My understanding of the situation is this: At the request of Rust Project, JeanHeyd is asked to give a keynote at RustConf. JeanHeyd is reluctant, worried that their topic is too speculative and too much like a proposal for implementing a Rust feature. They ask around and get told it’s definitely ok, please don’t decline the talk, etc. Later, after the talk is prepared, RustConf contacts JeanHeyd to say their talk ha…
Completely unrelated, but as a non native speaker of English I was completely lost in the "their"s, not knowing who they refer to. Then I realized that JT may prefer to be addressed this way, which is indeed the case according to their Twitter handle. It is a shame that better pronouns were not promoted in English to simplify the understanding of sentences where they both refer to a single person and a group.
Re: I have resigned from all roles in rustlang, effective immediately
#61I noticed this when I was writing it and tried to use names rather than pronouns as much as possible. I actually use “their” all the time for everyone, I wasn’t aware that JT requests it in their Twitter profile. About fifteen years ago, when I first heard about gender-neutral pronouns, the objection at the time was “it’s harder to write and more confusing”. I started doing it as a challenge to see if it really was hard or not. In that fifteen years, you are in fact the first person to have ever noticed and said something (congratulations).