found any other website on Internet achieve it at same scale and importance.

I get misgendered all the time! I go by "Ruvi" (short for Reuven) and English readers see that as a female name. So on forums I get called "she".

It's never bothered me.

Btw that cisgender community you speak of doesn't exist, right? You just made that up.

Got a link to the friends issues?

Google isn't turning up anything. What was the issue with Friends?

As someone who answers quite a few quesitons on SO I'd really like to see posts that were perceived as wrongfully closed to see if I agree (haha) and also to see how to fix the system.

Of course I have no hope that S.O. will change anything. When they started their "be nice" campaign I suggested the "CLOSED: This is a duplicate" message should be changed to "CONGRATS: This appears to be a duplicates so you win! There is already an answer [here]!"

In any case there are rules. One is "post the code you're having trouble with in the question, not a link offsite." The offsite link is useless if the code changes there or the offsite site goes offline. Some not insignificant percent of the time the question will just have a link to offsite code. I'll leave a comment saying effectively, "please add the code to the question" and then I vote to close, reason "missing code". The person never adds the code. Are they like you claiming S.O. is rude and unreasonable? Did they get their answer somewhere else and never come back to follow up? I have no idea.

Actually the rule is even more specific. "Make a minimal repo and post it the question itself". Almost no one makes a remotely minimal repo which is fine, but in general lots of people fail at the "repo" part period. In order to help them we'd need to download code, setup dev environments, make up test data, etc...."

What I do know is I often spend 30 to 240 minutes writing working examples for a single answer. I do that volunteerily for reasonable questions. When someone barfs out a "give me teh codez" question it can be very angering. They're basically asking for free labor. If that's not rude I don't know what is.

Here's a recent "give me free labor" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58206647/removing-the-ba...

Here's a recent "teach me an entire CS course" question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58165198/how-to-process-...

And here's an answer I spent over 150 minutes on, trying to understand their code, trying to make a working sample, running into bugs, when I looked up 2.5 hours had passed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58101753/drawing-a-torus...

And another more typical 30 minutes on this one

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58111380/in-webgl-the-pe...

note I'm not trying to brag. I hear your complaint often. I just don't run into it myself. Instead I see lots of volunteers answering questions and only voting to close the bad ones and they are bad ones.

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.

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.

> if gender is truly a fluid, to-be-perceived, non-biological construct, then why shouldn't we treat it the same way?

Because no one sane can keep up outside of a small personal group of friends.

I suppose if your profile on StackOverflow is high enough you could put it on your cv.

SO also has a jobs site, which I suppose can be linked to your profile if you want it to.

A company I consulted at one time was trying to improve it's profile for job applicants so they wanted people to put up their github profiles and SO profiles in some advertisements or whatever they were doing - I think it was on linkedIn they were doing this. Anyway I think they stopped because nobody had a particularly high impressive number so why would you even want to do that (but they did it)

yes, if you do freelancing

Maybe create an ICO for these points?

Sorry, I edited my comment so your reply makes less sense now. Bad habit of submitting before I'm fully satisfied with the comment.

this article was posted here a while back:

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

I thought it was quite interesting.

> No, not everything is political

Name literally anything and I will point out its political implications.

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.

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.

You can't "force" people to say things, but it's still a problem when people are deliberately insulting, obviously.

I don't get it either.

I can see a case where trolls could abuse it, but that shouldn't preclude well-intentioned use.

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.

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.

In theory yes, in reality it just serves to surface the duplicates that aren’t duplicates of the question at all.

In the absolute ideal these questions would be answered instead of closed as dupe but right now it just means following a trail of dupes and closures to maybe find the answer before giving up and going back to the search results.

Instead of that, give the user the wrong answer straight away so they can just back up one to the search to continue digging

> ["They"] is common to hear, just as ["He"]

> Many will mix between the "he/she" and "they" in the same conversation.

That does not match my observed reality at all. All natural languages I know are gendered the same way English is.

Singular "they" is already exceedingly uncommon by itself; and across all the languages, and in my whole life-time, never once I or a conversation partner used "they" instead of the specialised pronoun, or mixed in a conversation, when the gender of the person in question is explicitly known as GP wrote. The same is true for all written material I read in my whole life.

> "Where's Dave?" > "They're in the garage, I think"

I am born and raised US, have lived all over west coast and midwest, and have traveled extensively throughout all regions of US. I have never heard people use the singular they in this pattern.

Where are you from? Wondering if perhaps it is a regional dialect difference.

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.

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 certainly haven't been keeping up with Twitter culture if you think this.

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

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

> "define hurt."

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.