7 ms·

This is a question that touches one of the cornerstones of the culture war, so you will hear radically different opinions from all sides of the discussion. I do

This is a question that touches one of the cornerstones of the culture war, so you will hear radically different opinions from all sides of the discussion. I don't think we are at the point where we can just pick one way to ask for genders. Even "male", "female", "other" is causing problems, as some people get offended for the "other" option (it should only be "male"/"female") and other people get offended for the "other" options (it should be "demiboy", "nonbinary", "catgender", etc.). IMO the concept of gender is really not that useful anymore. We should only ask for sex, and if you don't need to know the sex you just don't ask.

freedomben 4y ago
I've discovered that for some people, they will feel ignored by not asking their gender identity, or at least their pronouns. Things feel more inclusive to them when they are able to register their identity, even if it's not used by anything in the app. A coworker put it this way: "We want to be celebrated, not ignored"
- serverholic 4y ago
  I feel like this is a bit of a mask-off moment that reveals the narcissism behind the movement. And yet people get lambasted on twitter for suggesting that there is an undercurrent of narcissism when people obsess over pronouns.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Do you think you could steelman this take instead?
    - poszlem 4y ago
      Can you steelman the idea that "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" rather than just criticizing how others have discussed it? It may be more productive to try reframing the issue yourself.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - kelseyfrog 4y ago
        No, I don't think I could do that without being transphobic. If there's a way to do that, please let me know though.
        poszlem 4y ago
        "Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force. The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that. We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention. So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label — "sexist", for example — and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true? Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think." Anyway - if you cannot steelman the "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" phrase you are probably not the best person to ask other people to steelman anything.
    - vehemenz 4y ago
      Instead of implying an argumentative fallacy has occurred—I don't see it—why not present your own points in a counterargument?
      - kelseyfrog 4y ago
        I'm simply referring to the guideline. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. The claim that enjoying to be asked about pronouns is a narcissistic trait is unfalsifiable at worst and unable to be worked out through dialog at best. We could say something about it through surveys and descriptive statistics, but that wouldn't form the basis of a causal relationship. Instead, rhetorically, it's much easier to ask if there simply isn't an interpretation which doesn't assume the worst in people. Doing so reveals more about the commenter than it does about the topic and kindly suggesting a positive or at least neutral interpretation builds bridges of meaning instead of assuming an argument.
        vehemenz 4y ago
        This is a reasonable response, but good faith should go both ways. Am I operating in good faith if I ask everyone if they are Sunni or Shia for some ulterior motive, assuming they are Muslim? What about astrological signs? I'd argue not, but a similar thing happens when pronoun-talk occurs. Whether someone finds salience in pronouns' mapping to "gender identity"—insofar as the concept is coherent—is largely a matter of worldview. Many, if not most people, only care about sex. The imposition of worldview here is what motivates the narcissism charge. That and the fact that most TRAs are narcissists, but it could be unrelated.
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    Imagine “I want my religion in work profile so my group can be celebrated and not ignored”. My gut reaction is “gtfo”. (Asking for Pronouns for practical usage makes more sense but that’s not for celebration)
- yamazakiwi 4y ago
  But if I don't know you, I don't care if you want to be celebrated. How do those people deal with people they don't know personally?
- zestyping 4y ago
  "Ignored" is a feeling they have. Feeling ignored is unpleasant and can be hard, and deserves empathy. But feelings belong to the person having them. You can choose to design your products to cater to feelings if you like. But that does not make it an ethical imperative to design your products so that no one feels a certain feeling.
dale_glass 4y ago
In software it's useful in internationalization. In languages like Spanish or Russian you have to know the gender of the person or thing you're talking about. This extends to non-living things, in many languages, you can't just do "$THING has been deleted". How you say "deleted" changes depending on the grammatical gender of the thing. "El objeto ha sido eliminado", "La entrada ha sido eliminada".
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do? Even in gendered language, you need to come up with some kind of "other" category, and you'll likely need to rewrite your sentences to make it work if you can make it work at all.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    > Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do? No clue. But at least you have the data to use whenever you figure out what to do with it, and I imagine somebody tackled that question already, since this is not something that showed up yesterday. In some languages like English you can go with "they" or such, in others there aren't good options that would be widely recognized. But that's just how i18n goes. Languages don't neatly align with the desires of computer programmers.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > In languages like Spanish I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term (and different animals/objects have different defaults you're supposed to use, which you just kind of have to memorize). For example, I was taught that if you're picking up a cat off the sidewalk, and you haven't checked its genitals, and you want to ask if it belongs to someone, you just use "gato", and it's understood that "gato" can mean both "explicitly male" and "I haven't taken the time to check." Similar deal for mixed groups containing people of multiple genders, I was taught if there's at least one man you use the male forms when referring to that group. Admittedly I did have an American education, so it's very possible I was taught incorrectly. I don't put a lot of faith in my Spanish teachers. But it's not like gender ambiguity is a modern thing; scenarios where speakers don't yet know the sex/gender of the things they're referring to are a fairly common issue that will come up pretty often in any culture, regardless of what its gender norms are. If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something, I assume you can tell that story to a friend in a way where your friend will understand you're not claiming that you were ever close enough to the fox to determine its sex. Again, I don't know, but I assume there are something like default gender-variants that Russian people use in that situation; I assume its possible to have that conversation in Russian.

freedomben 4y ago

I've discovered that for some people, they will feel ignored by not asking their gender identity, or at least their pronouns. Things feel more inclusive to them when they are able to register their identity, even if it's not used by anything in the app. A coworker put it this way: "We want to be celebrated, not ignored"

serverholic 4y ago
I feel like this is a bit of a mask-off moment that reveals the narcissism behind the movement. And yet people get lambasted on twitter for suggesting that there is an undercurrent of narcissism when people obsess over pronouns.
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Do you think you could steelman this take instead?
  - poszlem 4y ago
    Can you steelman the idea that "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" rather than just criticizing how others have discussed it? It may be more productive to try reframing the issue yourself.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      No, I don't think I could do that without being transphobic. If there's a way to do that, please let me know though.
      - poszlem 4y ago
        "Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force. The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that. We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention. So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label — "sexist", for example — and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true? Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think." Anyway - if you cannot steelman the "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" phrase you are probably not the best person to ask other people to steelman anything.
  - vehemenz 4y ago
    Instead of implying an argumentative fallacy has occurred—I don't see it—why not present your own points in a counterargument?
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      I'm simply referring to the guideline. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. The claim that enjoying to be asked about pronouns is a narcissistic trait is unfalsifiable at worst and unable to be worked out through dialog at best. We could say something about it through surveys and descriptive statistics, but that wouldn't form the basis of a causal relationship. Instead, rhetorically, it's much easier to ask if there simply isn't an interpretation which doesn't assume the worst in people. Doing so reveals more about the commenter than it does about the topic and kindly suggesting a positive or at least neutral interpretation builds bridges of meaning instead of assuming an argument.
      - vehemenz 4y ago
        This is a reasonable response, but good faith should go both ways. Am I operating in good faith if I ask everyone if they are Sunni or Shia for some ulterior motive, assuming they are Muslim? What about astrological signs? I'd argue not, but a similar thing happens when pronoun-talk occurs. Whether someone finds salience in pronouns' mapping to "gender identity"—insofar as the concept is coherent—is largely a matter of worldview. Many, if not most people, only care about sex. The imposition of worldview here is what motivates the narcissism charge. That and the fact that most TRAs are narcissists, but it could be unrelated.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  Imagine “I want my religion in work profile so my group can be celebrated and not ignored”. My gut reaction is “gtfo”. (Asking for Pronouns for practical usage makes more sense but that’s not for celebration)
yamazakiwi 4y ago
But if I don't know you, I don't care if you want to be celebrated. How do those people deal with people they don't know personally?
zestyping 4y ago
"Ignored" is a feeling they have. Feeling ignored is unpleasant and can be hard, and deserves empathy. But feelings belong to the person having them. You can choose to design your products to cater to feelings if you like. But that does not make it an ethical imperative to design your products so that no one feels a certain feeling.

dale_glass 4y ago

In software it's useful in internationalization. In languages like Spanish or Russian you have to know the gender of the person or thing you're talking about. This extends to non-living things, in many languages, you can't just do "$THING has been deleted". How you say "deleted" changes depending on the grammatical gender of the thing. "El objeto ha sido eliminado", "La entrada ha sido eliminada".

jeroenhd 4y ago
Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do? Even in gendered language, you need to come up with some kind of "other" category, and you'll likely need to rewrite your sentences to make it work if you can make it work at all.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do? No clue. But at least you have the data to use whenever you figure out what to do with it, and I imagine somebody tackled that question already, since this is not something that showed up yesterday. In some languages like English you can go with "they" or such, in others there aren't good options that would be widely recognized. But that's just how i18n goes. Languages don't neatly align with the desires of computer programmers.
danShumway 4y ago
> In languages like Spanish I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term (and different animals/objects have different defaults you're supposed to use, which you just kind of have to memorize). For example, I was taught that if you're picking up a cat off the sidewalk, and you haven't checked its genitals, and you want to ask if it belongs to someone, you just use "gato", and it's understood that "gato" can mean both "explicitly male" and "I haven't taken the time to check." Similar deal for mixed groups containing people of multiple genders, I was taught if there's at least one man you use the male forms when referring to that group. Admittedly I did have an American education, so it's very possible I was taught incorrectly. I don't put a lot of faith in my Spanish teachers. But it's not like gender ambiguity is a modern thing; scenarios where speakers don't yet know the sex/gender of the things they're referring to are a fairly common issue that will come up pretty often in any culture, regardless of what its gender norms are. If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something, I assume you can tell that story to a friend in a way where your friend will understand you're not claiming that you were ever close enough to the fox to determine its sex. Again, I don't know, but I assume there are something like default gender-variants that Russian people use in that situation; I assume its possible to have that conversation in Russian.