It does seem to me that complaining about gendered language in source code is about as stupid as a moral panic over daemons in systemd, or vulgarities in source code comments. There is some place for it… but not much

On top of that, ‘he’/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time. I understand the desire to change that, but it’s still a normal thing in English language. Similar to ‘master’ in git repositories and IDE connections, though those are both much more recent and arguably referencing much worse.

If a dev insists on ‘she’ everywhere, or ‘they’ in places that read awkwardly, should we flame and blame? In fact, why not go and convince Firefox to use exclusively feminine language in their source, to balance things out. It sounds more sensible than taking up a political fight over this!

Also while you’re at it, ethical hacking is now done only by natural-human-skin-colour-hat hackers; background process on your computer are called abstract beings; your computer does not boot[strap], (‘pull itself up by its bootstraps’), it has affirmative action from the motherboard to get it started; and when I saw the article headline, I thought the issue would be bigger … that’s what they said.

Calling an unspecified gender person anything other than “they” was until recently considered to be incorrect. “They” is plural but now is used to refer to singlar persons because writing “he or she” everywhere is too much. Calling a user “he” does not imply that users are male or can only be male. Not using “they” or “he/she” or obscure gender neutral pronouns does not make something inherently transphobic. Closing PRs that unnecessarily change pronouns as spam is not inherently transphobic, but the accompanying comment is not very inclusive.

The post talks about “white suppremacist language,” but the proposed change did not remove white suppremacist language. It was just a generic anti “woke” message, possibly motivated by people brigading after the original PR to change “he” to “they.” White suppremacists may use also use similar language, but you can’t just pick things that a white suppremacist has done and decide that anyone else who does the same is a white suppremacist. He’s not blameless, but people are intentionally provoking the developer and exagerating the responses for drama.

This is such a weird thing for the dev to decide to die on. I understand, although i don’t agree, with the “there are TWO genders” issue, and the desire for folks who are in that genre of people to avoid the whole thing, perhaps even forcefully. I don’t understand why including women, one of the two genders they do approve of, is considered overly “political”. How dare someone suggest girls might like tech? Ridiculous! I almost get the first instance, as a mistaken attempt to not support trans folks (which, again, is stupid anyway) but the constant rejection means they are CLEARLY just misogynists.

This whole thing has jilted-lover vibes. There is no other reasonable explanation for dredging up a three-year-old PR denial than simply shit-stirring for the sake of trying to embarrass or hurt the dev in some way. It reeks of simple childish revenge.