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This is more or less a practical thing. I think you would agree that there are more males in IRC than females. Which personal pronoun would you choose by defaul

This is more or less a practical thing. I think you would agree that there are more males in IRC than females. Which personal pronoun would you choose by default to address someone without explicitly knowing their gender? Would you always ask them beforehand? That might get weird. Would you use some weird Internet pronoun like "xe"? Statistically speaking, going "he" is not a bad first guess. I'm not saying it's helping, though.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
Um, I'd just use singular they (which has been in use in English for literally centuries), or rework the sentence to avoid the pronoun.
bkirwi 12y ago
The 'he' seems not to be the most important part here. (Though, as the GP points out in another comment, the singular 'they' is useful.) The particularly nasty part is this: > And I eventually leave, because now they're being really sexual and creepy. Mistaking someone's gender is a relatively small lapse (though I understand it gets painfully annoying when it happens all the time) but the subsequent creepiness is just actively toxic.
wpietri 12y ago
The pronoun I use to address people is "you", which is conveniently ungendered. If I need to refer to somebody whose gender I don't know, I'll generally just say their name. If I really need to use a pronoun for a person of undetermined gender, I say "they". Shakespeare used singular they, so I think it should be good enough for me. This is just as practical as saying "he". We say "he" for reasons entirely different than practicality. We do it because dominant groups tend to treat dominant characteristics as "normal", as the default. Indeed, it's practicality that drives me to use the singular they, especially when I'm talking about tech. Right now there's an enormous deficit of people with technical knowledge and experience. To fix that, I want to get everybody possible involved. If I were to help drive half of humanity away over such a small thing as me wanting to be disrespectfully lazy about pronouns, I'd feel I was being very unpractical.
S4M 12y ago
I think it's fine to mention as "he" by mistake, but if she says "Don't mention me as 'he', I'm a 'she'.", people should say "oh sorry" and not "Are you a fucking trans?".

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

Um, I'd just use singular they (which has been in use in English for literally centuries), or rework the sentence to avoid the pronoun.

bkirwi 12y ago

The 'he' seems not to be the most important part here. (Though, as the GP points out in another comment, the singular 'they' is useful.) The particularly nasty part is this: > And I eventually leave, because now they're being really sexual and creepy. Mistaking someone's gender is a relatively small lapse (though I understand it gets painfully annoying when it happens all the time) but the subsequent creepiness is just actively toxic.

wpietri 12y ago

The pronoun I use to address people is "you", which is conveniently ungendered. If I need to refer to somebody whose gender I don't know, I'll generally just say their name. If I really need to use a pronoun for a person of undetermined gender, I say "they". Shakespeare used singular they, so I think it should be good enough for me. This is just as practical as saying "he". We say "he" for reasons entirely different than practicality. We do it because dominant groups tend to treat dominant characteristics as "normal", as the default. Indeed, it's practicality that drives me to use the singular they, especially when I'm talking about tech. Right now there's an enormous deficit of people with technical knowledge and experience. To fix that, I want to get everybody possible involved. If I were to help drive half of humanity away over such a small thing as me wanting to be disrespectfully lazy about pronouns, I'd feel I was being very unpractical.

S4M 12y ago

I think it's fine to mention as "he" by mistake, but if she says "Don't mention me as 'he', I'm a 'she'.", people should say "oh sorry" and not "Are you a fucking trans?".