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You know what I find far, far more offensive than someone using gendered pronouns? The kind of smug, pandering post that deliberately strives for gender neutral
by elohesra 13y ago
You know what I find far, far more offensive than someone using gendered pronouns? The kind of smug, pandering post that deliberately strives for gender neutrality through tortuous 'he/she' verbosity.
I happen to think that most women are probably clever enough to work out that just because a writer has used a particular gendered pronoun, it doesn't mean that the writer's point applies specifically to that gender. Furthermore, literally none of the women I've known have ever complained about gender pronouns; such nitpicking seems to be the exclusive domain of gender-political activists and HN commenters.
- jeorgun 13y agoI agree--- if any author were to use `he/she' consistently, I'd probably find their writing quite annoying. Still, that hardly means they'd have no other ways of being gender-neutral ;)
- cma 13y agoYou mean like 50% of the time using "she/he"?
- thenmar 13y agoI don't think it's an unreasonable thing to point out. Let's not pretend that there are no problems with sexism in tech. While this may or may not be a good example, literature normalizing that programming is a "boy's club" contributes to the problem that programming is perceived as exactly that - a boy's club.