Removed use of gendered pronoun #1015
Conversation
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Thank you for contributing this pull request! Here are a few pointers to make sure your submission will be considered for inclusion. Commit alex/libuv@1ff9d18 has the following error(s):
The following commiters were not found in the CLA:
You can fix all these things without opening another issue. Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more information |
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They/them can absolutely be used as an ungendered singular. Further, even if they couldn't, that concern would be trumped by the fact that using gendered language is hostile. |
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Rule 1 of writing: Throw your Strunk & White into the ocean immediately. |
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I've now submitted a CLA, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to put in the subsystem part of the commit. Can anyone make a suggestion? |
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Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that. |
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+1 for merging this change. |
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I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button? |
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Glad this didn't go through. The White Knights of tech are getting a bit over their heads on this. One thing is to raise awareness of a problem that exists throughout society -- not just tech, a whole different one is to go to the extent of requesting a pull request to remove gendered references. That helps no one. Zero. It does not advance anyone's argument. |
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+1 "him" definitely needs to be replaced with "them" |
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@rdodev I would like to raise awareness of another problem: dismissing attempts to actually change things as "white knighting", with the subtext that there's no genuine platonic reason women deserve to be defended. Awareness is of little value if no one ever acts differently, and open source is supposed to be about fixing what's broken, right? Patches welcome and all that. Well, here's your patch. |
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@eevee "with the subtext that there's no genuine platonic reason women deserve to be defended." Are you implying that women cannot defend themselves and need people to defend them? I think that stance is even more sexist that a "him" vs. "them" |
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@rdodev so you need a woman to submit this pull request to consider it? |
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@rdodev Are you implying that only women should care about how women are regarded? Isn't that how we got here in the first place? When the very problem is that there are very few women participating in open source, what do you expect to accomplish by shaming men who try to make the environment more welcoming for women? That in itself is even more offputting. |
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So you're saying this pull request would have been accepted if it had been submitted by a woman rather than by Alex? Shall we see if we can put that theory to the test? |
What white knights? I don't see anyone typecasting women as damsels in distress.
What argument? It's a small editorial change to reflect that sometimes women want to use libraries too.
That's a total load of bullshit. We should all strive to create the world we want to live in, whether it effects us directly or not. We're all in this together. I don't even know why I'm replying to this. You do all know that Ben's moved on ages ago, right? |
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No, there's no need for this pull request be it requested from a man or woman. That's the whole issue I have. This PR will not advance women in tech, it will not increase the awareness, it will not get more women in tech or STEM majors. Such a trivial and minor change is about-face and grandstanding. You really want to make a change? Go volunteer at your local high school and get girls excited about tech or other STEM fields. Support groups like PyLadies or Women Who Code, CodeChix who are trying to bring in and support women into the field. But this PR? This PR is political: to be able to say "I stand for women's right in tech" because you changed a gendered pronoun without actual consequence. |
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@rdodev Make the change yourself and strip his name from the commit log, then. Being worried about someone's personal motivations in suggesting a good thing isn't a reason to not do the good thing. |
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This PR and supporting PyLadies/WWC/CodeChix/etc are not mutually exclusive; suggesting so is absurd. |
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Given that the work had already been done, why click Reject, rather than Accept? Yes, the change is trivial, but that's a reason for accepting it, not rejecting it. Why do you consider it more appropriate to challenge how Alex chooses to spend his time rather than challenge the deliberate choice to continue using gendered language when a gender neutral alternative has been offered for inclusion? |
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Clicking the 'Merge pull request' button would have taken less effort than it did to click 'Close' and leave a comment, but the positive effect from accepting it had would have been much greater. |
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Hello, I might be a woman. 100% for Singular They. It is perfectly grammatical ("you" works the exact same way) and never socially problematic. I don't see what the problem is and I don't see why @alex and @eevee being proactive is some sort of motivation problem. I would recommend @rdodev consider that change begins with the small things. |
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I mean, we can't all not be tools. |
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While this little change is highly unlikely to have a large impact, it might have a small one–someone might see it and think "oh, someone is considerate of non-males in this male-dominated industry, that's great!" On the other hand, rejecting a simple change that someone wrote for you gives a mild signal that there are quite a few people who still don't care. And those who oppose equality will feel vindicated and supported. None of these are a big thing. But when choosing between a minor positive signal and a minor negative signal, you chose the negative one for no reason at all. There was no work involved, there was no loss in quality of your code, and it would have been a small good deed. :-) |
Speaking as a woman, I frequently see documentation that uses exclusively male pronouns and and know that it's often because doc authors forget/don't consider that they have female readers too. The implication (intended or not) is that the audience of software developers is male. I mentally compare that to how I'm always assumed to be male first on the internet. I'm +1 on this documentation change. |
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Remember that the whole world is watching this discussion, and consider--carefully--the message you are sending, not just with the PR itself, but with the way it is being handled. |
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I've read enough documentation with "he" in it that I'm almost desensitized to it. It's never affected me. It's an honest mistake made by people who haven't really thought about it (and the problem exists outside of technology). The concerning part here is that when it does affect someone, you're actively fighting against it. It doesn't hurt a single thing to merge this patch, but the damage you do in not merging the patch and defending why you're not merging the patch seems to be digging a hole for yourselves that you weren't initially in. :( |
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+1 to merge. Even if the phrase "hostile" seems a little strong to me, it would be unreasonable for me to dismiss people who claim they perceive gendered pronouns as such. The requester is hardly asking for accommodation that requires a Herculean effort—in fact, closing this issue with a rebuttal certainly took much more effort than merely merging it in! I'm personally disappointed that the Node and Angular maintainers seem to continually go out of their way to come across as inconsiderate jerks. |
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@excelsiores Wheaton's Law says hi |
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'female' is not offensive or derogatory, but it is depersonalising when used in isolation to refer to women ("those females"), or a single women ("that female"). You can say they are female, but to use it as an identifying noun is removing the humanity from the individual. The scale of offense is similar the original pull request drama. It's not actually a big deal, it's just words, but it is callous to not understand why it makes people feel belittled and sit righteously on your side of the fence without bothering to consider things from a different point of view. |
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I would like to inform people here that GitHub has decided to close the GitHub repository @excelsiores created to point out the problems that lead to this kind of long flamewars. Unfortunately over there at GitHub office they only support freedom of speech as long the speech is a match to their own opinions. |
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@ThisIsSoGood Freedom of speech exists only for the politically correct. Otherwise, no such thing! So, as long as you say the 'right' things, you're in the clear. ...And I Stared his repo. |
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Thank you for sharing that point of view. I can assure you, when I used the word female and I can only assume that when @mistydemeo used the word female, neither one of us intended to dehumanize those of our gender or ourselves. My usage, and I assume the usage of Misty, related to the definition of the word as given by Webster to depict a population However, I will adapt my usage of language away from female if some find it offensive and your polite explanation is appreciated. In exchange, I ask that we all remember we are part of an international community with many languages, customs, different generational experiences and perspectives. It's always good to assume the best of one another, which I am certain your tendency is to do, as well. |
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@ThisIsSoGood @CodeAngry With the qualifier that I've only read the gist version that was linked from that reddit thread... It's not respectful, it's not constructive, it doesn't serve a justifiable purpose. It might be a pure troll, but I'm not going to assume @excelsiores wasn't serious. There are complaints that the tech community is hostile because exactly because of things like https://gist.github.com/rlemon/7758759 being defended. What kind of reaction, exactly, do you expect to get from a woman new to tech if she encountered that as an example of coders and their opinions of women? |
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@kaithar You are hilarious. "Why should we be taking it as fact that ..." This whole shitstorm started after the original patch author claimed that it is "fact that using gendered language is hostile". |
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And now imagine all these keystrokes be turned into some useful code... Some people have too much time to spend on nothing really valuable. |
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@bartoszmajsak I'm glad those who thing this is an enormous issue aren't writing my code. Their priorities are all screwed up. |
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@ThisIsSoGood that has nothing to do with what I said, or are you trying to make a connection between gendered language and sexist pay inequality? If you haven't something sensible to say, please let the adults talk. |
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this is getting interesting: witch hunt, bad Joyent, etc. |
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@kaithar - since @ThisIsSoGood appears to have joined GitHub solely to post on this thread, I'd say you can safely conclude troll. I recommend blocking anyone who has no repos and no activity to improve your day. |
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@joemcmahon yea, that hadn't escaped my notice :( |
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The only actual tragedy here is what @bnoordhuis said: "I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development.". I kinda see this "probably" as something that's going to happen, unless someone changes the laws of physics. Thank you Ben for all your hard work. You will be missed. Hey, community, thanks for the neutrality in the docs and all the fuss, but in this case YOU are the assholes from the 4th slide. If this is your solution to the humankind problems, then I'm totally underwhelmed. For those who don't understand the tone of this message, I am not against neutrality in docs, or women in this field, but you people need to learn how to deal with this shit in a way it doesn't have consequences like these. For some halfwits posting on this issue: yay, a victory for feminism. Cool story bro. A defeat for tech at the same time. Does Pyrrhic victory rings any bells? Did this victory of yours produce any relevant outcome that's at least on break even with the consequences? As for @isaacs (and the rest of the Joyent who caused this), thanks, that's really mature to support #38. Closing comments over "irrelevant" issues. This issue right here is fucking relevant. Next time when I'll have an issue with the networking stack from node I guess I'll need to thank the lords of grammar and weep for joy that I live amongst linguists who care or understand these cultural issues that mostly exist for native speakers instead of having a dialog with people who actually write some fucking code that gets the shit done. I'm out. I'm too angry to continue in a relevant way, to put it gently. |
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Somewhat off topic, really, but agreed, there are standard English ways to
It isn't necessary to use a gendered pronoun to be able to communicate the The discussion, however, is about the social procedure, not the patch. Had If there was a full-up style documentation guide, I'd suggest constructions At any rate, I'm pretty sure the dead horse has been flattened out to a |
Agreed |
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The saddest thing about it is that no one asked him to leave. No one It is very difficult and painful to be on the receiving end of a situation On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 6:42 AM, kaithar notifications@github.com wrote:
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@joemcmahon: If you don't want someone to leave the community, you don't make a post on your corporate blog implying they're a sexist asshole for sitting on the other side of you in an age old English grammar bikeshed. http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun I would be surprised if someone didn't leave the community after an attack on their character made by Joyent. Expecting a contributor to keep on going after abusive treatment like this is ridiculous. Joyent is risking a libel lawsuit when they lie like this on their blog:
Ben never said this, or implied it. |
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Congrats all, you've killed the goose that laid the golden egg for the benefit of exactly zero actual people. |
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I can pretty well guarantee that ALL the opinions expressed here are woefully uninformed. Continuing to comment on this thread only is doing harm. Everyone. Please. Just stop. @mojombo Hey, can you try to encourage your team to take the isaacs/github#38 feature request seriously? The inability to close threads is doing active harm to open source projects, and you're seeing it here. I've offered to pay $1000 out of my own pocket if you can deliver this feature by the end of 2013. Surely someone at GitHub wants an extra Christmas bonus! |
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I'm going to delete all comments after this one. You've been warned. Stop posting here. Take it to personal email if you want to keep debating things. |
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