Found this blog post and found it had more insight into the issues around the dev and the toxicity in FOSS
You seem very, very sure of there being “LITERALLY” no problem with the gendered pronoun being used for an unknown user.
Instead of hand-waving it away as the author being male and just prefering his own pronouns in his writing, we could maybe consider where it is being written and why it might feel particularly non-inclusive? ie: a field that has historically been very intentionally uninviting to women?
Also, it’s not like this was someone petitioning for a boycott over one assumed pronoun, they just quietly fixed the grammar and submitted the change. Absolutely nothing idiotic about it.
There literally wasn’t a problem.
Until the person that asked for the correction literally assumed that said dev was assuming. Since thats what they said in their comment.
So I can understand being a little pissy at someone pointing to you and accusing you of assuming something. It’s stupid.
I may have been a little irritated too if someone accused me of assuming something. I wouldn’t have reacted the same, but I would have been clear that I in no way assume anything related to gender identity.
If the person wouldn’t have put that assumption into their comment, the change may have been more likely to happen.
Instead they assumed something and got push back which turned into the scene we see now.
Ass u me… I mean it’s pretty clear.
Ah OK, I think we’re getting to the heart of why you are saying that this wasn’t an issue.
When you say that the author wasn’t assuming anything, what exactly do you mean? If, for example, I write in a guide that if a user of my software does ‘a’ then he can expect result ‘b’, do you disagree that I am assuming my users go by he/him pronouns?
I might not have done it with intention, but there is an assumption being made there. Words mean things.
As an outside observer, who is a male which is important for this sentence, if something said “if a user of my software does ‘a’ then she can expect result ‘b’,” I wouldn’t assume I couldn’t use the software, I wouldn’t be mad about the gendered pronoun, I wouldn’t assume anything about the author, I’d say “cool so if I do A I can expect result B.” I don’t think I’d even give it a second glance, at best/worst I’d think “oh neat I wonder if the devs are women” and move on with installing the thing.
Exactly this.
Just because you wrote your documentation a certain way, doesn’t automatically mean that you feel a certain way about any particular group, or that your users are primarily a certain gender. It may just be writing what pronoun you are most familiar with.
In this particular case, we can see that the author didn’t exactly make the best case for himself.
However, there was never a problem to begin with until the person that requested the change also accused the the author of assuming that the user/dev of the OS is male.
If that little bit of accusation would have been left out, and they just put a note like “grammatical correction” it may have just been accepted and moved on. Instead they asked for a change while accusing the author of feeling a certain way.
