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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • One issue I have with hexbear is that you can't argue with its users on hexbear itself. Most comments from outsiders are deleted within a day, and most of the users aren't interested in discussions and simply resort to name calling and personal attacks. The more "sophisticated" ones will tell you to "read theory". The amount of hexbear users actually capable of producing arguments seems to be very low, at least from my experience.

    These issues exist on other instances as well of course, but on hexbear its particularly bad. The only other instances this toxic I have interacted with were lemmygrad and exploding-heads.




  • They/them is absolutely gender neutral, as it can be used for any person, regardless of their gender. See? I did it in this sentence.

    Take my example from before: "A person is walking down the street. I approach them, asking for their pronouns. They smile and tell me that's none of my business." This works, regardless of the person's gender identity.

    Now use different pronouns: "A person is walking down the street. I approach him, asking for his pronouns. He smiles and tells me that's none of my business." This one only works if the person uses the pronouns he/him. (Btw, shouldn't pronouns be sets of 3 like "they/them/their", "he/him/his" or "she/her/her"?)

    Gender neutral language isn't about not recognizing peoples' genders, its about omitting irrelevant information. Having gender specific pronouns draws attention to the genders of the people referred to, even if the point of the sentence is not about gender. At some point during the development of the English language, the consensus emerged that it is important to always know/mention the gender identity of everyone involved.

    This is an arbitrary selection of a subset of a person's identity however. For example, we don't have pronouns indicating whether people are parents or not, or indicating their marital status.

    Actually, we did have the latter with "Miss" and "Mrs", until we decided that this distinction isn't very inclusive, introducing the neutral "Ms", equivalent to the "Mr".

    Point is, you could make up all sorts of pronouns including every aspect of a person's identity. I'm saying that is neat and all, but if I just want to construct a sentence about a person going to the store, I might not know or want to include any part of their identity, be it their gender, marital status or age.