It won’t mind.

Useful!

There are a lot of opposition-worthy linguistic acrobatics within that space, but default they/them is none of them.

It works perfectly. It is inoffensive, a drop-in-replacement, doesn't elongate sentences or any other such negative side effects.

It's real known words not just freshly invented. And it's even semantically correct.

The they/them swap is the most elegant implementation I am aware of.

> The they/them swap is the most elegant implementation I am aware of.

Far from it, it only creates confusion and injects ideologically charged "pronoun language" into the discussion. If you feel the need to make clear that yes, the person you're talking about can be a man as well as a woman - something which most people realise and the ones who don't won't anyway no matter which words you use - use something like s/he or "he or she". The first form is just as short, is not ideologically charged and does not create ambiguity.

What confusion does it create?

You may genuinely not know the gender of an online nickname, and, frankly, you also don't really have to know? Why share this metadata in the first place.

I kinda see your point regarding "it pulls in culture war", but, to be fair, it's "they/them". Language that - in this very usage - predates the culture war by centuries.

So.. idk I think you might be wrong here.

"They" is plural AND singular. Obviously it creates confusion.

Fair pushback, however, again, I would ask to which degree and to what end.

"There is an entity named doob, and they are responsible for this thing" at least to me kinda solves the exact thing (attribution, "where to ask with questions") it needs to solve, while simultaneously encoding the least amount of metadata possible.

In this case it could be plural though. Very much so.

Unless they are non-binary? But in some languages you'll still run into trouble. In Italian, if your masculine, it's non-binario, and if you're feminine, it's non-binaria.

> In Italian, if your masculine, it's non-binario, and if you're feminine, it's non-binaria.

Haha what the fuck. Who implemented that oh my god.

Genuine question though. That cannot be grassroots, can it? Because it completely defeats the purpose of that. Did this just come up because someone _had_ to translate the english culture war during news reporting?

It reminds me of the atheists of northern Ireland getting asked, yes but which atheist are you, Catholic or protestant?

It was implemented when gendered languages developed a few thousand years ago, neutral words in english (binary) are gendered in other languages (e.g.: binario/binaria in spanishas well). Americans tried to fix the issue for latinos/latinas by coming up with latinx/latine and similar modifications to gendered spanish words, but it was wholly rejected by actual latin-americans.

Prefer harmless confusion to harmful intolerance

Intolerance of what? The term is used here because the person can be either male or female. S/he does that job just as well without creating confusion.

His brand is literally "Mr Doob"

The consensus in English-writing guides like the APA or Elements of Style is about staying true to a person's self-identified pronoun while preferring specificity over ambiguity. In a case where you don't know - "they" is perfectly acceptable. In a case where "they" is an explicit self-identity - it's the only correct option. In this case, where he literally calls himself "Mr", it's stylistically incorrect to choose a more ambiguous pronoun where "he" is the correct one for someone calling themselves "mr"

Hm. Interesting argument, but I kinda disagree with the premise that "if we have anything exposing gender metadata, the rest of the language around it in a sentence must be pulled into referencing that to be more correct".

It's a coherent thing to argue for, I'll give you that, but it's also.. kinda arbitrary? And one can make an equally convincing case for statelessness in the sense that just because one word carries metadata, doesn't mean that the other words around it must react to it.

You're making a straw-man argument with "anything exposing gender metadata". It's not like I dug up some obscure article - it's literally his chosen brand name. There's nothing arbitrary to use "he" for somebody who calls himself "mr".

Is it possible that you have a good point about inclusive writing in general, but you just happened to hop on the wrong case to make your stand, didn't realize that we're talking about an explicit "mr"?

Huh?

Isn't a strawman something I would make up that you would have said to then attack it?

[delayed]

Uh, okay, but, how do you just disagree with an idea then?

The idea being

> it's stylistically incorrect to choose a more ambiguous pronoun

And my disagreement being with the assessment that it is "incorrect". It's not. That's an arbitrary choice and pointing to "authorities" there changes nothing about the arbitrary-ness.

In fact, I went all in on good faith there by validating that idea as one coherent way to see this topic.

I just fundamentally disagree with it and brought forward my equally valid and coherent way to see this topic.

Which got countered with a "this is just a strawman" (which is false, as that is not how strawmans work) followed by a direct attack

> but you just happened to hop on the wrong case to make your stand, didn't realize that we're talking about an explicit "mr"?

And now you show up and.. uh.

Yeah anyway. The direct attack there alone is enough to lose any moral highground. So even if I had been doing what I was accused of (which I clearly did not), that would be a less worse offense?

Idk.

If you ask me I am seeing people here, desparate to have a culture war discussion and force reality into their tiny little pre-defined shapes they have in their heads. Regrettably.

But I am only saying this now that the thread is already dead and I am not the one who killed it.

> And my disagreement being with the assessment that it is "incorrect". It's not. That's an arbitrary choice and pointing to "authorities" there changes nothing about the arbitrary-ness.

I don't see why de-gendering people would be less upsetting than gendering them correctly, and THAT is clearly seen as absolutely unacceptable by many. One can't claim a moral high ground if one is just as obnoxious as ones opponents.

I said:

> it's stylistically incorrect

Not grammatically, not factually - but stylistically.

I also said:

> In this case, where he literally calls himself "Mr"

Not all cases, not as a general idea, but rather when his self-identified pronoun is known.

You're free to ignore style guides, in fact you're free to write your own - but they generally agree that when a self-identified pronoun is known, it's clearer and better writing to use that specific pronoun rather than the ambiguous "they"