> while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy? And how do you square it with calling someone an asshole in the next paragraph? That passes as professionalism and empathy at Joyent?
> On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent tolerates.
They're not opposing the use of the word "he," they're opposing him saying "no, go away, I don't see any reason someone could take offense" when the issue was pointed out instead of "thanks for the patch."
It's not so crazy if you put down your pitchfork for a sec.
1) Every employee is an ambassador of your company's brand, and Tech already has a sexism problem to begin with.
2) It's not about the pronoun so much as it's about Ben re-rejecting a patch that Isaac, the project lead, had already accepted, solely on the grounds of pronoun genders.
#2 really has no other explanation than sexism; and when his behaviour is conducted in public on the internet, where the "Joyent employs bigots" meme has potential to go viral, that'd be cause for concern for any employer.
Now, I like to think that had Ben been a Joyent employee the author of this pieces would have had a standard "we have concerns with your conduct" meeting with Ben before reaching for the banhammer but we don't really have any way of knowing.
I think #2 happened because Alex (the creator of the PR) was being hostile in his comments. I doubt Ben would have closed this PR if Alex would have approached the subject with more poise and kindness.
Not everyone is familiar with the battle of gender inequality in tech and the fact that some people find gendered pronouns exclusionary.
This was a perfect time to help the cause and educate developers, but instead Alex chose to be hostile because they didn't understand.
We need to remember that the Internet is a global community and not everyone we deal with has english as a first language, Ben being from The Netherlands most likely speaks dutch first which has its own gender language issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Dutch_grammar
It's so easy to condemn others, isn't it? There are many possible motives for Ben's actions, sexism being only one of them. Moreover, convicting someone and giving them the "committer's death sentence" on such flimsy evidence ought to give anyone pause.
Demands for strict orthodoxy aren't the way to navigate the path of righteous inclusion. When a minor situation blows out of proportion you make sure to clearly state policy, set the people who did something wrong straight and make sure that everybody is on the same page. You use heavy handed tools like bans, firing, or removal of contributor privileges when it becomes clear that someone is set on wrong doing despite warnings and clarifications. Punishment at the hint of political incorrectness just leads to an environment of fear.
Grammar purity is a reasonable alternate explanation. My past English teachers and some of my current friends would be appalled at the use of "they/them" as a singular pronoun. I have utmost confidence my friends are not covert sexists; rather they appreciate the power of clarity in writing.
#2 has the alternative explanation of passive aggressive frustration, in addition to sexism. Sort of an irritable "you aren't going to tell me what to do" attitude. Not sure if that is better or worse than sexism, but it is a definite possibility.
That also sounds like a pretty undesirable attribute in an employee, especially one who is hypothetically in a prominent position in a major open source project.
The whole event reads to me like Ben was having a bad day and rejected a minimal patch, and then it exploded and he was grumpy. I imagine that on a normal day, a good F/OSS leader would accept patches that improve or make the codebase more consistent, even if they are fairly minimal. That's how code grows.
I'm giving Ben the benefit of the doubt that he was in a mood, which is why he behaved as a bad project leader. If this became a regular occurrence, then there's a problem.
Ben's behavior isn't about the gendered pronouns. I think it's great that the project is committing to using appropriate language. But I don't think this is what made this incident occur.
EDIT: removed some poorly chosen words that didn't reflect the point of my comment.
As someone who works with a lot of people in social justice, I can say for sure this is not what social justice is about.
No True Scotsman there.
It may not be to you, but social justice has been diluted to an insane and incoherent pseudo-academic political correctness that goes to such extreme lengths it becomes equivalent to the very thing it opposes (as per the principle of the horseshoe theory).
I too am giving Ben the benefit of the doubt here. If the OP of the patch had gone through and consistently changed all He|She -> Them|They im sure Ben would have merged it in as a consistent change.
To a reasonable approximation, it turns out the author of PR did consistently change gendered language in the project, there just wasn't very much of it to begin with. That wasn't my assumption either (I thought there'd be more such language somewhere), and the biases that created that assumption are surely an interesting "this is how these problems happen" sort of side topic.
Anyway, definitely a lesson in where we choose to direct the benefit of the doubt. In this case, the author of the PR was the one who deserved it, but wasn't the one who received it.
> Anyway, definitely a lesson in where we choose to direct the benefit of the doubt. In this case, the author of the PR was the one who deserved it, but wasn't the one who received it.
"Benefit of the doubt" isn't such a finite resource. If anyone escalating this chain of tomfoolery had applied it, you would have likely found that there was more than enough to go around.
What Ben did seems to be a message to women that they don't belong and aren't welcome. Whether you like it or not, that is how many women (and men as well) interpret the use of gendered pronouns. What joyent did is say Ben is an asshole. They aren't the same thing. Part of creating an inclusionary companies, industries, and associations is removing the default assumption that engineers are male, and language is a critical way that presumption is conveyed.
"to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense "
That's great. But that's not what Ben said. He said he rejected it for being too trivial for a pull request.
If there was a typo in the docs (e.g. "f*cktion" instead of "function") would he have rejected a patch for being "too trivial" as well? Which is worse: a typo or misogyny? (rhetorical question)
I have no reason to suspect that he wouldn't treat your hypothetical patch any differently than he did this one. I think this has very little to do with his opinion of women, and it seems a bit of a stretch to assume he hates women based on this.
I'm not a git expert. I wonder didn't the guy who accepted the commit kind of offend the guy who had already publicly said he wouldn't merge it? If so, reverting the commit would much likely be about something entirely different than pronouns.
Suppose the merger had merged the commit before the discussion, would it also have been reverted? I rather doubt it (not knowing any of the people involved, though).
I think with Joyent's conduct today libuv is 100% more likely to be forked than it was yesterday. Accusing a committer of lacking empathy in an official blog post is not cool.
That dehumanizing attitude is extremely common in first-world "social justice warrior" circles.
They consciously and deliberately use shaming and bullying tactics to intimidate others into silence. They acknowledge this constantly, especially on Twitter when their bullying victims ask why the "social justice warriors" are being so cruel.
Their answers are typically something like, "We need everyone to know that being a fucking asshole like you will mean everyone will mock and hate you."
These activists are quite literally bullies. It's extremely important that we continue to stand up to them.
As he expands on it later, it was a deliberate choice of gendered pronoun given (a) no particular need for it and (b) a perfectly acceptable alternative being provided. Additional context is that Ben not only rejected the PR, but then reverted it after another dev accepted and merged it.
I'm as capitalist as the day is long, but some of the Can't Get Your Degree Without Learning Applied Marxism memories are getting pinged a bit by the naked use of economic power to punish thoughtcrime. This impression is further strengthened by the not insignificant detail that Capital is here asserting the right to punish Labor even though Capital has negative a billion desire to ever cut Labor a check.
Another thing reminding me of university: "The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small" was originally said about academic infighting but could also be applied to drama over the social functioning of a commit bit.
I haven't seen any (comprehensive) explanation for why the original patch was rejected, but it might be as simple as that he wasn't interested in his project becoming part of someone else's fight. That doesn't mean he's sexist, it might be as simple as that he isn't interested in feminism's battle to redefine acceptable language. Reasonable people can disagree on that sort of thing without being women haters.
> it might be as simple as that he isn't interested in feminism's battle to redefine acceptable language
Huh? Singular they has been in use for over five hundred years (it shows up in Shakespeare) and is standard for modern technical writing and in most other contexts. It is not a conspiracy of some sort.
Read the issue and the revert in particular. Once committed, it took deliberate desire to be provocative to remove it and threaten someone else's commuter status.
You might want to read up on the term "thoughtcrime."
Ben was an ass and very poorly represented the Node.js community. A "thoughtcrime" is a crime that is a crime because of the thoughts of the perpetrator.
Every country, essentially, has crimes based on your thoughts. It's called "intent to XXX", where XXX is some actual criminal act that you didn't do. "Intent to commit murder" is a crime for planning to kill someone.
So being a poor representation of the company sponsoring the project is relegated to being merely a thoughtcrime?
Even if the company espoused your wild viewpoint, not responding as such has toxic consequences for the company itself, which ultimately has negative consequences for all the people employed by Joyent. At the very least, it was a business move.
He's not getting "fired" for behavior, he's explicitly getting fired because the decision maker believes that the behavior must be motivated by an attitude the decision maker disapproves of. That's the thoughtcrime. This is not the subtext of the post. It is the explicit text. Also in the explicit text is the decision maker praising an actual employee for probably being free of the thoughtcrime that is a firing offense at his employer. Does that ping your Ominous Sentences radar just a little bit?
Let me try a different tact. Suppose for the moment that you and I have the same politics with regsrds to the underlying issues. It is very very dangerous to endorse employers doing this. Think whose ox is going to get gored more often. It is probably not well-paid cisgendered white men who hold opinions which are widely representative of those in the tech community.
"He's" not getting "fired" at all. The annoying thing about this post is that Joyent's representative is taking a facially absurd hardline position about a stupid intramural developer pissing match (one that just happens to have a faint aura of gender politics) so he can use the nil-stakes of totally hypothetical drama to position himself and his company politically.
This isn't "capital" punishing "labor" for "thoughtcrime". It's just posturing. If the "accused" had actually worked for Joyent, one assumes the whole issue would have been settled in a couple email round trips, tops.
Maybe I missed some context in the linked post, I didn't see much explanation of anything Ben did other than reject a pull request.
Personally I don't think the fight over the use of "he" as a gender neutral pronoun is over and done so without additional context it seems rather extremist to declare Ben as the next Hitler, let alone to imagine what Ben's reasoning was.
Edit: I went back and read the comments on the pull request and the revert and I'm not seeing evidence of misogyny or even anything that could be a firing offense. Yeah Ben was a jerk and who knows maybe his reason for rejecting the pull request was actually misogynistic. Getting rid of a contributor seems like the worst possible solution to the problem though. Remonstrate with them and explain that using gender neutral language is a valid change and that they shouldn't be passive aggressive with their VCS actions if they want to continue to be part of the project. Giving them the boot for perceived thought crimes is just horrible in every aspect.
> the behavior must be motivated by an attitude the decision maker disapproves of
people get fired for attitudes all the time: "not being a team player", "having a giant ego", etc. being against hiring assholes is not being the "thought police".
> Suppose for the moment that you and I have the same politics with regsrds to the underlying issues
this is not a political issue for any reasonably scoped definition of the word "political". supporting gender neutrality in technical documentation is not some political stance.
he's explicitly getting fired because the decision maker believes that the behavior must be motivated by an attitude the decision maker disapproves of.
But that happens all the time, and is OK! If an employee made a hiring decision by being motivated not on finding the best candidate for the employer, but by being motivated by wanting their child to get the job, that's an fireable offence. If someone made an internal promotion by being motivated by bribery, that's a fireable offence. etc.
Like the article says, it's not that the original author was both sexist and sloppy with language, although they were. The problem is that the sexism was actively reinforced in a public forum, first by a dismissive comment and then by an actual reversion. It would have taken no effort at all to make the correction; it was actually more work to reinforce the sexism. That means it was willful.
If one of my employees was being willfully sexist in public in a way that reflected on my company, I'd fire them too. Node.js is a really important project, closely associated with Joyent, and they've already seen some backlash from this. This kind of behavior could have real implications for the company's bottom line, and potentially even legal liabilities. Being inclusive is good business.
To reiterate: the original sexism, while dumb, is not a fireable offense. To actually go out of your way to be an asshole and practice discrimination while representing a company: totally a fireable offense. I'm not really sure why so many other commenters feel differently.
Just to be clear, the use of the gendered pronoun isn't the issue -- it was the insistence on it, to the point of attempting to revert @izs's commit fixing the issue. To me, that transcends from rational position to unacceptably inappropriate, and it speaks well beyond a pronoun. You might say that reaction is extreme, but I would be willing to bet that you've fired people for less: I bet you have (or would) fire people for merely being an asshole. Firing someone for being such an asshole on such a small issue that in fact has broader consequences for the hostility of a work environment is actually a no-brainer.
I say this fully aware that it risks inviting a backlash, but as a female developer I applaud this move.
Misogynist assholes are insidious in that they are often hard to uncover, but brutal to any women in the office. All developers are not misogynist assholes; quite the opposite, the vast majority I've worked with have been pleasant and awesome. But when that one asshole sneaks in, and nobody sees his assholery but you, it becomes an office environment of "me or him, and he has more experience and I don't want to seem to be rocking the boat... nobody else has a problem with him, maybe it's me?", then eventually I left.
I could ramble about this for a while, but it may just not be one of those things which can be easily communicated. Now, as a manager, I look for examples like this which demonstrate a person's biases, and if they don't self-correct (with prodding) I have zero compunctions with letting them go. It keeps the family healthy.
The problem I have is calling someone a "misogynist asshole" on the basis of just one thing. It doesn't look like there's been any dialogue with this person, the blog post doesn't touch on past behaviour. What if the person in question was reverting to reasons other than the content? What if English isn't his first language and he didn't fully understand the implications? From here it just looks like "he's a witch burn him".
There is no question that people with negative attitudes can have a deeply destructive effect on a team and an industry in general, or that you and others have suffered because of them. But this seems to have kicked off on a real hair trigger.
How would you react to someone that writes a blog post at a moment's notice calling someone an "asshole" and saying "he should be fired", whatever the issue is?
That's where he (potentially) stepped over the line. If he were in the office it would at the very least precipitate a serious discussion. It's the refusal to acknowledge the feedback or policy which really screams out "asshole".
Again, I would need to have a relationship with him to be sure of it, but the OP did have that relationship. Assuming this wasn't the first issue, it would be even more inappropriate for him to go blabbing about that history on a random pull request, don't you think? That would just be character assassination.
To anyone who hasn't followed the link to the reversal, this seems to be a case of a normal power struggle:
"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."
As others have said, this might still have been the result of confusion. bnoordhuis clearly didn't realise that bert had signed off on the change already. There are apparently other issues, such as people making minor changes and sneaking into the contributor list, which maintainers have to deal with day to day. I don't know much of this, but it's detailed in other posts.
I think this isn't clear cut. Certainly not clear enough cut for all this uproar.
Since he's just a contributor, and has not been fired (nor could he be), in this case OP is describing a hypothetical situation in which someone in his office might exhibit similar behaviour and how that would be handled.
The situations are different enough that I consider his post one which uses the opportunity to make a hypothetical point rather than one which describes a real situation. (For instance, in an office setting a first step would be to talk to the person in question. The second step would be to consider their holistic reputation in the office. Etc.)
I went back and read the article. Weasel words. Yes it's hypothetical situation but he is explicitly linking Ben and this hypothetical situation. He didn't have to use Ben's name and the word 'asshole' in adjacent sentences. It looks pretty deliberate to me.
I think a lot of people (Bryan, commenters in this thread, and the people abusing and bullying noorhuis on twitter) got hot under the collar and are retroactively trying to rationalise and explain their behaviour rather than apologising and saying "sorry we got caught up in the lynch mob". I've not seen a single answer to the question of "why are you ignoring the fact that he was following the procedure had no option".
Anyway, this has been talked to death. I'm interested in this because I empathise with the injustice of it, can't stand a witchhunt, and don't think that bullying should happen, in any of its forms. Everyone's drawn a slightly different conclusion about the people involved, we can all learn something about humanity and move on.
I suppose it depends on the prevailing culture (I'm guessing American). As a European, I would say firing someone over the above would be a deeply intolerant act, and possibly illegal.
In a lot of cases (at least in the UK), it could fall under gross misconduct, for which your employer is allowed to terminate you on the spot. Of course, you can then take them to an employment tribunal who will then deliberate on if this was appropriate.
I think the concern is that there is no provided evidence of Ben behaving as a bad project leader before now. If he's been an ass two to three times, that's a problem. If he's having an off day and makes a small mistake, there are better ways to solve the problem than publicly blogging about how you would have fired him.
Did he insist on using a masculine pronoun or was he guilty of being insinsitive to the importance of the commit? those are two very different things. Reasoned discussion could have fixed the latter, which I suspect is the case here.
This is something that calls for dialogue, discussion and debate. I seriously hope Ben Noordhuis learns from this. But to say that you would fire someone over this is a sign that you are not a fit company for a reasonable person to buy from or work for.
On the contrary, this is the only acceptable response for a company. To not respond this strongly would invite more intense criticism, potentially at a national scale, as well as a toxic environment for any female engineers internally due to the company being perceived as not doing enough. This would be poisonous for recruiting where good engineering talent is at a premium, and potentially disastrous for the company as a whole if clients decide to protest not having a no tolerance attitude towards this behavior by withdrawing their business.
Whatever the views people may have here, the company was boxed in & was forced to make a strong statement. To do otherwise would be a terrifying mistake for the company itself.
There are people who want to believe in a great conspiracy of "politically correct" social justice warriors, who are using their political influence to bully corporations and individuals, which seems to be compatible with what you're saying. There are also people who want to believe in a great conspiracy of male software developers who think that women are at best unnecessary and at worst inferior contributors to the industry. Both are totally incorrect, but these debates often seem to proceed on the basis that these two sides are real and at war with each other, and the only choice we have is which side we want to be on. I don't think you're deliberately reinforcing this idea, but this is the effect that posts like yours can have.
Would you be willing to put your company on the line in the event of such a situation? I mentioned potentially - it is possible almost none of those possibilities happened. But if you were in the position to make risk assessments for your company, would you risk this story being picked up by national media?
Similarly, would you put your company's culture on the line?
Hmm. I'm probably the kind of person who would try to refuse being influenced by what I believed to be unreasonable pressure. I've said how I think this situation should be handled and I would be willing to defend that. I suppose I have a lot of faith in talking sensibly to people and working things out, and maybe that is naive.
Sometimes one simply has to call the bluff. If I had to say what "side" I'm on, I'd say I'm on the side of inclusivity and I'm happy to state a clear preference for the removal of gender-exclusive language from source code comments. If people think that's not enough, and that I should start firing people who do not immediately agree to do so when presented with ad-hoc pull requests to that effect, I'd also be willing to explain to those people why I won't be firing anyone on those grounds. If we believe that everyone really does divide into the two camps of totalitarian feminists and reactionary chauvinists then I'm going to be attacked by both sides. My point is that I believe that very few people hold such views, and that most people just want the right thing to happen and for nobody to get hurt in the process, and I can't imagine that I could suffer meaningful damage from holding such a view.
That's a fair position to hold - I would prefer to err on being decisive & setting a no tolerance standard on this type of behavior, but your approach/viewpoint isn't onerous. However, it is risky in that this is the type of issue that can result in lost business since there are arguably enough public details here to make a judgment call.
If I were a female engineer, I would not get upset about the whole "he/she" controversy, rather I would be concerned that a temperamental manager could fire someone over something so trivial.
I know plenty of quality female engineers who would be greatly offended or disturbed, not to mention female employees overall - it isn't about the he/she controversy itself necessarily (although using male gendered pronouns exclusively has a long history of intimidating women & making them feel less welcome). It may also offend quality male engineers, who feel like the culture at the company is not as rosy as they expected. As a male engineer myself, if I saw such signs, I'd think about jumping ship simply because leadership isn't thinking at a high level about the effects of their actions (or inactions), and word has a habit of getting around (and in this case, it is visible enough as is). Just as companies don't want to associate with something less desirable most of the time, there is a lot of quality employees that feel that way about employers.
Tech companies like to bill themselves as great places to work for all prospective employees they court - this is the type of issue that is exactly an instant dealbreaker for many out there if it is not handled decisively.
> If I were a female engineer, I would not get upset about the whole "he/she" controversy
This statement is a perfect demonstration of why people accuse tech nerds of having no empathy. You really have no idea whether you would get upset or not, because you have no idea what effect a lifetime of subtle (and often overt) sexism would have on you. You do not have the experience to simply declare what your feelings would be if the tables were turned.
Is there seriously an argument to be made for a pro-"he" side? I don't understand how people both say "there should be a debate" and also "it's one word in meaningless documentation".
Oh yes there is. He and She can only refer to people while They can refer to things, too. Take for example: "if a person wishes to rungle the querts, they need to configure them such so that they will be in the state indicated by the widget manager". A sentence like that, while ultimately understandable, does cause me mild confusion at first read, and I'm sure I can come up with a more natural-sounding, but more confusing example, if I weren't so tired.
From my point of view, English is basically fucked. You've ended up with third person pronouns that are irredeemably connected with the gender of the person they describe. They is really a cludge that sort of works, but isn't quite a drop-in replacement for good old She and He.
I'd use They when the text can flow naturally with it, but drop to She/He when it starts sounding ambiguous or use any other kind of description. If writing instruction manuals, I'd use You to refer to the user at all times, or just drop to passive form and not mention people's genders at all.
There's probably an argument for it, yes. I can't imagine that it's a very good one, but I imagine that it exists. (There's always an argument for the status quo, which is "this is how we've always done it", and there's certainly a tradition of using "he" as a singular pronoun).
In any case, I am contrasting "debate" with "we would fire you for not agreeing with us". Debate does not imply that both sides are equal, but it does mean that people are given the opportunity to hear both sides of an argument and decide what they want to do. If Ben Noordhuis still thinks that gendered pronouns are a good idea after this debate, he's still entitled to his opinion, but if Joyent are the owners of the project he's working on then he'll have to keep his opinion to himself when working on that project.
"He" (or sometimes alternation between "he" and "she") is stipulated in some older style manuals (I think the New Yorker still uses the latter, say).
There are also some people who seem to be under the impression that singular they is a neologism created by an imagined political correctness conspiracy (of course, they're wrong; it's been in use for over five centuries).
What we really need here is some kind of blind poll, with results aggregated into two buckets:
"Female developers who have worked in the valley." and "Everyone else".
I think the HN community might be surprised by the results.
As a female developer, I assert that you haven't a clue what you're talking about, and you don't understand what it's like to work in this industry as a woman.
First, try listening. Then, try observing your workplace and peers. Finally, consider what Ben's actions (particularly his refusal to accept feedback or accept reality) have unveiled about his biases and daily behavior.
I can't find any examples of a pronoun in my personal repository or work repository, but in a few bug submissions I say "she".
But if anyone ever challenged me on it, or suggested it was inappropriate, or rejected a pull request, I'd _totally_ understand. Just as if I accidentally said something which was accidentally racist or ethnocentric. It's not about the original "he", it's about the rejection of active inclusion.
edit: Scanned my whole code tree and ticket database, and found 7 "she"'s, 5 "he"'s and 8 "they"'s. The gendered pronouns were all referring to specific people, except for one "she", referring to a hypothetical external API customer. I've just patched it to "they".
Of course, my team works for a female CTO (me) and is ~50/50 m/f, so we are very much not representative. But since this was totally unplanned, this suggests a curious corollary that the absence of default-masculinity seems to be at least be correlated with gender equality in an office.
It's not that surprising that the presence of a diverse mix of people makes it likely for imaginary people to be less stereotyped.
I must admit as a non-native speaker, I am still not quite sure how to properly use "they". I wasn't aware of the possibility before this discussion occurred.
and that an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well.
Uuuuh, yeah, except for the little bit about the English language having notoriously poor support for gender neutral pronouns in the first place. TBH, blindly substituting "them" and "they" everywhere will result in sentences that are incorrect. It doesn't take a huge lack of empathy to suggest that it's better to write in a way that's grammatically correct while asking people to accept either:
a. the generic use of "he" OR "she" as a universal singular pronon
or
b. randomly switching between the two throughout the document as way of indicating inclusiveness.
Gender is the grammar layer above sex. Sex informs gender. Gender is not a purely social construct out of nowhere. In English, there is the ternary, but it is defined as without the male/female. People generally don't like being called it though. Even if they have a special snowflake prounoun such as xer which they prefer the rest of the world can't know this and so it is fair and reasonable to call them what they look like they most identify out of the binary. Or we can just stop using pronouns altogether, even in industries largely of men, because we wouldn't want to make it seem like women can't take part in them (even when there is nothing stopping them). I'd be fine with that. Men don't exist anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAuqkqxk9A
>It is also informed by sex, but that is only one influence.
Right, so it's not fair to say that gender != sex when gender is the grammatical expression of a sex within an environment's constraints.
>You are confusing grammatical gender with gender identity.
The grammar is the expression of masculine and feminine, which vary based on constraints, but still stick to the sexual binary. Going beyond that is special snowflake territory where people invent their own thing to be unique while expecting to be taken seriously. Complaining that people don't use your preferred pronoun is a perfect case for first world problems.
My original comment you replied to "There are human genders other than male and female? Scientific or imaginary?"
All else other than male (primary masculine) and female (primary feminine) are imaginary, and not based on biological reality. Those things do not merit being taken seriously no more than any religion or superstition. Male and female based sexes will always be re-expressed in very similar ways, as they have all over the world in varying civilizations, while others will never be the same. I'ts the same as religions or ideologies. It is complete fabrication of the mind. If people want to invent new identities fine, but white washing away him and her so that all of the other newly minted pronouns don't feel left out is ridiculous.
>Hi, I'm Caramelkh. I'm demisexual, polyromantic, fat positive genderqueer (neutrois, femme presenting), sexual assault survivor (7 times), native American, Muslim neuroatypical with OCD, cotard delusion, trimethylaminuria, social phobias, depression, post traumatic stress, anxiety issues and I can't walk very far. On my blog I will NOT tolerate any form of oppressive bullshit language and I will not hesitate to call you out on it. My preferred pronouns are ze/zy/zo/zum. After reading my about me section above, you still know nothing about me other than that the long list of labels means I get to have experienced nearly every type of kyriarchy oppression and so I can call people out on anything and say it triggers and offends me. If people get bored, I invent new oppressions. I'm triggered by the color teal.
Or better yet the new thing of people insisting to be called only by the pronoun brony.
Gender identity is not at all the “grammatical expression of a sex within an environment’s constraints”. It is ‘a person's sense of self as a member of a particular gender.‘ — http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gender_identity
> All else other than male (primary masculine) and female (primary feminine) are imaginary, and not based on biological reality. Those things do not merit being taken seriously no more than any religion or superstition.
Complete and utter bullshit, evidenced by how the ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” vary between and even within societies. These ideas are hardly the same “all over the world in varying civilizations”. Please, please read the Wikipedia article on Gender Identity, especially the section on non-western gender identities. It is such a different concept than classifying nouns.
Even grammatical gender is hardly consistent or strict with its being informed by sex. In Spanish, a man’s shirt would still be “la camisa”, a feminine noun. A female cheetah would still be called “el guepardo”. This insistence on adhering to biological sex — which itself isn’t even always binary — as a strict basis for gender makes no sense.
Grammar is how an idea is communicated. If a person has an identity they want to share then the pronouns they use communicate their identity, but if they use an uncommonly used pronoun then their identity is not understood, not communicated, and if gender neutral pronouns are used then no identity is communicated, or it's just completely confusing as is the case with using xer. I'm fine with people inventing identities outside of the binary, I'm fine with cultures having outliers to the natural occurring roles the constraints of reality offer, because all cultures and languages developed in different environments with different forces pushing and pulling. What bothers me is the white washing of the binary male/female him/her in an attempt to represent everyone when people invent their own identities which did not occur naturally as a consequence of environment. If a culture has some instances where definite articles are sometimes out of what is naturally expected from the basic grammar then that's cool, but it's still not the norm. You mention because they are exceptions not because they are everywhere.
>, evidenced by how the ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” vary between and even within societies
I did say that they did vary in an earlier comment, but they still follow the biological binary. They are a product of biology. I'm talking from experience of being around different cultures and I have never been in one where men are not generally male and women are not generally female. The same gender roles also still exist, because the dimorphic nature of humans make different behaviors more advantageous for each sex to do.
I'm aware of things like XYY syndrome, but expression wise they are still male.
>third gender
Transpeople exist, yeah! Like in an earlier comment I also said that there is a third option in English the it, but transpeople don't like that word as far as I know because it has a history of being derogatory as is illustrated in the wikipedia page as people being seen as without gender. They are people with gender dysphoria, because they generally would have rather been born the other gender. For whatever reason, as they developed their hormones were not at the male/female ideals and so they expressed in different ways outside of the male/female ideal ranges, and their behavior expressed in ways not common within their natural sex, so they become outcasts being not really attractive or useful to either natural sex in traditional societies. I empathize with their suffering, but I still see it for what it is. There is no plethora of varying genders divorced from sex. There is a lot of made up stuff though with no basis in science. "Social science" isn't.
In English we do have a grammar with gender, and I know that there are generally assumptions about gender/sex which people want to change, and many I do not agree with. How far away is that from real human suffering? How serious should we really take a person who looks like a male within our culture and is offended with a person calls this person a him?
>It is such a different concept than classifying nouns.
Why reply at all to my original post then when the person I was replying to was talking about pronouns, and I was clearly using the word gender defined as an attribute of sex.
If you can make the world a better place with less human suffering then good luck. I see it all as being biologically informed and so useless to even bother with. This dialog is useless too. You've not given me any new information and I already have reflected on it all and I see it as another way. It's not worth either of our time to continue, so, good day to you, xer.
I clicked the comments to write "Joyent is going to get a lot of hate mail from Hacker News woman-haters", and indeed, with 21 comments so far, that seems to be true.
Good job, Bryan Cantrill and Joyent. One small step forward.
(And now I see this posting getting flagged down the page rapidly, like anything else on the topic of Silicon Valley's disdain for women. Has dropped from #3 to #35 in roughly 3 minutes.)
Pointing out a complete overreaction is now woman-hating, it seems.
It's almost as if being a misogynist doesn't take any effort whatsoever anymore. It just becomes another mundane everyday action. It shouldn't be, but you're redefining it to be.
"misogynist doesn't take any effort whatsoever anymore"
You mean it ever actually took effort? The truth is that our entire society is misogynist. I'm a woman, and I do my upmost to not be, but /because society itself is screwed/, even I can't avoid being misogynist occasionally.
In this particular case, you're thankfully calling the actions of men "overreactions", but that EXACT word is used to belittle women the world over, in exactly this same way. Wanting people to be decent human beings is "overreacting". Wanting people to check for consent before buying them drinks, or walking them home, or coming into their house... overreacting.
And that's not even going into the gender aspects of calling a man that.
I notice that your argument can be used to dismiss any criticism of any action taken to fight sexism - it does not rely on the action actually being proportionate, reasonable or productive. Just the fact that some sexists have called other, reasonable, reactions unreasonable is justification enough to dismiss it out ouf hand. It essentially makes self-proclaimed anti-sexist actions immune from criticism.
If our entire society is so pervasively misogynist that you can basically do it all the time just by going through your daily routine, then why is misogyny even notable at all? Misogyny is supposed to be an abnormal thing.
How do you define misogyny?
Yeah, the word "overreaction" can be applied to many contexts. Who would have known?
Wanting people to check for consent before buying them drinks
I wish someone bought me free stuff.
or walking them home
That one I can agree with, but how exactly does someone walk you home without your consent? I mean, if they don't have it, then by definition it's following or stalking.
coming into their house
As in, they knock and come in uninvited? Politely send them away. If they come in forcefully, that's a different issue entirely.
I'm not sure why you think it has to be necessarily. By analogy, would you say that racism is supposed to be an abnormal thing? We have plenty of examples of societies where racism is or was the norm.
In contemporary Western society, misogyny is considered abnormal.
But like I said, I'd require a more thorough definition of what the OP considers "misogyny". Because for some people I've noticed that all minor annoyances and socially awkward situations are misogynistic and sexist.
I think the patch was a good change. I think the way Ben handled it was bad behavior. I think the way Joyent handled Ben's behavior was even worse behavior.
Building an environment based on fear, reprisals, summary judgment and punishment is not a good recipe for improving the state of gender equality in tech (or anywhere). Means are as important as ends. Lining up suspected misogynists against a wall and shooting them is not a good way to go about stamping out misogyny, although that is more or less what's going on here (though not quite as dramatic, of course).
By using inappropriate means, by making summary judgments based on little evidence, and by making use of other inappropriate means the cause of gender equality is not advanced or strengthened, instead it is equated with abuses of power and instead weakened.
And just for posterity's sake, this article ended up being flagged into total invisibility within about 10 minutes of hitting the front page, despite having 50+ upvotes in about 20 minutes.
I can't be the only one who seriously doesn't even understand this article.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for gender-equality, but say what about languages like Spanish? Do those have to be gender-neutral, too? Should we fire people because their culture dictates that gendered pronouns (which, by themselves, offer little to the conversation except perhaps a passing thought, at best) be used?
Really? Is that what it's come down to?
Of the millions of things that could be argued and put down due to gender inequality, we're firing people over pronouns.
As a Joyent engineer, I feel qualified to field this one.
tl;dr: you couldn't be more wrong.
The long version requires a crucial observation: this wasn't one simple mistake, made in haste, ignorance, or confusion. This was a deliberate action to revert to exclusionary language. Speculating on the precise motivation strikes me as pointless; it's the action itself that is problematic.
At Joyent, I have room to make mistakes, and enough respect among my colleagues that I can take corrections without misgivings. Deliberate and repeated "mistakes" on my part would have consequences (but surely that's the literal definition of a problem employee).
In case you aren't already one step ahead of me, here is the corollary: I am protected from the deliberate and repeatedly hostile actions of others.
So: the ability (even obligation) to speak your mind, listen to others, and be protected from bullying, exclusionary behaviour?
The fact that you don't see Bryan Cantrill's public shaming as deliberately and extremely hostile is astounding. It was misleading, it was predicated on a straw man that wasn't remotely supported by the evidence, and it was mind-boggling aggressive. The permanent social and business ramifications for everyone involved are substantial, and if Bryan Cantrill were my employee, I'd have him posting an apology or submitting his resignation.
I'm not sure what sort of culture you have there at Joyent, but if it's a monoculture that fully supports this sort of grossly disproportionate public escalation and aggressive behavior from anyone, especially under the company's name, then I'm happy to keep Joyent off the short list of companies I'd consider working for or with.
Surveying the facts, I'm far more inclined to believe that this event simply provided you with a convenient self-righteous excuse for Joyent to stretch the truth enough to hang what you considered to be a troublesome contributor (and competitor) with his own rope.
[edit] On top of all this, I've had to fire a number of people over the years, and always, regardless of how justified it was, I did so with a heavy heart. The fact that Bryan Cantrill would speak to gleefully of firing anyone is, if nothing else, a testament to the myopia of self-righteousness.
Do we know absolutely, for sure, that this is what happened? From the revert, bnoorhuis clearly didn't know that Bert had signed it off. To me it looks like there was a bit of confusion, and there's not enough info to say either way. As I said elsewhere, the error bars on this look far too wide.
Given even the remotest possibility that this was a confusion, such a public and childish telling off seems entirely unreasonable.
I appreciate you are an employee and are qualified to speak as such. But as an outsider (and a feminist), I won't touch Joyent with a bargepole after this.
What a mess this whole thing is. I'm looking forward to a level-headed explanation of all of this in a few days. It's a pity the witch-hunt happened before there's been meaningful dialogue to find out exactly what the situation is (name-calling and posturing doesn't count as meaningful dialogue).
You didn't read before commenting, did you? The point wasn't the choice in the first place or a grammatical debate but rejecting the idea that there was a question and then, after more discussion, reverting a two-word change in a fit of pique.
I note that none of the anti-PC reactionaries are giving much attention to the part about throwing a for and reverting another developer's commit, which is telling.
This to me sounds like a company terrorised that the political-correctness police is coming after them, and going way too far in the opposite direction just to prove their PC credentials. While on first read I was as surprised as anyone at the magnitude of the over-reaction, on second read, I'm starting to think how bad things have become, i.e. the environment of fear, to lead companies to react this way.
This should be a reminder to everyone that your public actions on public code repositories can carry consequences.
That said, I personally approve of the work that people like Ashe Dryden, Coda Hale and others have been doing to help the tech industry grow up. We need to move beyond the time when mastering this weeks hot skill entitles you to act like a jerk. And if making it known that acting like a jerk in public will get you fired from the places where you'd like to work is one of the things that it takes to effect that change; that is a positive development.
Your question was discussed at length in the post above. Part of your ability to function on a team requires empathy – deliberately choosing to be antagonistic over an admittedly small effort to be more inclusive shows lurking problems in that area
Also, if you look at historical language, it has never in English to say that 'he' was gender neutral. It would be more correct to interpret it as "women are not real". See also "Mr and Mrs John Doe".
It seems like though it was used as gender neutral only for undefined gender. So if one knew for a fact that a given person is female, "he" would not be appropriate anymore.
Yep. But the gender undefined pronoun would be the male pronoun. So while semantically it would be gender neutral, from an overall perspective it's still male-centric. And we might want to have a way to refer to humans in a completely gender neutral way without ever having to explicitly specify it.
But still, I guess using 'he' as a universal pronoun would be the most elegant solution. Although you can imagine some not liking it's historical baggage.
Singular 'they' has been in use for far longer than gender-neutral 'he', and is more inclusive. It is also used in virtually all modern tech writing. I'm really not sure what people have against it.
I applaud Joyent for their brave stand in theoretically firing someone who does not work for them. The legal issues they would theoretically face are daunting.
I scanned the comments here to see if anyone has brought up data about the underlying linguistic issue. I call baloney on the silly idea that "gendered pronouns" make life better or worse for anyone in actual society as contrasted with "nongendered pronouns." What is my evidence? I speak the world's most-spoken language (the only language that arguably has more speakers than English, namely Modern Standard Chinese) and it has totally nongendered pronouns. There is not a distinction in spoken Chinese[1] between "he," "she," or "it," as the language has just one third-person singular pronoun, namely tā.
But my wife, who grew up in Chinese-speaking society and has since lived in English-speaking society, and I, who have lived in both places, think it is ludicrous to suppose that Chinese-speaking society is "less sexist" in any systematic way just because of the pronoun system of Chinese. Pronouns appear to make no difference at all. The map is not the territory. On this issue, languages appear to vary arbitrarily with no particular influence on social custom, and not much influence from social notions of male or female superiority or inferiority. Gendered pronouns don't matter for anything important. It is an extraordinary claim to say that they do. People who make extraordinary claims should bring along extraordinary evidence to back up those claims.
[1] Under Western influence, after extensive contact with speakers of Indo-European languages and translation of books from those languages into Chinese, the Chinese writing system has sometimes distinguished written forms '他,'她,' and '它' for "he," "she," and "it," but all are pronounced /tā/ in speech and this distinction has to be painstakingly learned by Chinese children in school, with many native speakers of Chinese confusing the pronouns of English as to gender for years after learning them. For example, I have heard plenty of Chinese-language conversations in which someone describes a situation involving men and women and then starts speaking about individual persons in the situation as he/she did this or that to him/her, and sometimes a listener breaks into the conversation with "male or female?" to keep track of who is whom. And I've heard plenty of Chinese speakers talk about "my sister . . . he is" or "my brother . . . she is" and so forth, making clear that their brains don't distinguish pronouns by grammatical gender in any language.
I'm aware that singular they is attested all the way back to the 16th century, but it still doesn't read right to me. Particularly in the case where the pronoun definitely refers to one person, albeit of unknown gender, rather than where it could refer to either a singular or plural antecedent. I'd actually prefer the awkward 'he or she'.
De gustibus non est disputandum, but to claim that preference for the generic he, or even the kind of indifference that could lead one to reject such a patch as a waste of time, can only come from a deep wellspring of misogyny, is absurd.
He didn't quote Strunk & White to justify rejecting the patch, nor did he bring up the grammatical argument at all when reverting it. He just said "this is not worth spending time on" and closed the ticket. (And if it was truly not worth spending time on, he wouldn't have contramanded one of his fellow maintainers to revert the patch, then rewrite the repository's history to cover himself.)
This insistence on political correctness is harmful to the cause of gender equality, is harmful to the state of our society and harmful to the technology sector.
It is the construction of thought barriers, the creation of solely accepted behaviour and arbitrary creation of anormal behaviour, by redefining what is normal and not discriminating in any way (to use he in a normal sentence) as discriminating and bad and as a cause to lose an existence (i.e. getting fired).
It is morality not for creating good, but for appearing moralic, one of the lowest kinds of behaviour on an ethical level.
Damning someone who seemingly tried to hinder those artificial norms getting a foot into a project is a mistake.
It isn't "political correctness" - the phrase implies that the language has no real effect and changing it is merely for show, or as a political statement.
Using male pronouns as gender neutral has a measurable effect on comprehension that has studied and reproduced repeatedly. Using "he" pronouns as generics does in fact lead both men and women to exclude women in their comprehension of the sentence a statistically significant fraction of the time. See for example http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/27784423?uid=2&uid=4&s....
Revising language not a "thought barrier", it's an actual real benefit.
>to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense. ... the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered.
So what. The request was rejected on the principle of it being trivial:
> Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that. [1]
I can find no mention in the discussion of anyone arguing against the change on the grounds that gendered pronouns are preferable.
We can still argue over wheather this is a good reason to reject a pull request. Personally, I think that trivial requests should be accepted if for no other reason than to be welcoming to newcomers who are testing the waters before becoming active. However, accepting pull requests takes time, and one might not want to encourage a community to spam oneself with minor corrections. Furthermore, in this particular example, the proposed changes were grammatically incorrect, as the object itself is the singular "user", while the new pronoun is the plural "they/them". This could easily be resolved by making user plural, or avoiding the pronoun altogether, but this still takes more of the maintainers time.
Notwithstanding that, it seems completely dishonest to frame the original dispute as Ben Noodhuis objecting to removing gendered pronouns on principle.
>But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
Lol. Joyent, the people who tried to optimize their whole product around nodejs because it was hip is now creating excessive coverage with pretty extreme language to paint themselves as the "White knight" of the tech world.
I'm afraid some will look at this as an issue of the fickle HN crowd never being satisfied, but it really is more about exercising rationality. Firstly, nobody really had to publicize this ridiculously miniscule episode, as it was sorted out responsibly without the attention. It's great for women to see how many people rally to their inclusion in tech, but there's a not-too-fine line between displays of inclusion and Joyent's response. This sort of response is polarizing and inasmuch works against the goal of equality, safety, and comfort of men and women in the industry. Also, has anyone considered language barriers in this discussion, because if that was a factor, it would be an even worse reason to start a public shaming and loss of a contributor.
"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."
Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.
That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?
Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.
To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks."
Firing someone because he uses "he"? That's really fucked up.
P.S. What's with the trend of obsessively using "she"? Is that a widespread phenomenon or specific to IT community? Am I the only one who finds it awkwardly forced?
It's a widespread phenomenon by now. It's been around in written language before, but it has received more adoption recently. I have nothing against it, personally, although I feel as though a lot of people use it to compensate for some sort of guilt they have.
If you maintain a flagship open source project for you company, you are not just a programmer. You are a public representative of the company.
So as a company representative it seems reasonable to be fired for either directly going against a known view point of the company, or being ignorant of view points you are supposed to representing(after reasonable opportunity to learn what they are.)
It seem reasonable to fired for not representing a company the way it wants to be represented when part of the job is to represent that company.
Ben is not a Joyent employee, but a Strongloop employee/cofounder. I Cannot say I am terribly surprised. Strongloop has rubbed me the wrong way from the very beginning. Since they have launched, they have displayed all the integrity of a used car salesman. I know they have some very strong core devs, and I know they are not all like this, but their public image has been max-sleaze ever since they started marketing in shady ways suggesting that they were the creators of node.js.
Would the commit have happened if the offending pronoun was 'she' instead of 'he'? This is speculation but it seems clear that the pronoun 'she' would have been allowed to remain, because it is as a sign of progressiveness and inclusiveness, but 'he' is a sign on retrograde patriarchal medievalism that must be combated with our every waking breath, if you don't agree you are clearly a misogynist bigot.
> we believe that empathy is a core engineering value
What?? That's pure BS. Is empathy a political value? Or a filmmakers' or writers' value? And what about honesty or team spirit? Are they core engineering values?
Putting aside gender theory, there is a much simpler issue here. This is the same issue that affects wikipedia.
Writing that deny took more effort than just allowing the change. If it really was trivial, then there is no harm in accepting it. Denying it is shouting down someone's effort to improve the project. It destroys community rather than builds.
Oh, I wouldn't say that. The clear confirmation came from the introduction of the CLA. Regardless of how free the license is (or which type of freedoms you want from a license) once you make one party more equal than all others the pretense of "community project" goes out the window.
That's not to say people outside the company can't be highly involved and feel like they have an ownership stake in productive way. Just that when push comes to shove they find out they don't have an ownership stake. See: The Hudson/Jenkins split.
Your argument apparently being that non-English speakers are just incurably rude? The problem wasn't the minor doc change but how it was handled – less capable speakers might make a mistake but a simple “oh, thanks for the correction” avoids any problem.
I read some of the comments on the pull request and the commits. This is the worst part of Github, these kinds of public massive flame wars, complete with animated gifs. I think Github should have moderation features for situations like this. Even though they're not common, they're damaging the constructive atmosphere that's usually present.
Isn't using "them/they" in the singular to avoid gendered pronouns still considered grammatically incorrect?
If gendered pronouns are such a big issue why is there no effort to make a lasting official solution by updating the standards of English? I know most of my school teachers would not have let me written "they/them" in this situation. Have things changed and "they" is now acceptable?
I think the only correct solution available today which sounds decent at all is to say "the user".
> Isn't using "them/they" in the singular to avoid gendered pronouns still considered grammatically incorrect?
No. Singular they has never been grammatically incorrect. The frequency of its use has simply varied throughout the years. For what it's worth, singular they seems to predate gender-neutral 'he' in written English.
The commit itself, and the events around that were already discussed on another thread, but about this blog posting specifically - this is a little extreme.
I would have hoped at this point, an official posting, on the corporate pages would have a more sensible and calming approach. I guess not.
All in all, no one comes out of this looking well.
OTOH, I had no opinion about Joyent before, and now have a lower'ish opinion of them. This seems like a combination of over-reaction, obsessive "PC" thinking, and an attempt to mask a potential PR gaffe.
If Joyent cares so much about gender equality, I imagine that there are more concrete actions they could take to encourage that, than threatening to fire somebody who isn't even an employee - over a pronoun.
This isn't good. The title should be "The Power of Gendered Pronouns" — it's about gendered pronouns and our intentions/perceptions around their use, not about pronouns in general.
Here's my simple argument against pronouns (even gendered ones) in documentation. Too often you hear, which can often be the turning point of a "polite" discussion to a "heated" discussion:
Don't talk about me as if I'm not here. My name is ----.
Refering to someone as "they" or "them" is an even worse offense.
I want to say further that pronouns do a disservice to the "organic conversation" that is Source Code just as pronouns do a disservice to polite discussion. Pronouns may be common in usage, but their use turns a discussion into something informal. Their "power" in general is a question of emotive/suggestive language, as vagueness implies, versus explicit/shareable/re-useable language.
'Refering to someone as "they" or "them" is an even worse offense.'
I've actually tested this. Or rather, I live by this - I default to gender neutral pronouns for everyone. I have done this for many years in customer facing call centres, dealing with 30+ callers a day and working alongside 100+ support staff, and communicating across all levels of business, from shop floor to CEO.
I have had people comment on singular they. Mostly LGBT+ people who understood gender issues and actively had a preference. Everyone else? NOT A SINGLE COMMENT.
You may personally have a preference about people's use of pronouns for yourself, and that is actually a wonderful thing - knowingly having a gender identity is awesome! :) But, at least in the UK, there is nothing offensive about gender neutral 'they'.
This does have the, ah, interesting consequence that essentially any policy you could have about when you use gender-neutral pronouns will either offend or involuntarily out at least some trans or genderqueer people. (Even if most of the gender-binary cis populace won't notice.) Using gender neutral pronouns for everyone unless they object seems especially likely to do so though.
Generally most trans people have commented during QUILTBAG events or private company. I've found that in a formal office environment, they tend to welcome, or at least not notice, gender neutral defaults
Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy? And how do you square it with calling someone an asshole in the next paragraph? That passes as professionalism and empathy at Joyent?