doc: Use gender-neutral pronouns in the docs.#6535
doc: Use gender-neutral pronouns in the docs.#6535majjoha wants to merge 1 commit intovim:masterfrom majjoha:docs-gender-pronouns
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I find this offensive to females. |
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As well as making the documentation consistent (sometimes the docs use "s/he", other times they just use "he" etc.), this PR also fixes several small grammatical errors. It seems like a good idea to include it - and it appears to be quite thorough so it will reduce more discussion on this topic - once it's done, it's done, and everyone is happy. |
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@brammool: I am not entirely sure I follow how. Would you mind elaborating on what you mean? |
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This deserves some more explanation, I didn't have time for that yesterday. Most obviously, it removes the statement of inclusion, that makes clear Vim was made for everybody. More subtly, this change infers that using "he" when referring to the user means the user would be male. Let it be clear: I am allergic to discrimination and injustice. I might be a bit sensitive about this subject. |
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| First of all, it should be possible to use Vim as a drop-in replacement for | ||
| Vi. When the user wants to, he can use Vim in compatible mode and hardly | ||
| Vi. When the user wants to, they can use Vim in compatible mode and hardly |
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I'm not a native English speaker, but "he" was referring the "the user" in the first part of the sentence.
So saying "they" does not look correct.
Same remark in some other places.
I don't think we need to workaround the fact that English has no neutral he/she pronoun.
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It is perfectly correct to use "they" here. In fact it is more common to write "they" in this situation, as until this point the gender has not been specified.
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Regardless of how much people push for it, neutral 'they' doesn't feel natural when not used as a wildcard.
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On 2020-07-26, Nick Jensen wrote:
@nickspoons commented on this pull request.
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In runtime/doc/develop.txt:
> @@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ balance must be found between them.
VIM IS... VI COMPATIBLE *design-compatible*
First of all, it should be possible to use Vim as a drop-in replacement for
-Vi. When the user wants to, he can use Vim in compatible mode and hardly
+Vi. When the user wants to, they can use Vim in compatible mode and hardly
It is perfectly correct to use "they" here. In fact it is more common to write
"they" in this situation, as until this point the gender has not been
specified.
It is not "perfectly correct" to use "they" here. "They" is plural
and the sentence calls for a singular pronoun. I recognize that the
use of "they" as a singular pronoun is becoming more common as
perhaps the least-problematic solution to this problem, but it is
not yet universally accepted.
Regards,
Gary
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@brammool: My intention with this pull request was not to offend you. I am a longtime Vim user and appreciate your tireless work on the text editor. However, I disagree that the changes create a situation where the documentation appears less gender-neutral than before. To me, it is unclear how insisting on using gendered pronouns promotes gender neutrality to a larger extent than using a pronoun that can be applied regardless of gender and carries less ambiguity. Using pronouns such as "he" or "she" in the documentation both implicitly favors the given gender but perhaps more importantly it excludes the people who do not identify with either gender. This is particularly problematic in situations where the reader may identify as non-binary. IBM, Google, and Microsoft already encourage the use of singular "they" but popular open source projects such as Chromium and Ruby on Rails as well as GNU do the same, and I fail to see why this project should not follow suit. |
| their first language. We do not make any assumptions about the gender of the | ||
| user, no matter how the text is phrased. And we do not want to waste time on | ||
| this discussion. The goal is that the reader understands how Vim works, the | ||
| exact wording is secondary. |
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Why is this part being removed? It solves the very problem this PR is intending to solve, so it feels like this is being removed in order to introduce a problem, to then justify this PR. Specifically, the part "And we do not want to waste time on this discussion", which would prohibit this PR to begin with.
This PR reeks of virtue-signalling.
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@Tyil: I strongly disagree with your statement. I am admittedly surprised that this pull request is seen as an act of virtue signalling when it simply attempts to remove harmful language from the documentation in order to show consideration for underrepresented groups in our industry.
From my previous comments, I think it should be clear why this text does not solve the issue but let me dissect it to further stress my argument.
In the first sentence, two issues are apparent. First, it neglects how using "his" is in fact an issue of great importance to a lot of people, and, secondly, it notes that the use of "his" does not imply that the user is male as some people may think. By using "his", I think it is only natural to make this assumption. For anybody who identifies as non-male, I imagine that it may seem incredibly counterintuitive why the documentation is so hesitant to adopt singular "they" instead of gendered pronouns if this is the case. Why not simply apply a pronoun that carries no assumptions about the gender if it is so important to keep stating that there are no assumptions about the gender? Using singular "they" removes the need to do so. Then it goes on to explain that the use of "his" is just the result of a habit that has developed throughout the years. In the past, we have used hurtful words to describe various groups of people but we have shown time and time again that we can change habits for the better. I do not see why the Vim documentation should not welcome change of this form too. Finally, the text once again mentions that it "do[es] not want to waste time on this discussion" which returns to the theme of neglecting how this issue may be hugely important to a lot of people.
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To support @majjoha opinion here, there are two things I would like to add about this removed part.
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First, I came accross this text long after I had started reading the docs. I understand that this is not the way the docs are intended to be read, and that maybe I should have read it first. But I bet many people do the same. Should they feel offended by the rest of the doc, then it would be too late and it's not just "their fault". Especially now that this PR exists and that the burden of editing the whole doc has been taken in charge by @majjoha.
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Second, even though I don't personally feel offended by this removed part. Here is how I understand/rephrase it in my head:
We are aware that the exact wording of the doc is likely to offend people. However, we think it is secondary matter so we did not intend to fix it.
.. which I feel offending.
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Why is this part being removed? It solves the very problem this PR is intending to solve.
A declaration that no harm is meant is not sufficient to do no harm. It is in a place that few users of the documentation will ever see. And "you might find this offensive but I assure it is not offensive" doesn't actually help a person who feels excluded. "We don't think this is important" is even worse.
"they" as a replacement for he/she (in the context of talking about a specific person) is a new use of the word, but the singular "they" as a pronoun for a single person of unknown/irrelevant gender has been in use since the 1300s. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/grammar/singular-they https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-nonbinary-they https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ "They" is a perfectly acceptable pronoun to use in this context because we do not know or care which gender any given user is. Your lack of acceptance of the singular they as a correct grammatical construct does not mean that it is incorrect. |
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Moreover:
This is a reasonable interpretation, given that "he" is widely used as a pronoun for male-identifying individuals?
Respectfully, that's a you problem. You presumably wouldn't react this way if it were a bug report about some vim subsystem misbehaving. Consider this a bug report for a different language. |
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I find the reaction to this PR extremely disappointing. I hope this PR will be merged. Changing he to singular they (which most emphatically is idiomatic English) is an easy fix. |
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I have been trying to get used to "the user, they..." but it just keeps sounding wrong. It's like using Shakespearean English: it may be correct English, but that's just not how you would say it in real life. |
If your point is that singular they is not idiomatic spoken casual English then I have two responses:
If your point is that singular they is incorrect in more formal settings then please see the many authoritative links posted by @cweagans. If you'd be interested in taking a look, I'd be happy to submit a PR that tries to "write around" the problem to avoid singular they while eliminating "he" (which is sometimes possible). Please let me know. But honestly, this PR is fine, and I think it should be accepted. p.s. I think that describing people who care about this issue as "very opinionated" unnecessarily implies bad faith on their part. We care about this not because we enjoy bikeshedding trivia or signalling our virtue. We care about the fact that our community and our industry has failed and hurt people. |
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On 8/13/2020 1:53 PM, Bram Moolenaar (Vim Github Repository) wrote:
I have been trying to get used to "the user, they..." but it just
keeps sounding wrong. It's like using Shakespearean English: it may be
correct English, but that's just not how you would say it in real life.
I understand some people (and I think it's actually not that many, but
they are very opinionated) object to using "the user, he...".
Something to consider (I heard it recently what with all the current
global discussions). If there's a group that has historically been
oppressed, why would you do something they find offensive/oppressive? (I
had to pound that into my head, since I'd often say/feel I didn't mean
to offend)
Additionally, if a gender neutral pronoun doesn't sound right. You can
use "she".
…-ernie
So we need to phrase that differently. It takes some more effort, but
there aren't that many occurrences.
That way we can please more people.
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On Thu, Aug 13, 2020 at 01:53:51PM -0700, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
[...]
I understand some people (and I think it's actually not that many, but
they are very opinionated) object to using "the user, he...".
[...]
If one is not very opinionated, they may just choose to not appear to
avoid all the troubles. It's not to object, it's to feel excluded. My
mind just isn't reasonal enough to not feel that.
Unfortunately it's hard to explain how feeling excluded is to people who
have never had that feeling. I've tried and have one more feeling ---
tired.
BTW I read the Chinese version of documentation in the past and didn't
notice this issue.
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Best regards,
lilydjwg
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I concur and, as a native Australian English speaker, it is how I have always spoken and written. I have been picked up on it a few of times over the years by those whose first language was, perhaps just coincidentally, German. Unfortunately, I have forgotten any explanation that might have been offered as to why it sounded odd to them. |
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Looks like we heard all opinions at least twice now. |
13 participants
This pull request replaces gendered pronouns in the documentation with gender-neutral ones. I've followed the Google developer documentation style guide on how to write gender-neutral technical documentation, and to find instances of gendered language in the documentation, I've been running the following commands:
In addition, I think the section about inclusion in
runtime/doc/helphelp.txtwhich was added in eab6dff causes unnecessary harm, and I'd suggest that it is either removed from the documentation or updated to encourage people to create pull requests when they stumble upon gendered language in the documentation. If there is any interest in the latter, I am more than happy to help out.