On the way to being the most downvoted post ever on StackOverflow:Meta

[Off Topic]

I was very late to the whole StackOverflow Saga, and didn't spend much time reading through all of its causes and comments at the time it happen.

And when I did, the thing that struck me most and has been in many other places including HN ( Sometimes ) is the use of English presumes others are Americans, especially in technology sector. This completely ignores people all over the world using English to communicates. And this is not about cultures or values, but what is a pronoun? How do we use the correct "pronoun", how do we tell which one to use. I suspect many native English user will have cognitive load and may decide it is not worth the hassle and walk away.

What about those that uses English as 2nd or even 3rd language.

I remember a story my British Colleague once told me, our German Colleague is so good with his English, so precise that sometimes it is borderline rude if you didn't know he was German. i.e The tone is wrong, but Germany tends to be very explicit about things in their culture, not the same could be said about the Brits.

It is important to understand the meaning, and messages that is trying to come across behind its written or verbal form, and often not literally what it meant.

If we have to nitpick every single word, phase or grammatical mistake as well as whatever political issues it is with the usage of the word, we will very quickly end up with people not communicating to you ( or in this case Stack overflow ) in the fear of constantly being bashed and disrupted.

For what it's worth, I've only ever encountered people getting "deeply offended" over intentional misrepresentation of gender. I hear far more people complaining about people being upset about being misgendered than people actually upset about being misgendered. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm just saying that in my experience the counter-"outrage culture" in many cases blows things way more out of proportion than the "outrage culture" they rail against.

I get that there is a much larger context to this (moderator losing her moderating bits over this issue, many other moderators stepping down in protest) that's almost certainly inflaming the discussion and driving a lot of the downvotes, but overall I don't really see much that's objectionable about this.

Essentially it boils down to: if you know someone's preferred pronouns, use them. If not, use gender-neutral pronouns. They even specifically point out that there's no requirement to actively seek out someone's pronouns if you don't know; just use something gender-neutral and move on.

I do see some issues, like: what if someone makes up a pronoun in bad faith, with the intention to troll people? There's some discussion around that in the comments, but the current policy seems to be "go along with it, but raise the issue with mods and they'll look into it", which is... not really a satisfying answer at all? And what if someone puts down a pronoun in good faith that you're simply unfamiliar with? Is it really reasonable to expect that answering a SE question will sometimes require googling someone's stated pronoun, followed by a value judgment to guess if they're trolling or not?

I come to SE (well, mostly SO) for answers to technical questions. For the vast majority of them, gender has nothing to do with the question or answer. Someone in the comments links to a question where someone put their pronoun preference at the bottom of their question, followed by an edit war removing and re-adding it[0], plus there's a meta discussion of the question[1]. Pronoun discussion in a technical question that doesn't even have to do with people is just noise, plain and simple. But it seems the consensus among community managers is edging toward leaving the pronoun notification in there, even though their FAQ explicitly states that the right place for a pronoun preference is in the About Me section of the user profile. This is getting to be a bit much.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/posts/58336846/revisions

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/390301/would-a-note...

I use whatever pronoun I see fit and if I offend someone by using the wrong pronoun I will apology to that person and move on.

ming the discussion and driving a lot of the downvotes, but overall I don't really see much that's objectionable about this. Essentially it boils down to: if you know someone's preferred pronouns, use them. If not, use gender-neutral pronouns. They even specifically point out that there's no requirement to actively seek