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by farias0 1523 days ago
Well, it turns out people are more interested in avoiding upsetting people through gendered language than through non-gendered language. You can't please everyone, and your worries do seem less important if you ask me.
3 comments

This is a great example of how a lot of these methods of "avoiding upsetting people" seem to really be ways for people to make themselves feel good for doing something that they think is nice, like how almost every latino has no problem with the gendered form and has never heard of "latinx".
Why? Using non-gendered language avoids misgendering people, and even though there are people who are offended by not being gendered this seems like a great trade off.
But your argument boils down to "it's what I want, and even though there are people who don't want it, who cares?" Here is your argument, but adjusted to argue for my position. I didn't have to change much!

"Using gendered language avoids not gendering people, and even though there are people who are offended by being gendered this seems like a great trade off."

It's because, even though I'm a cis male that has never been misgendered, I can empathize much better with the pain of a misgendered trans person than with the pain of any person that was treated by as a "they". To be completely honest I can't even understand why someone would be offended by this. So yeah, I prefer to run the risk of offending by using gender neutral language. And this seems to be the consensus among most institutions that are actually thinking about this kind of things.
To some people, using non-gendered language is offensive. I recall a woman who got upset because someone else referred to her as "they". She was offended because her profile picture was very clear. She felt the other person was making it seem as if it was unclear whether she was a man or a woman.
I am all for trying to be as inclusive as it gets and to be honest, English’s gendered pronouns are just unnatural to me due to my native tongue not being gendered to begin with.

But other than the old “he/she” (annoying) repeated thing or perhaps “they”, some other constructs feel pretty forced. I feel that without starting a conversation where both sides partake, no consensus will ever happen. Or, probably the foremost should be the actual targeted demographic be consulted, because in plenty of cases these are not coming from them and they don’t even approve of these changes, making it the old feel-good changes for the sake of it.

Filtering out people who get upset about nonsense like this is a feature, not a bug.
>Well, it turns out people are more interested in avoiding upsetting people through gendered language than through non-gendered language.

You mistakenly wrote "people" when you meant to write "Google and those who ascribe to the same ridiculous cultural mores as Google".

My worries seem important to me, if you ask me ...
Well, thoughts and prayers. We're fighting a different fight.