Glad this didn't go through. The White Knights of tech are getting a bit
over their heads on this. One thing is to raise awareness of a problem that
exists throughout society -- not just tech, a whole different one is to go
to the extent of requesting a pull request to remove gendered references.
That helps no one. Zero. It does not advance anyone's argument.
Gosh, it's pretty upsetting that there are people who believe this. In any case, though, I'm glad that the PR went through. A small step in the right direction.
Why is it upsetting? I wholeheartedly agree that this particular case is a triviality.
I tend to use gender-neutral pronouns in written language myself, but I do not see any significant difference in using gendered ones, either. They can be used to describe hypothetical scenarios that apply to everyone reading the documentation.
I've noticed a recent tendency to use female pronouns extensively, something that I am not bothered by at all.
A small step? So what would the full step be? What would the consequences be?
Will nobody in the future be able to refer to another person as 'him', 'her', 'she' or 'he' unless they have full confirmation of that person's declared gender identity?
Will newspaper articles and blog posts have to regenerate dynamically, in the event that the person decided to change their identity, to avoid lawsuits over misidentifying a person in public resulting in emotional hurt and damage to reputation?
Of course, the vision of the future you present is probably one few actually desire, but it's interesting to think about why we humans feel such a need to emphasise people's gender all the time. As another poster put it, what if personal pronouns included a reference to race (or age, religion, weight, sexual orientation, etc.) - would we really be comfortable with that? Yet we find gender such an important thing when referring to others.
