SerenityOS and LadyBirds: Because These Things Shouldn't Hide in Closed Git Conversations

Calling an unspecified gender person anything other than "they" was until recently considered to be incorrect. "They" is plural but now is used to refer to singlar persons because writing "he or she" everywhere is too much. Calling a user "he" does not imply that users are male or can only be male. Not using "they" or "he/she" or obscure gender neutral pronouns does not make something inherently transphobic. Closing PRs that unnecessarily change pronouns as spam is not inherently transphobic, but the accompanying comment is not very inclusive.
The post talks about "white suppremacist language," but the proposed change did not remove white suppremacist language. It was just a generic anti "woke" message, possibly motivated by people brigading after the original PR to change "he" to "they." White suppremacists may use also use similar language, but you can't just pick things that a white suppremacist has done and decide that anyone else who does the same is a white suppremacist. He's not blameless, but people are intentionally provoking the developer and exagerating the responses for drama.
- 'They' has always existed in the English language as plural or singular, context dependent. Hence it's natural transition into a pronoun. Non-native English speakers can be excused for using gendered pronouns because the problem isn't them not knowing and using it in the first place, it's them refusing to update the language after a reasonable explanation to do so.
  People are brigading, sure, but it's such a simple change to make, one that only helps the world. So, yeah, fuck the devs honestly. Just accept the PR and move on, there was no need for any of this.
  
  Well, not always: Plural 'they' is a borrowing from Old Norse ca. 1200 AD, and the earliest attestation of singular 'they' is about a century later.
  But, yeah, you'd think 700 years of continuous use would be enough to make it uncontroversial...
- until recently
  TIL 600 years ago is recent!
- Singular "they" is older than singular "you." And note, of course, that the pronoun "you" is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.
  
  "You" was both singular and plural throughout the history of Middle English. Singular "they" emerged in Late Middle English around the 14th century.
- until recently
  the first known written appearance of singular "they" is so old that it was still spelled with the thorn (þei)
  
  I love þis fact
- also in that regard, there are languages (swedish, and my native language german are among them) with a grammatical gender to nouns. Coming then from a language like that to a language where everything is the, you really need to think twice which pronoun is to be used.
  
  Sure, but does that also cover accusing someone of inserting their politics into things when they suggest a change? Especially one that has nothing to do with politics at all?

Are we really complaining about gendered pronouns in source code notes for a web browser?
Is that what we are doing?
There are mountains of bigger fish to fry, y’all. Social change doesn’t happen overnight. It can take decades or longer.
Widespread language changes have historically taken decades or even centuries to occur.
Ask any woman or person of color over the age of 50 about the CONSTANT slights or worse endured every day for most of their lives for some perspective.
Fight the good fight, absolutely, but this isn’t worth getting angry over - at least not from what I’ve read so far.
- To be clear we aren't complaining about the existence of the gendered language. We are complaining that the maintainer has repeatedly rejected friendly contributions which would fix the gendered language, under the premise that it is ToO pOLItIcAl, instead of just merging the very obvious improvement and moving on with life.
  CONSTANT slights or worse endured every day for most of their lives for some perspective.
  This is part of those constant slights. How can you simultaneously gesture toward the issue at hand and say that its not worth working on?
- Compassion is not a zero-sum game. We do not have to reserve our capacity to care about issues only to issues that affect people we think are deserving.
- What's more, it's attaching strongly negative feelings to a positive change. As a result, it's driving the wedge down the middle of our society as deep as it can possibly go.
  You catch more flies with honey, and you can also use it to heal wounds.
  
  Unless you're talking fruit flies, you actually catch more of those with vinegar. They love the stuff.
- while you might be right some things are more important. why is your comment not directed to people actively blocking these changes? why not just agree to them and move on with these “more important things”. the PR was submitted. the effort had been done already. blocking it is an statement on its own.

This is such a weird thing for the dev to decide to die on. I understand, although i don't agree, with the "there are TWO genders" issue, and the desire for folks who are in that genre of people to avoid the whole thing, perhaps even forcefully. I don't understand why including women, one of the two genders they do approve of, is considered overly "political". How dare someone suggest girls might like tech? Ridiculous! I almost get the first instance, as a mistaken attempt to not support trans folks (which, again, is stupid anyway) but the constant rejection means they are CLEARLY just misogynists.
- To be fair, it's also kinda dumb to point out something as an issue when it clearly wasnt, and saying "assuming the user/developer if the OS is a male" means that the person complaining is assuming that this dev was assuming something because he used the word he.
  The issue was that the person decided that it bothered them so much that they needed to ask the dev to change it.
  This has idiots on both sides written all over. Why is that person being nitpicky over something so stupid. Women use she/her in their writing all the time, just like men use he/him, and people with other pronouns are more likely to use what is familiar to them such as they/them.
  I say this as someone with a child that has been reading books to them and noticed that an authors gender and the pronouns they use seem to correlate more often than not. Unless the book focuses on topics of or relating to understanding and accepting the differences in people. Both people are dumb in this scenario.
  Edit: let me put things into a perspective that maybe some of you can understand. Let's take anything related to gender or being PC out of the equation.
  I ask you to make a change to your documentation because I don't like the way you said something, then accuse you of being or believing a certain kind of way because of the grammar you used.
  That is what this person did.
  Now let's assume (yeah I said it) for the sake of my argument that the person doesn't feel any kind of way about the thing that they were accused of being. I'm pretty sure that person might just take offence to that. Which in this case is exactly what happened.
  Had there just been a change that said something along the lines of just a simple grammatical correction. It probably would have be pushed and ignored.
  In this case the dev definitely seemed like an ass, but that's not the point. The point is the whole fucking situation is stupid.
  
  They didn’t just ask the dev to change it, they submitted a pr that would’ve fixed it. All the maintainer had to do is click merge
  The maintainer was the one that brought politics into it!
  
  Look... I certainly (particularly verbally) will probably use "he" a lot more than I should... And no one cares.
  But if someone makes a PR changing these into "they", I would reply with "shit, you're right, this is objectively better, thanks for your work".
  Instead, these contributors get their PR shut down with the most terrible, supremacist excuse. That's the problem. There's the true idiot.
  
  I don’t think it’s “kinda dumb” to point out the issue all, unless you’re an insufferable twatwaffle like 90% of the fucking STEM community in 2024, who can never be wrong or challenged.
  Like, I’d consider myself pretty progressive, maybe even “woke” if that still has any meaning left, and even I might have just used male pronouns because I myself am male;’not for malicious reasons but just because I wasn’t thinking in that moment.
  But if I was like “oh yeah, that makes sense, and cool you even did the work of fixing it for me! Merged.” and went about my day, no one would have brigaded me, no one would have posted it all over socials, there wouldn’t be blogs and articles, and I’d probably have a leg to stand on if anyone still wanted to make a big deal.
  The way this dude reacted was a self-report. The community was right to push back, even if some people ended up taking it too far.
  
  The original text had 'he' where 'it' was correct. Which supports part of your premise.
  They also merged a change request that changed those instances alongside 'they' instances. I don't know if the original author and denier was involved, but it's certainly important context missing from OP blog post.
- The guy is German, and the German language traditionally uses generic masculine pronouns, although that has become a big political issue in the past years. Some new gender-neutral forms have developed, but some of them have even been banned by the "center"-right-wing clowns in two state governments, and it's all a bit of a mess. The guy probably thoght "they" in English is a similarly experimental concept, and while it's still dumb and he should just try to be as inclusive as possible, it's probably not a matter of him purposefully excluding women from the documentation.
  
  That makes more sense i guess, although even with that context as you said, it is still dumb. It's political in the US as well to use non gendered pronouns. It's generally aimed at hurting trans folks more than anything or anyone else. I could see the first time having it be a flippant meh response, but multiple times? Having had it explained clearly? Someone else has however said it has been fixed now. People can change, so my current plan is to assume things are better, cautiously, and hope they continue on a more pleasant path.
- I wrote elsewhere that based on everything I read about gender the logical conclusion is that there are only two genders. Male and political.

This whole thing has jilted-lover vibes. There is no other reasonable explanation for dredging up a three-year-old PR denial than simply shit-stirring for the sake of trying to embarrass or hurt the dev in some way. It reeks of simple childish revenge.
- Except there's recent examples, and it's in the docs (On the "ideologically motivated changes" point at the end), this is established
  
  Great gods. They did as asked, but they weren’t sorry enough? I don’t even know what the complaint is. I’m obviously not the only one.
  Political correctness makes my teeth hurt.

There have been many improvements in making documentation more inclusive across the IT industry which shouldn't be scoffed at. The first that comes to mind is changing "master" and "slave" to "primary" and "secondary" (or "replica" etc.) because references to slavery is inconsiderate to many.
I don't think pile-ons are productive, but I think inclusive language and thinking is important.
- You must construct additional pile-ons.
  
  https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-must-construct-additional-pylons
- How about when there are folks who have been harmed by people with agendas?
  They'd prefer their code or commentary to be inclusive, not exclusive?

its already been solvedddddd plus a lot of the people annoyed or mad about it really arent being nice (the one trans woman one was spam) was just non native English language issue not a discriminatory policy (how u go from pronouns to being white surpremisist idk) can we save vitriol for actually bad people an not small mistakes (even if is done by a maybe-conservativ) pls
- can we save vitriol for actually bad people an not small mistakes (even if is done by a maybe-conservativ) pls
  yeah that would be best.
  Edit: in regards to vitriol: don't be like https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648 LiEnby in that thread after the code was merged. It makes us all look stupid and hateful.
  
  It makes us all look stupid and hateful.
  I'd argue that it does a lot more than make people just look hateful. Plenty of assholes out there using progressive causes as justification and shielding for their poor behavior.
  The dev could have avoided this easily by merging the original PR and moving on with their life, but there is negative reason for the dogpiling that occurred. It's open fucking source. Fork it and make your own inclusive competitor.
  The behavior of the community around this is reprehensible, and is the perfect ammunition for opportunists looking to draw people into right wing radicalism. "Look at what they did to someone for using he instead of they! Imagine what will happen if we let these people have any real power?"
  
  TIL GitHub doesn’t appear to have a “Block User” function.

It does seem to me that complaining about gendered language in source code is about as stupid as a moral panic over daemons in systemd, or vulgarities in source code comments. There is some place for it... but not much
On top of that, 'he'/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time. I understand the desire to change that, but it's still a normal thing in English language. Similar to 'master' in git repositories and IDE connections, though those are both much more recent and arguably referencing much worse.
If a dev insists on 'she' everywhere, or 'they' in places that read awkwardly, should we flame and blame? In fact, why not go and convince Firefox to use exclusively feminine language in their source, to balance things out. It sounds more sensible than taking up a political fight over this!
Also while you're at it, ethical hacking is now done only by natural-human-skin-colour-hat hackers; background process on your computer are called abstract beings; your computer does not boot[strap], ('pull itself up by its bootstraps'), it has affirmative action from the motherboard to get it started; and when I saw the article headline, I thought the issue would be bigger ... that's what they said.
- On top of that, ‘he’/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time
  Appeal to tradition bias
  I understand the desire to change that, but it’s still a normal thing in English language.
  So is singular 'they'.
  The rest of your post is just a slippery slope argument.
  
  Your entire comment is argument from fallacy. Lol
  
  Appeal to tradition bias?
  Yes. Turns out languages work by saying things the same way somebody else said them before.
  My point isn't that there can't be a reason to change. My point is calling 'he' out as implying misogyny on the part of the author is ridiculous, and fussing over changing it is, in this situation, in my opinion, petty.
  So is singular 'they'.
  Indeed. Some English contexts are used to defaulting to 'he' for ungendered animate; some to 'they'. Neither necessitates an egregious humanitarian wrong.
  The rest of your post is just a slippery slope argument.
  I did get facetious toward the end. If you like, you don't have to build your life philosophy on the foundation of the logical integrity of my closing paragraph. Up to you.
- This reads eerily close to reverse-ism. Please don't do that.
  
  I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.
- Hey, this isn't me.