Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

tarahenley.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 441 posts

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#111

Post by colechristensen »

coolso wrote: post #55
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a previous job HR directly contacted me and told me to put my pronouns on my profile. I said sure and proceeded to ignore it. Fuck that shit

Good. This pronoun virtue signaling meme has gotta go. Or at least don’t censor us by limiting us to the ones Officially Approved by the Pronoun Establishment like Instagram and most other places do. If they can have custom pronouns, why can’t we? (The answer is because it would immediately undermine the “cause” by shedding light on just how silly but also how 1984-esque the concept is.)

If someone wants to tell me pronouns they want to be referred to, sure, I’ll try to remember as long as they’re not asking for something extreme, but honestly I’m not that good with even names so… best effort.

I would rather not give out pronouns and don’t really care how people refer to me though “they” in forums when my username is my real name does come off as a bit strange… though again, this is a trivial annoyance.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#112

Post by dghughes »

teg4n_ wrote: post #24

This is incredibly tedious. I can't fathom how this has anything to do with "Hacker News" but I guess it's appeal to a certain subset of the audience here overrides that.

About as much as the death of Betty White did.

But really it (identity politics) does touch us all in any workplace since HR in every organization aggressively enforces compliance.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#113

Post by at_a_remove »

coolso wrote: post #71
mikepurvis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't preferred pronouns kind of orthogonal to the rest of the stuff? It has nothing to do with attempting to ensure representation and is instead about addressing a person in the manner of their choosing, akin to asking a woman if she prefers Ms, Miss, Mme, Mrs, etc. I expect it's probably way more appropriate in most contexts to directly ask a person what their preferred pronouns are than to ask what their gender i…

Pronouns are merely virtue signaling acts of control. By specifying pronouns if they are obvious (99% of the time) you are signaling you are part of a non-bigoted, non-hateful club. Surely you don’t hate people right? So why don’t you have your pronouns visible, fellow citizen? It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious. You want to just live your life? Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my p…

I have been tempted to enter "bun/bunself" and show up with rabbit ears. That has made its way into the "real and valid" category.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#114

Post by maxsilver »

coolso wrote: post #71
mikepurvis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't preferred pronouns kind of orthogonal to the rest of the stuff? It has nothing to do with attempting to ensure representation and is instead about addressing a person in the manner of their choosing, akin to asking a woman if she prefers Ms, Miss, Mme, Mrs, etc. I expect it's probably way more appropriate in most contexts to directly ask a person what their preferred pronouns are than to ask what their gender i…

Pronouns are merely virtue signaling acts of control. By specifying pronouns if they are obvious (99% of the time) you are signaling you are part of a non-bigoted, non-hateful club. Surely you don’t hate people right? So why don’t you have your pronouns visible, fellow citizen? It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious. You want to just live your life? Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my p…

>by specifying pronouns if they are obvious (99% of the time)

Except they aren't obvious 99% of the time. They aren't even "obvious" like 60% of the time. They aren't even "obvious 99% of the time" for cis-straight (non-LGBTQ) folks.

"Hi, Sam Shepard will be on the call with you today, and will be joined by Alex VanBeckran and Kegan Marton" -- are these folks hoping to be addressed as men, or women, or non-binary? There's no way to tell, and it's kind of disrespectful to be wrong.

> It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious.

Form of control? What on earth? It's literally just a tiny amount of human dignity. It's basically no different than being asked to address someone as "Mr. / Ms. / Mrs. / Mx." from decades prior.

> Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my preferred pronouns at all times.

It takes literally almost no extra effort, you just file it along with their name (or phone number, or timezone, etc). If you are thinking that hard about it, your probably doing it wrong.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#115

Post by philipkglass »

commandlinefan wrote: post #101
badRNG wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I didn't word it well enough, but I intend to comment on a broad category of discussion that I don't think is necessarily inappropriate according to the guidelines, but tends to produce unproductive, hostile conversations. I understand that anti-diversity blogs often gain a lot of traction with a particular subset of HN readers, but it consistently winds up producing flame wars and can make HN a less friendly p…

It seems to me that HN is the last place you can discuss this topic - it's just preemptively deleted on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

The author of this substack has a Twitter account too, where this same article is promoted and discussed:

https://twitter.com/TaraRHenley

This same article is also under active discussion on two subreddits:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/rv9kvx/tara...

https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/rv9l8v/tara_henley_...

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#116

Post by bastardoperator »

coolso wrote: post #71
mikepurvis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't preferred pronouns kind of orthogonal to the rest of the stuff? It has nothing to do with attempting to ensure representation and is instead about addressing a person in the manner of their choosing, akin to asking a woman if she prefers Ms, Miss, Mme, Mrs, etc. I expect it's probably way more appropriate in most contexts to directly ask a person what their preferred pronouns are than to ask what their gender i…

Pronouns are merely virtue signaling acts of control. By specifying pronouns if they are obvious (99% of the time) you are signaling you are part of a non-bigoted, non-hateful club. Surely you don’t hate people right? So why don’t you have your pronouns visible, fellow citizen? It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious. You want to just live your life? Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my p…

I don't know about everyone else but I've been using non-gendered pronouns my entire life. I was taught words like "they" and "them" in first or second grade. At this point I just assume anyone bothered by this is the actual narcissist.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#118

Post by abernard1 »

ineptech wrote: post #63
badRNG wrote: post #22

I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN. By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far this time ." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.

They very reliably rise to the front page (because people like arguing about this stuff) and then sink off again (because, I believe, the HN algorithm penalizes a low upvote-to-comment-count ratio). I predict this'll be gone in two hours...

> They very reliably rise to the front page

They very reliably rise to the front page because this issue is endemic in the tech industry and yet people are afraid to speak out in public.

This has always been the problem with HN's stance on "this isn't a forum for political debate" or whatever. It's a way of status-quo enforcement by selectively ignoring how political tech has become these days. It's also diminishing the role HN (used to?) play in conversations within the tech industry. If everyone should go to Reddit to discuss fundamental concerns with working in tech, then why wouldn't people just replace HN with an RSS feed.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#119

Post by coolso »

notreallyserio wrote: post #79
coolso wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pronouns are merely virtue signaling acts of control. By specifying pronouns if they are obvious (99% of the time) you are signaling you are part of a non-bigoted, non-hateful club. Surely you don’t hate people right? So why don’t you have your pronouns visible, fellow citizen? It’s also a form of control in redefining the obvious. You want to just live your life? Nope, sorry, you need to consciously be aware of my p…

It's just an extension of using someone's name. Is that virtue signaling, too? Or is the problem really that it's new and scary?

No post body was provided.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#120

Post by NikolaeVarius »

kbenson wrote: post #110
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a previous job HR directly contacted me and told me to put my pronouns on my profile. I said sure and proceeded to ignore it. Fuck that shit

While I understand the sentiment, I think to some degree putting a pronoun down is for the benefit of those conversing with you, so they don't have to wonder or get it wrong. In lieu of this, and because I don't really care what pronoun is used for me, I sometimes just put "any" if it's an option to denote that I don't care.

I literally dont give a shit what you call me.

People who hem and haw about getting pronouns wrong blow my mind of how weird this has all become

Post reply on HN