Comment by vdqtp3
6 hours ago
> If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.
It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.
Sure, but why would I go out of my way to use gender neutral pronouns like "they" when they can just tell me their preferred pronouns?
It's only "out of your way" if you never learned to write gender neutral from the ground up.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the default in many Commonwealth locales to not assume that (say) Rob Owens writing mathematics and engineering papers was male (as it turns out, she isn't, the Rob is short for Robyn).
So much correspondence was with people who had Initial Surname or abstract handles that didn't broadcast gender.
But if someone has the ability to broadcast their preferred pronouns and we built that in, and it costs nothing, then what's the problem?
I guess I'm just not really understanding people getting upset at what I perceive to be completely made up problems. We have technology, we no longer have to assume gender neutral pronouns for everyone. They can just tell us the pronouns they want.
1 reply →