this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I tried Raddle and the people there are crazy. I gave it a fair chance but even calling someone "he" is seen as an attack because I didn't instruct myself "whether or not the person wanted to be called he or she or they". This is the hill they are dying on.
I tried lemmy and the big problem is that people are attracted to the most populated subs, namely the subs hosted on lemmy.ml, which is administrated by the crazy chinese. It doesn't matter if you register yourself on beehaw, you will still talk on lemmy.ml, and when you are banned because you said "Taiwan number one" or because you insulted Putin, then you are out of the biggest channels. You can still talk on your own server, sure, but you will talk in a ghost town. The federation model has a limit. This is why we should populate Kbin and not jump on the lemmy.ml ship when the cloudflare component is eventually removed. Build here, stay here.
I don't want to start a war here, and I don't have the context of what you experienced over there. Perhaps they did go too far. But if you don't know the gender of someone, it is indeed incorrect to assume "he" is OK. That's inclusion 101: don't assume things about people. There is a commonly accepted solution to this problem, used e.g. in the academic peer review world where the reviewer is anonymous, which is to default to "they". That's a good habit to take, costs nothing, and helps (particularly) women feel included. That's a hill I'd happily die on.
Even then some people throw their toys out because they believe "they" assumes a person is non-binary. "They" as a singular pronoun for someone of unknown gender has existed since at least the 16th century.
Look if people are getting mad because you're using "they" to refer to someone who has not disclosed their pronouns, then they're being unreasonable. But I've literally never seen that. What I have seen is people getting mad when someone uses "they" to refer to someone who has disclosed their pronouns. And often, this is something that is done by mildly transphobic people who aren't fully comfortable using, e.g., "she" to refer to someone who they feel looks insufficiently like a woman, but recognize that using "he" is wrong. Using "they" in this situation is just as wrong.
That being said, it doesn't help that there's no easy way to disclose your pronouns on this app. I'm a lot of discord servers I'm in, they use badges for pronouns so you can click on someone's username and see their pronouns. But no such option exists here
I would say people getting mad about a they instead of a he/she even after disclosure are being unreasonable. The word they is neutral ground in text conversation. I can see it being awkward to use in a direct conversation, but so often in threads, we're talking to the public not the individual.
Having said that, I still haven't seen anyone really get mad except in cases of direct misgendering. Yes some people will be unreasonable, but they are the exception.