[peterangular]

If it's that much of a concern just put a validation filter on the comment submission box that has you "gender neutralize" your submission/answers if they find "he/her" type language in there.

I mean - it's a clear-enough defined problem to solve with software and I've found that if you mess up a gender pronoun on accident people sometimes get deeply offended. I've gone 100% to the "they/them/you/their user name/etc." route because I just don't want to step on toes.

I miss the days when everyone was just a silly textual username that didn't have a gender, age, religion, race, etc. I've gone years communicating with people without actually knowing their gender.

[tstrimple]

For what it's worth, I've only ever encountered people getting "deeply offended" over intentional misrepresentation of gender. I hear far more people complaining about people being upset about being misgendered than people actually upset about being misgendered. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm just saying that in my experience the counter-"outrage culture" in many cases blows things way more out of proportion than the "outrage culture" they rail against.

[mattnewport]

The introduction of this policy rather contradicts your claim.

[tstrimple]

In what way? I think it only supports my claims. How much visible outrage was there from people being misgendered? Yet there is a thread full of people complaining about having to adjust their language. It seems to me there is way more people upset about changing language than were upset about being misgendered. Unless there is some meta thread you can point me to which is full of people complaining about being misgendered?

[mattnewport]

The visible outrage is not from people "complaining about people being upset about being misgendered", it is from people complaining about an actual policy change introducing compelled speech. If people complaining about being misgendered is as rare as you suggest then why does stack exchange feel the need to push through such a controversial policy change?

[hypnagogicjerk]

The policy is about recommending polite speech in a public forum where rules to this effect have been enforced for a long time. And it's articulating what that means to people who don't understand what pronouns are for.

That some people may use a pronoun other than the one on their birth certificate is the way things are going in the modern world, so polite use of the language must take this into consideration.

I have living aunts and uncles and grandparents who still think it's okay to refer to dark skinned persons, and with all politeness, as "Negro." I take it on to school them and, yes, compel them to use polite and accepted speech.

By the way, there is no society or culture without compelled and enforced norms, which by the way are what's under debate underneath all this.

[mattnewport]

> The policy is about recommending polite speech

The policy is not about "recommending" anything, it's about "requiring". That's the essence of most of the negative reaction. There are plenty of things that I will usually be happy to do voluntarily but will strongly oppose being required to do.

[peterangular]

Anecdotal, but I have definitely seen people be hurt when it's not intentional... and honestly, I feel for them.

I can't truly relate but I can be empathetic. Folks bug me sometimes when they assume in conversation that I'm close to my family (because most people are). In reality I come from an abusive family and tend to not want to talk/think about them.

I understand that it's a completely different thing, but I'm using it to illustrate that _all_ of us should be good to each other, and realize that sometimes we can hurt someone's feelings without a single bit of intention to do so!

[atonse]

Right but intention is everything.

There's a difference between someone who knows you don't have a good relationship with your family and then really just being in-your-face about it (that's intentionally making you feel bad about your family), vs someone who doesn't know.

Yes you feel bad in both cases, but you probably feel much worse when it's an intentional thing.

[peterangular]

> Yes you feel bad in both cases, but you probably feel much worse when it's an intentional thing.

Of course. I don't want to make people feel bad regardless of intention so my personal SOP is to try not to hurt people in regards to gendered language by keeping it as neutral as possible, and that's pretty easy when it's typed out IMO.