"So to preface this is posted in literature.cafe’s meta community but this question is primarily aimed at generally anyone in the lemmyverse who is NOT a cisgender man no matter what instance they may be in. The purpose of this thread is to present a stage for conversation for those willing to contribute, and although cisgender men are not excluded I kindly ask you to be mindful of the fact what this thread is meant for and try to avoid talking over others here. If you are a cisgender man interested in learning and seeing how lemmy can improve like I am: welcome. For those who are here to cause issues or talk over others though, you will be promptly removed.
I do not know the demographic data of lemmy, but I would wager a large portion are male. And over the past few weeks I have witnessed women on numerous occasion discuss their discomfort on here. Reddit very much had a very “bro-y” feeling culture for many, that felt like a barrier to entry to many women. With lemmy, there’s a potential to break this. But the answer really is how? Lemmy has begun to develop into its own culture already independent of Reddit quite rapidly, and it’s been awesome to see but I am wondering if there’s a way we can push it a step further and implement ways to make the platform more welcoming to women than Reddit previously did.
Thoughts?"
They tried to pull "but not all languages have gendered third person pronouns" as if the vast majority of people using Lemmy aren't just English speakers or some other European PIE language like German or Spanish.
Using this, not an expert on most of these languages, but from what I could gleam on Wikipedia:
Mandarin Chinese: Spoken language has no gendered pronouns, but written personal pronouns have gender, mostly due to Western imperialism
Spanish: Gendered pronouns
English: Gendered pronouns
Hindi: No gender pronouns. The language technically doesn't have third person pronouns.
Portuguese: Gendered pronouns
Bengali: No gendered pronouns
Russian: Gendered pronouns
Japanese: Gendered pronouns
Yue Chinese: No gendered pronouns, but people usually type with Mandarin characters instead of Cantonese characters
Vietnamese: No gendered pronouns
Turkish: No gendered pronouns
Wu Chinese: Same deal with Cantonese
Marathi: Gendered pronouns
Telugu: Gendered pronouns
Korean: Gendered pronouns although spoken pronouns are gender neutral like Mandarin
French: Gendered pronouns
Tamil: Gendered pronouns
Egyptian Spoken Arabic: I have no idea why Wikipedia doesn't lump Arabic together, but Standard Arabic has gendered pronouns
Standard German: Gendered pronouns
Urdu: No gender pronouns. The language technically doesn't have third person pronouns.
The major non-PIE European languages (Basque, Estonian, Hungarian, Finnish) don't have gendered pronouns. Outside of Estonians and that's mostly because of the admin of lemm.ee, how many Hungarian/Hindu/Vietnamese/Turkish people actually use Lemmy? It's a ridiculous excuse, and there's no reason why an instance based on a language without gendered pronouns couldn't reuse the pronoun flair as some other type of flair like location.
if lemmy takes off in India, Hindi is more of a concern, but they could literally turn the feature off if the user/instance's primary language was set to one of the mentioned languages.
Also trans spaces in Chinese have people refer to themselves as aunts, uncles or (based) comrades
I assume there are other ways they handle it in languages like Finnish