Free and Open Source Software

'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.

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.

until recently

the first known written appearance of singular "they" is so old that it was still spelled with the thorn (þei)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wrote elsewhere that based on everything I read about gender the logical conclusion is that there are only two genders. Male and political.

Except there's recent examples, and it's in the docs (On the "ideologically motivated changes" point at the end), this is established

You must construct additional pile-ons.

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.

On top of that, ‘he’/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time

Appeal to tradition bias

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.

It is. Both SerenityOS and Ladybird are courageous projects, easy target for this drama.