There have been many cultural revolutions throughout history where a group tries to retrain millions through shaming, reeducation, force, policy, banning, censorship, etc.
From a historical perspective all that has change is which group is important enough and what titles are deemed socially required.
Because the reality is, I'm trans and I don't feel safe participating on Hacker News anymore. If I try to ask someone to be respectful towards me, I know I'll be attacked because this is the top comment. And that sucks.
It is bigoted, because the implication behind this belief that all trans people are delusional, mentally ill or liars.
Mind you, I agree that "they" is an acceptable pronoun unless it's being exclusively used to avoid the chosen pronouns of trans people (in other words, it's fine to me if applied neutrally) and I think SO is going overboard here, but your comment has a lot of anti-trans bigotry in it you may not recognize.
The comparison here is utterly absurd. Why not throw something about Hitler in there too?
Not likely to happen while SO's moderators aren't even honestly engaging with the community, but instead rewriting their posts without comment: https://meta.stackexchange.com/posts/334979/revisions
Citation?
LGBTQ population estimate (US) 4.5%:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population...
Transgender population estimate (US) 1M/0.3%
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227946/
From the above, "The available evidence suggests that the size of the gender-nonconforming or gender-variant population may be twice as large as our best estimate for the transgender population size."
That pushes the estimate to 0.6% of which non-binary or andogynous is a subset.
I'm not LGBTQ unfriendly at all so don't go there. I am, however, going to question stats that appear questionable, regardless of my personal beliefs.
So, it’s a touch more complicated than that.
This can alienate the 8.3%+, and is probably one of the reasons why that percentage is that low.
This change isn't just about trans people, but about anyone who doesn't use he/him or isn't male.
That "probably" there isn't justified, in my opinion. As others in that FAQ thread have pointed out, StackOverflow isn't a place where a lot of third-person interaction is taking place, so I'd consider it a stretch to make that out as a reason that non-males are lacking there.
Maybe it's just that women often have better things to do than to ask strangers for help on why their Haskell state monad is acting up.
A new user will typically arrive at SE for asking or answering specific questions. Even most of the users with accounts rarely seem to go near meta and chat.
When I was active on SE (I gave up logging in a few years ago), meta was the afterthought to bitch about some policy or detail and the annoying habits of questioners. The chat usually empty or quiet enough that even looking to see if it was active seemed mostly pointless. I'm sure it's grown since, but that's not really where new people are going.
People are making a huge deal out of nothing.
For 99% of questions and answers pronouns are irrelevant, and rarely ever seen.
It is not in any way bigoted or transphobic to believe that a person being a man or a woman, and therefore the pronouns used to refer to that person, are determined by that person's sex at birth. This was the accepted belief of the vast majority of the human race up until about 20 minutes ago, when it suddenly became a bannable offense.
StackOverflow going all-in in support of social engineering on behalf of political activists is baffling to me. Where does this end? Is the goal really to force all of society to change to placate a small group of activists? A reasonable compromise would have just been to allow "they" to refer to someone in a neutral way, but I understand that this is actually not allowed if the person being referred to has stated they would like "he" or "she". This is what makes me think it's more about social engineering than actually protecting anyone from harm.