Cameras and Lenses

As far as I can tell, the content of your first comment in this thread was

> The site is the work of a guy, "him", and "his" work. We don't have to guess and say "them" and "their" work.

This, to me, indicates that you want the previous person to say "him" and "his" where they said "them" and "their". Even in this post you're displaying a negative opinion about the use of singular "they", and expressing that you want others to stop using singular "they" this way. Am I wrong?

Like, if you referred to Dominique McLean with "he", and someone said to you "We know that person prefers they/them pronouns, we don't have to guess based on appearances and say 'he'," would you not characterize them as dictating that you have to use certain language?

> I don't speak in vagaries when something is specific and known.

I hope you do. (And I'm pretty sure you do.) Omitting information that is specific, known, and irrelevant is a basic part of communicating well. Not every failure to bring up something that is specific and known constitutes "dumbing down of discourse".

It is grammatically plural, but it has been accepted for semantically singular use since long before the Victorian effort to impose Latin-inspired rules on English usage which failed to eradicate it despite intense effort. (Victorian prescriptivism did have some good effects — regularized spelling FTW — but trying to eradicate clear and useful usages like singular “they” was one of its less-well-considered, but fortunately also less-successful, efforts.)

> I find it very inspiring that while we can’t physically experience a four dimensional space, with just a bit of ingenuity we can easily simulate how a tesseract and its shadow would look in our day-to-day world.

> You may find math’s indifference to the limitations of our human perception quite cruel, but I think it’s liberating. Reflecting on higher dimensions is transcendent – it removes the shackles of the physical world and allows us to explore the realms we’ll never encounter.

I am, and I like that. Like the example of hiring musicians after a blind listening. Kind of the whole schtick of that music show where the hosts spin around only after listening to the artist. fwiw, that's actually not considered progressive anymore because it amplifies the homogeneity of choice. Because of this or that factor, many cellists are one sex, or the QA department skews heavily towards one demographic. Without active HR grooming you don't get those SV pleasing diversity numbers where you have a numerical microcosm of the country. But yes, the idea of a meritocracy and blind hiring is always refreshing.

> To my eyes, in this thread, the person who is harping on pronouns the most, seems to be closest to having a mental breakdown over them, who can most accurately be described as "pronoun police", and who shows the greatest explicit tendency to control others' use of pronouns, is also the person who in the first place corrected an in-the-wild usage of singular "them" to "him".

Have you cared for groups of children? Like all bullies, SJWs try to make the victim appear the aggressor. As a current example, Letitia Wright got taken in by pseudo-science, but people attacked her (viciously!) for retweeting it even though she had been victimized by the "hoax". "You're pushing a message that KILLS PEOPLE! F you, cword", and so forth. Presumably if they found anyone taken in by Letitia's post they'd attack them too. Simply put, none of this is what you'd do to actually fix a problem, or if you actually cared about people.

In our case, look at how the person who used "them" responded to the criticism. They went straight to trying to ideological slander.

>> It seems like you dislike trans folk. I'm not sure what they did to hurt you, but I suspect your fears and hate are the result of conditioning.

Accusations of transphobia. That's not the kind of allyship that anyone needs. In fact, that's almost exactly how a troll who wanted to make people hate each other would act.

Yes, this is obviously a non-problem, but by their own rules, the OP assumed someone's pronouns. And when called on this they didn't respond reasonably but lashed out with essentially accusations of hate. If they intend to be helpful they should check themselves before they wreck their allies.