[XCSme]

Offtopic: I was checking his bio: "Entrepreneur at Binomial, open source dev. Previously SpaceX, Valve, and Ensemble Studios/Microsoft. SIBO survivor. From New Jersey. Opinions my own. He/him."

At the end wrote "He/him".

Anyone knows what does this mean and what is this trend? Is this to clearly state your gender and how you identify yourself?

[tw102]

there are plenty of people who, e.g.

- don't want to show their face on the internet

- people whose appearance is ambiguously gendered

- people who are not the gender that people assume from pictures of them

- people who used to be addressed as a different gender

and, when addressed, want to be referred to correctly.

for instance, i'll never show my face on the internet, but i like it better when someone says "_he_ wrote that program" rather than "_she_ wrote that program."

for all those people, it makes sense to put their pronouns in their bio.

but that leaves the problem: if only the people in the above categories put pronouns in their bio, and you have pronouns in your bio, that might imply you are, for instance, ambiguously gendered.

so people who are conventionally masculine like Rich put pronouns in their bio to normalize it, and to make sure that "having pronouns in one's bio" is not a "thing only OTHER people do".

i think it's a good thing to do. i'll do it too.

[XCSme]

Thanks for the explanation, it makes sense!

Although this seems nice, I don't think it actually solves the bigger problem (if there actually is such a problem in the first place). You can not wear a label everywhere you go with your preferred pronoun, this would lead to people stuffing their bios with all their genes, preferences and believes (eg. gender, race, religion, political view, etc.).

The actual problems are:

1) People assuming someone's gender.

2) People getting upset when their gender is incorrectly assumed.

3) Not having a well established social protocol to ask someone their gender without one or both of the parties feeling uncomfortable.

4) In my opinion it further emphasizes that gender is something really important, that should be mentioned immediately as it changes the way you look at someone. I think the correct progressive way of thinking is to disregard gender entirely and assume everyone is "genderless" unless it actually matters. Does it really matter if he is a he or a she? Does it matter that much if a stranger on the internet uses the wrong pronoun?

5) Same issue applies for all other previously mentioned characteristics of an individual (race, religion, political views, etc.).

[d0100]

Signaling that he agrees and supports people chosing their preferred pronouns.

Maybe even supports compelled pronoun use.