Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by itsabug 1542 days ago
Trans and non binary folks are probably whole integer percent of populations, and are over represented in tech.

It's trivially easy to use "they" rather than he or she. Or "the person" or whatever the actual noun is.

1 comments

It's not even a matter of making special provisions. It's just plain civility.

If you ask me to refer to you as a "they" or any other pronoun, that's how I'll refer to you.

Right? We already do this with names. "Please don't call me Bill, I prefer William". Ok, I'll call that person William. It'd be an asshole move to deliberately call them Bill.

Using someone's correct pronouns is the same. If they say, "use x not y" it's an asshole move to deliberately not use x.

Oh me too, of course. I just don’t understand someone expects to change the default way to refer to anyone else.
Perhaps because the "default" way misgenders about half of them.
It happens to everyone, even cis, and they just accept it and move on, too much importance is being publicly given to things that are private. I don't care about misgendering and being misgendered, here are a lot of people that for political and PR reasons are alimenting the delusions of a bunch of kids and people all over the world who are spending way too much time on something that is unimportant and private
> I don't care about misgendering and being misgendered

They do. What's wrong with respecting their wishes?

If referring to a definite existing person who is physically present the default is to infer gender from a combination of physical attributes, name, and style of dress. This works about 99.9% of the time. For example it is almost always possible to tell that a person desires to present as a female even if they have some masculine attributes and or name and you can be nice and predict what they would prefer. The small percentage of times you get this wrong you just correct yourself and apologize and move on.

Being decent to people is important. Now if you are referring to a hypothetical person for example in documentation you can't misgender them because you are speaking hypothetically. At that point I think the choice is an aesthetic choice as opposed to a moral one. On cannot be harmed by the documentation using a different pronoun because the person was never speaking directly of you in the first place.