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by m0zg 2443 days ago
This is so dumb. Just disallow people to use real names and switch to aliases completely. Voila! Nobody needs to know or worry about anyone's genders or pronouns. It's a tech forum, nobody should give a shit about your gender or lack thereof.
1 comments
TeMPOraL 2443 days ago
It's not how it works. Some people will volunteer this information anyway, and then either them or someone else on their behalf will raise a stink about how the information is being ignored.
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m0zg 2443 days ago
Well, ban those people then. Problem solved. They're clearly on the site to cause trouble.
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MauranKilom 2443 days ago
That simply won't work for half the questions at, say, the interpersonal stackexchange, the workplace one, several of the religious ones, and possibly others (there's 175 stackexchange sites now I believe?).
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TeMPOraL 2443 days ago
That would mean a pretty draconian anonymity policy. Haven't seen that anywhere yet. But beyond that, you start banning people for revealing gender pronouns, you risk finding yourself trending on Twitter for sexual discrimination and transphobia - after all, you've been banning people for revealing their gender pronouns, which will be shortened to "for their gender pronouns"...
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m0zg 2443 days ago
I see what you're saying but don't quite get it's "discrimination" if the terms are the same for everyone and gender is not even visible if the site is used in accordance with the terms.

I go to SO to solve problems. I couldn't care less about pronouns one way or the other. I'd use the "anonymous" version of the site, no problem. In fact I'd prefer it that way.

And Twitter? Really? Who cares? It's not like people would stop using SO just because a few activists shit on it on Twitter.

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TeMPOraL 2443 days ago
> I see what you're saying but don't quite get it's "discrimination" if the terms are the same for everyone and gender is not even visible if the site is used in accordance with the terms.

It doesn't have to be actual discrimination; half the time the mob is screaming "discrimination" there isn't any. There are issues you aren't supposed to touch unless you're willing to defend yourself from people who care about winning, and not at all about truth or accurate accusations.

> I go to SO to solve problems. I couldn't care less about pronouns one way or the other. I'd use the "anonymous" version of the site, no problem. In fact I'd prefer it that way.

You may not care, I may not care, but enough people at important enough places care enough for this to explode into a shitstorm, as you can see in front of you right now.

> And Twitter? Really? Who cares? It's not like people would stop using SO just because a few activists shit on it on Twitter.

If you're the site owner, you may care, because behind few activists on Twitter there comes a mob, and behind a Twitter mob come the journalists. This story has been repeating itself over and over for almost a decade now.

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antisemiotic 2443 days ago
I'm not sure if it's possible to please everyone in a world where it's easier to call a lynch mob than to parse a compound sentence.
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