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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.
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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.
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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.
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?"
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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.
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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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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