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GitHub gender-inclusive language bot – postmortem FAQ

9 points by jph ↗ HN
A recent GitHub bot created many pull requests about inclusive language.

The bot was discussed on Hacker News. The bot isn’t mine, yet it used my inclusive language repository.

The discussion raised good questions. I've written answers that highlight why I believe inclusive language is worthwhile, especially for technologists.

https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/gender-inclusive-language/blob/main/doc/questions-and-answers.md

31 comments

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impowski
This is madness
kbrannigan
I'm all for fairness and inclusivity. But how far is too far?

Extreme School of thoughts like this have always existed for millenia. Groups of people trying to bend reality to their will.

The human desire... Oops huperson.... oopps huperdaughter .... Ooops huperdaughtx

The human desire for everyone to conform to my worldview.

BRB I'm going to the park with my 2 little individuals.

zzzkkk
> But how far is too far?

This could be an interesting question that I think is okay to ask? How far is too far when it comes to existing gendered language? Is it okay to ask that question too?

Your examples/jokes are odd, you've taken already gender-neutral language and replaced it.

> The human desire for everyone to conform to my worldview.

Is that not what's happening relative to gendered language and folks who wish to move away from it?

kbrannigan
Maybe it’s because I speak French where my shoes have a gender.

Things that are a non issue in some language are getting other people fired in some other languages

zzzkkk
A very small % of the population identifies outside of the conventional gender bounds. If anyone is getting fired, it's for not respecting the preferences and wishes of their coworkers, which seems quite reasonable. If someone refused to call me by nickname, and insisted using my legal name, for example, I'd probably be quite bothered.
kbrannigan
Which is fine, but if you want everyone else to use a nickname. This might be a problem
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
That sounds normal to the point that it's boring. I remember ~10 years ago I was introduced to this concept in a way I was able to understand via an episode of a video program called "Taboo". The particular episode was about gender differences in Romania (I hope I'm not misremembering), specifically about a bit of the culture that "allowed" a biological woman to live their life out the way a man traditionally would.

Someone from that culture could easily be looking at the English-speaking world and wondering why this is even being discussed: it's not even weird.

Someone from your culture seems to be looking at the English-speaking world and wondering why this is even being discussed: it's utter nonsense.

I do love this point about different languages, though. Many languages have gender as a default.

jaitsu
I echo your sentiment.

I am not against gender inclusivity but to call out what is essentially innocent language as inherently “bad” is not a good path to go down.

zzzkkk
Where does it say this is language is inherently bad? I'm not sure it does. As members of a software-focused community, can't we look at existing solutions that work okay and strive to make them even better? We all do this quite a bit in code review, for example.
nullfield
Some are better, like “fireman” to “firefighter”; in those cases, they generalize a concept in a meaning-preserving manner and simplify.

edit I didn’t even see the next comment, that mentioned firefighter, when I wrote this; that makes it all the more to me.

Most are identity politics bullshit, and should be resisted.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cyounkins
Why is this labeled a postmortem?
jph
It's a write-up done after the end of the problem, that aims to address some of the questions that people asked. Some teams use other terms such as after-actions, or post-incidents, or retro-reports, etc.
cyounkins
I'm familiar, and have wrote them myself. The "mortem" part of "postmortem" means death, so they are usually written after something has died or failed, like a startup or a project, and the document explains why it failed. Having "postmortem" in the title implies the language bot failed. I don't think this is what you meant.
jph
Yes you're correct, the GitHub language bot failed. It created a bunch of incorrect changes and pull requests that repo teams rejected. It caused many complaints to the author and to me. The author disabled it a few hours later.
spzb
You mean, it's discriminatory against people who aren't breathing any more?
detcader
https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/gender-inclusive-lang...

> biological man, biological woman | cisgender person or non-transgender person

A good FAQ item might be: Are humans mammals?

zzzkkk
Forgive my ignorance, why would that be a good FAQ item?
meekmind
A: Probably not for much longer, thus why we're pre-programming the population for genetically modified half-human half-lizard hybrids and genderless cyborgs.

It can't really be because less than 2% of the population isn't feeling included, though Palm Springs is piloting a novel way to solve that problem by incentivizing people to identify as transgender or non-binary. https://news.yahoo.com/california-city-universal-income-tran...

nullfield
This, approximately, is where the breakdown into bullshit occurred.

Biology is a thing. Transgender activists try to do two things at the same time, and the mental gymnastics they have to go through to maintain the bifurcation/cognitive dissonance has to be massive:

1. They claim that sex (male/female or man/woman) and gender (masculine/feminine) are two different things 2. They immediately conflate sex and gender, such that “gay men” (homosexuals) are now “same-gender loving” 3. They abuse you gratuitously if you argue about these concepts

I’ve had some pretty long talks with a friend in the field of social work, and (personally) come to a nuanced understanding of “transgender issues” where the short truth is that the large majority of people claiming to be transgendered are suffering from a mental illness.

In the end, I don’t think alleged “gender roles” do a lot of good/matter; they’re cultural, and when it comes to things like wearing clothes (skirts, kilts, skinny jeans, cargo pants, v-neck t-shirts, or tank tops)… who cares? Same for makeup, nail polish, piercings like earrings or whatever-those are all just “how you express you”.

Claim that a gay guy needs to consider a transgender man a potential partner, though, and you have a problem. A trans man is a trans man-a statement that, being a tautology, it’s insane the amount of vitriol you can get directed at you. Not a man. We don’t have “pregnant people”; only women can be “pregnant”.

Oh well. In the end, however this comment goes, I feel I’ve followed HN’s policy of “I clarified some things”, even if some people try to claim that things are not what they are.

detcader
Most people don't see the full underlying logical endgame, because you have to be really immersed in the conversation to have a sense for it. Here's how I understand the logic: Sex doesn't exist, at all, we are each a kind of random assortment of things associated with "sex" in the past, and The Experts are just starting to realize this after centuries of transphobic/intersex-phobic blindness. Gender identity is something most people have, and most aren't aware of. It is a soul-level attribute that just happens to stay the same for most people since birth, but for some, it changes on its own or maybe in response to outside events. If you say you are trans/identify as trans, you are. Trans has nothing to do with "transitioning" inherently (and "transitioning" means something different for each person, whether operations are involved or not.) Same with pronouns: they can stay the same as they've always been or change every single day, and that's just part of being trans, because that's your true self. “Woman” “man” and “non-binary” mean something unique for each and every person who identifies with those labels. Ideas like "born in the wrong body" or that trans means switching sex or gender were just public-facing stepping stones so that cis people can eventually understand all trans people, not just the ones that are binary. Cis people are those who don't identify as trans. They inherently benefit from gender roles -- even the poorest, most abused women have advantage over any trans woman, because they are is cis (and there is currently a genocide against assigned-male-at-birth trans people, as The Experts say.) Of subtle importance is the fact that assigned-female-at-birth trans people sit at the top of the trans community privilege food chain, because they are transmisogyny-exempt, or tme.

To say the large majority have "mental illness" feels reductive and dismissive to me, I wouldn't say that personally but I am glad to hear about anyone talking about this. You are right about gender roles.

I'll add: The problem is that “trans” doesn’t mean anything, but it also doesn’t just mean gender-nonconforming. This can hold in general progressive spheres, because other identities like Jewish or Black also don't mean anything specific, so what’s the issue? Add to this that the definition of oppression (resource extraction by one group from another) doesn’t matter anymore – the understandings of Whites exploiting Blacks for slavery, rich exploiting poor for wealth, and men exploiting women for their bodies have been eschewed for the simplistic disease models of “racism” “classism” and “sexism.” So we end up with the result that women don’t really need the word “women” anymore. Oppression isn’t class-based, it’s an individual deficiency, usually in education, resolved through affordable training and mindfulness.

thenerdhead
Does there become a point where the inclusive language rules starts to exclude a group of people who feel it's too much?

I've taken many different D&I trainings. I am still failing to understand the merit of these efforts. I am all for inclusivity and psychological safety, but the very nature of these tools feels exclusive in the process. People who feel psychologically safe would use the language that best describes the thing without any feelings of retaliation from others and the understanding that humans make mistakes.

zzzkkk
> Does there become a point where the inclusive language rules starts to exclude a group of people who feel it's too much?

If it does, is that perhaps okay? Would this not just be a pendulum swing in the opposite direction from the current group of folks who feel excluded by dominant language? Might that discomfort switching hands, so to speak, be an interesting or useful exercise?

bavell
Are you asking if excluding people is okay if it's the right group of people?
wizhi
You'd think, that someone who has suffered would not wish for others to suffer.
exfascist
If empathy isn't your thing then consider the secondary consequences of this. Many of those people the "pendulum" is swinging away from already feel pretty excluded by society and have little reason to participate. It's driving a mass movement, it's likely what got Trump elected, and it's likely to swing the pendulum back very hard in the direction you don't want it to go.

You need to make sure you're not pushing people too hard.

zzzkkk
Empathy is pretty important to me and as I understand it's the primary motivation of folks looking to shift communication in public code repositories towards more inclusive language, actually. It's remarkable that asking for that empathy is somehow a bridge too far and the onus to be empathetic and not 'push too hard' is on those looking to make life a bit friendlier towards gender minorities.
zzo38computer
Sometimes changing the words to other ones is improvement (using words that are better descriptive (e.g. "firefighter" instead of "fireman"; their job isn't to light you on fire, isn't it?), removing distinctions that are irrelevant or unknown (e.g. words with "-ess", which I think that you usually should not need such a suffix), etc), but sometimes not.

About renaming git branches, the change that GitHub made is harmless, and made improvements too, since you can easily change the default branch and rename branches, which is useful for other purposes too. Furthermore, the name "main" is shorter than "master", so there is that advantage, too. The first two letters are also same; I don't know whether or not that might sometimes be an advantage. However, maybe if it were named "trunk" by default then it might be more consistent with other version control systems that use the name "trunk" by default; although, even if it isn't, that isn't a problem either since you can still change the default names anyways. (Note: I do not use git or GitHub, so if I have any incorrect details, then you might add a comment with the corrections, please.)

In SQLite, they changed the name of the schema table from "sqlite_master" to "sqlite_schema" (although the old name still works too). The new name is better descriptive of what it does, but I would have consider it is not worth to change this, so now there is two names, etc. I would have waited for SQLite4 and changed it to "sqlite_schema" in SQLite4 (and remove the name "sqlite_master", then), instead, but now it is what it is, and it would be better to keep it how it is instead of changing it back which would be even worse.

About "priest"/"priestess", I should think that it should depend on the roles of religious traditions, independently from the gender. (For example, Christian traditions do not have a separate "priestess" role (although some traditions ordain women, but it is not a separate role from men and so the term "priestess" is inappropriate), so should not need to use that word. Some (non-Christian) traditions might not have priests at all.)

jph
Thank you for this. I'm adding your schema point and your priest/priestess point, both to the big list.
kbrannigan
Big list is offensive to smaller lists. Please use a more size-inclusive term like: Not-Small list.

Switch "This" to "TTheir"

Point is offensive to bluntness . Please use Not so sharp.