Twitter banning "gendered pronouns"

[JetsetJetlaggedJaded]

Long time lurker to this board but this is the first time I'm saying anything - apologies if there is already a thread about it - I had a quick look and couldn't see anything

It seems that the powers that be at Twitter HQ have decided that "gendered pronouns" (eg. His/him she/her) are no longer considered "inclusive language" and they're working on ways to replace them with they/them

When I saw this, (despite knowing that twitter is an absolute cess pit of misogyny against women who want to protect their sex-based rights), my jaw dropped. I mean... I'm lost for words to be honest.

Putting aside any GC arguments (of which there are many), how will certain tweets, with their limited characters, even be coherent if restricted to using they/them. It's so Orwellian! I just feel like my insides are on fire!

Anyway - I just thought you might want to know.

Mrs Jetset aka SHE because I'm a f*cking woman (- and doesn't my battered, post- pregnancy and childbirth body know it!)

twitter.com/twittereng/status/1278733303508418560?s=21

I just cannot be doing with all this inclusivity shite. Transpersons can call themselves what they like, BAME can call themselves what they like. But that is their issue. Not to be imposed on the rest of us who don't give a flying you know what.

WTAF?!

I really think you should try to get the thread title changed. This is going to be an endless stream of outrage at something that isn’t happening.

This is really good news from Twitter engineering. The software industry has a huge problem with sexism. The overlooking of female user experience is still widespread. Default language that reinforces the engineering staff (who tend to be very male dominated anyway) to think of their entire world as being populated by men does not help at all.

Yes - as I said upthread, the only surprise here is that most of this hasn't been standard practice for them for a decade or two. I work in scientific software, which maybe isn't quite so sexist as pure software engineering.

I really think you should try to get the thread title changed. This is going to be an endless stream of outrage at something that isn’t happening.

Yes - @JetsetJetlaggedJaded evidently misunderstood the context - understandable enough with all the idiocies of twitter.

But this is really not a cause for outrage. It's not people imposing their chosen pronouns on others, it's just about their coders etc using neutral terms. If you've ever come across anything written with words that assume your job is one only performed by men you may understand why this is a good thing.

This is great news!

Twitter can still blacklist a load of people for wrongthink, but internally they will not refer to it as a "blacklist", because they need to use more inclusive language.

Progressive folks! Ethical corporations at last!

Oh! Hi everyone! Sorry i was in such a rage when I wrote this (and also reacting to the tweet replies, which also seemed to get the same impression as me; ie. that it was relating to user's language rather than internal language).

I wrote this thread and then every time I checked back last night there were no replies, so I figured it was lost in the ether and no-one had seen it anyway, and then woke up to see all of these replies this morning. I will try to get the title changed so as not to mislead people

Having said that, I still don't know why, for example, if something has been developed by a woman at twitter, with a unisex name, they would insist on referring to it as "their" work. She is not a dirty word! And I would argue that, with the dominance of male employees at the company and in the tech industry more broadly, using "their" is basically going to be internally changed to "his" by anyone reading it

The key phrase is 'the language we have been using in our code.

Having said that, I still don't know why, for example, if something has been developed by a woman at twitter, with a unisex name, they would insist on referring to it as "their" work.

I don't believe that's what's being suggested. I think this is all about references such as "If the user clicks X then they should see Y". It's not about replacing "Sam says that she implemented X here because Y" with "...they...".

A big clue about what Engineering had in mind is that "he" is given as an example of a gendered pronoun, but "she" isn't... because they had in mind the generic use of "he".

@Goosefoot

Being non-NT and surrounded by friends who are divergent as well, we've never quite understood why the word blackboard was used in the first place, as all the boards we saw as children were dark green.

They were black before they were green. I'm not sure why they changed.

We had equipment from the 60s in our schools (70s and 80s), including the portable ones that rolled over in secondary - so you'd often have the teacher roll it up to find something rude had been chalked on it. All of them were green.

Maybe it was to do with making them easier to look at?

@transdimensional ah I get you now. Ok false alarm everyone!! Ha! That'll teach me not to rage-post!

I have reported it but MN haven't seen it yet I don't think

Twitter can still blacklist a load of people for wrongthink, but internally they will not refer to it as a "blacklist", because they need to use more inclusive language.

Yes indeed. But, if tech organisations can evolve to be less male dominated, perhaps they may evolve better ethics eventually. Not a given, just a hope!

I've got pretty good at doing this on mn when referring to certain people, bending myself into knots to avoid mentioning their sex

However, I don't think twitter have realised how this will impact all the transwomen on twitter who need validation or else it is literal violence against them.

Given that "blackboard" is a compound word (rather than "black board") and given they were black for the first 150 years or so, I don't think it's surprising the term "blackboard" persisted.
Apparently the green ones first began to be manufactured in the 1960s, but I can't find any source on when the green ones overtook the black ones in actual use.

@transdimensional

Given that "blackboard" is a compound word (rather than "black board") and given they were black for the first 150 years or so, I don't think it's surprising the term "blackboard" persisted. Apparently the green ones first began to be manufactured in the 1960s, but I can't find any source on when the green ones overtook the black ones in actual use.

According to Google, old black blackboards were made of slate, while the green ones are made of porcelain and are more robust.

Though you can get that blackboard paint now that is black, I wonder if that is more of a stylistic decision?

I think you may have misunderstood something.

I think you may have misunderstood something. If you mean the OP, I think that was pointed out in about post 3 and acknowledged a while ago!

Somewhat related, apparently Scrabble is considering disallowing slurs in game play.

The list seems long, even including things like "papist".

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scrabble-censorship-dispute-over-banning-offensive-terms-hj9jnr5ks

My initial reaction is to think that perhaps the N-word at least should be disallowed, simply because it's a word that makes us so uncomfortable that many of us probably won't type it out or say it aloud, even within inverted commas. That said, having read what some of the top Scrabble players, including some black players, say in opposition to the proposal, it's a difficult issue.
Interestingly enough, a vast number of these words have already been banned (at least in North America) since 25 years when US dictionary-publisher Merriam-Webster removed them from the official Scrabble dictionary. (In the UK, Collins is the official Scrabble dictionary publisher instead - and formerly it was Chambers.) But a compromise was reached whereby club and tournament players could continue to use those banned words, whereas people playing at home or among friends couldn't ( slate.com/human-interest/2020/06/scrabble-players-debate-slurs.html ). Whether this distinction applies in the UK I'm not sure.