> The they/them swap is the most elegant implementation I am aware of.

Far from it, it only creates confusion and injects ideologically charged "pronoun language" into the discussion. If you feel the need to make clear that yes, the person you're talking about can be a man as well as a woman - something which most people realise and the ones who don't won't anyway no matter which words you use - use something like s/he or "he or she". The first form is just as short, is not ideologically charged and does not create ambiguity.

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hypfer 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What confusion does it create?

You may genuinely not know the gender of an online nickname, and, frankly, you also don't really have to know? Why share this metadata in the first place.

I kinda see your point regarding "it pulls in culture war", but, to be fair, it's "they/them". Language that - in this very usage - predates the culture war by centuries.

So.. idk I think you might be wrong here.

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boxed 4 hours ago | parent [-]

"They" is plural AND singular. Obviously it creates confusion.

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hypfer 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair pushback, however, again, I would ask to which degree and to what end.

"There is an entity named doob, and they are responsible for this thing" at least to me kinda solves the exact thing (attribution, "where to ask questions") it needs to solve, while simultaneously encoding the least amount of metadata possible.

(Okay technically the entity is named mrdoob as an opaque string, but "there is an entity named doob" was more fun to type)

	▲	boxed an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In this case it could be plural though. Very much so.

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mock-possum an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Prefer harmless confusion to harmful intolerance

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exe34 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless they are non-binary? But in some languages you'll still run into trouble. In Italian, if your masculine, it's non-binario, and if you're feminine, it's non-binaria.

	▲	hypfer 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> In Italian, if your masculine, it's non-binario, and if you're feminine, it's non-binaria. Haha what the fuck. Who implemented that oh my god. Genuine question though. That cannot be grassroots, can it? Because it completely defeats the purpose of that. Did this just come up because someone _had_ to translate the english culture war during news reporting?