Twitter banning "gendered pronouns"

However, in the world of computers there's one area in which afaik sexed language still pertains. And yes, sexed not 'gendered', and hardware not software. Male and female connectors, which no one ever needs to have explained or gets confused about IME.

The company I work for recently moved away from the term "blacklist". A number of companies have done so, and also organisations like the National Cybersecurity Centre have done so.
While I personally wouldn't have been inclined to replace the term "blacklist", if it's bothering other people then I can't say that I feel strongly enough to protest against the adoption of a different term.

What about 'grey zone', then, to denote something the status of which is uncertain? Is that racist because of the suggestion that it lies between white/good and black/bad?

Black people are no more ⚫️ than white people are⚪️

Is Tinder run/policed/owned by the trans movement?

Lately everything I read or hear about them is anti men/women and pro extreme trans and trans promotion.

And now Twitter will stop using blacklist for the same reason.

It's not exactly the same thing. 'Blackboard' and 'whiteboard' are simply literal descriptions of the colour of an object. 'Blacklist' and 'whitelist' have an implicit connotation of black=bad, white=good.

I remember when a couple of schools got overexcited about racist language and said we can't say blackboard. It was picked up on and then you had people saying "blackboard is illegal? That's bloody stupid" but it wasn't a widespread idea. Just a couple of well meaning but not too bright individuals.

And now Twitter will stop using blacklist for the same reason.

They couldn't fall any further in my estimation anyway.

I'm not sure if my company has written guidelines or if it's simply understood that you shouldn't be sexist. In a way what I find concerning about this is that the twitter engineering people actually need to be told some of this.

Having said that, I'm not sure I shall bother expunging my uses of the term 'sanity check' referring to code.

Your thread title is massively misleading, this is about changing default male pronouns to neutral where they’re talking about either sex.

Even more glad that I’m not a computer programmer, I think my head would explode

I got that it was in house. I just can't work out how they can collate those terms and not be thinking "Oh oh! Newspeak" every time they add one

Yes... this is actually in general a positive move that many people in coding environments are trying to adopt. The use of male pronouns as the default used to be widespread and - especially in a male-dominated sphere - is definitely something best avoided. Similarly, documentation should always be written neutrally - it's easy enough to do in perfectly sensible grammatical ways.

I write scientific software and am pleased my colleagues have shown some awareness that male defaults are outdated.

This isn't about policing users' language.

Glad I’m not on twitter

Hmmm it's not just about gendered language though is it? And it seems to be more twitter developers than twitter the platform, due to the discussion of terms such as blacklist/whitelist and master/slave. It looks like workplace communication rather than social media.

Head
Wall

Bang.

Oh for a mo I thought this would be the end of the smug he/him she/her twitter bios.

This isn't about banning the pronouns from the platform. It has no effect on anyone who doesn't work for Twitter.

Rather, this is by Twitter Engineering and is a move to change the language they use in their computer code.

So, if there's anywhere where they might previously have used a masculine pronoun in the traditional way to stand in for either gender, they want that to change to "they". E.g. "Someone must have dropped his phone" > "Someone must have dropped their phone". Or "If someone is elected President of the US, he has certain responsibilities" > "they have certain responsibilities".

Now, some of the suggestions by Twitter Engineering are just stupid (if the term "sanity check" offends insane people, why wouldn't their suggested alternative "coherence check" offend incoherent people?) but it's actually a good suggestion to avoid the use of "he" as a generic pronoun referring to an individual of either sex.

This is the engineering department (@TwitterEng) talking about changes they'll make to their source code. It has nothing to do with the content of tweets themselves.

i'm not english speaker and i'm curious...
how can make any sentence without those?

is that possible?

I've read through that twice... and still can't work out wtf they think they are doing!