this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
153 points (94.2% liked)
Technology
67669 readers
6384 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Unfortunately, the lead developer of Ladybird, Andreas Kling, has engaged in transphobia and enforced misogynistic language in his previous project's documentation, SerenityOS. This post documents and links to multiple examples: https://toot.cat/@EveHasWords/114081930465217200
I followed the links to see what he actually wrote. There's nothing transphobic or misogynistic about it.
If you are referring to some other incident, then please link it so we can see for ourselves.
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecomment-830793992
Really?
This screams "women not wanted" to me
Really?
A better fix would be to remove the pronoun entirely.
But honestly, it doesn't matter at all.
Yes, I'm sure that PR would have been accepted instead /s
But you're right, it doesn't matter at all, the reasonable thing to do would have been for the guy to spend 3 seconds clicking the accept and merge button, or 6 seconds making your change. instead he wrote a comment stating that inclusive language has no place in his project
Here are the issues I see:
My suggestion sidesteps the issue entirely by avoiding pronouns, which doesn't violate norms at all here.
He didn't say anything about inclusive language not being welcome, he said politically motivated changes aren't welcome. If there's documentation referencing users of telhe software, I'm guessing a change using inclusive language would be treated very differently.
What's the established norm here. All people compiling software by source are male?
What's politically motivated about changing "he" to "they". As you said, gender doesn't apply here, so the neutral word is literally preferable.
I'm honestly not sure, most OS projects I've seen use passive voice like I provided, because gender doesn't make sense. I've seen a handful of projects select "he" for system users (e.g.
root,nobody, etc), so that seems like the norm here, if there is one. Or it could be that the project uses "he" elsewhere to refer to these system users.Here's the documentation:
This isn't referring to an actual person, it's referring to a system user created by the build script in the target operating system (SerenityOS). The user will never be used by an actual human, so any gender selected here is irrelevant, and there should be no preference for male, female, or a third gender.
That's why I prefer the passive voice because no gender makes sense, and
itjust looks weird.If I was the maintainer, I too would probably reject the PR because it didn't remove the gender entirely. Most technical writing does that, because selecting a gender makes no sense.
Cool, but that isn't what happened here. The PR was closed immediately because the maintainer considered using gender neutral pronouns "personal politics" - he had ample opportunity to clarify his stance, or simply comment 'resubmit in passive voice', but he didn't. Clearly the problem wasn't the active voice, it was the summary of the change, because when that exact same PR was re-submitted much later with a commit message of 'Fix some minor ESL grammar issues', it was accepted with no discussion
As an aside, I absolutely disagree with the use of passive voice. It's more verbose, and harder for the reader to comprehend. It's why every style guide (APA, Chicago, IEEE, etc) recommends sticking to active voice, especially in the context of 'doing things'.
In this case, yes. Context matters a lot here, and the context is that this didn't refer to any human user, but a system user.
What's the gender of
root? The question doesn't make sense, becauserootisn't alive, it's a technical concept. What gender is your PC? A directory? It's the same idea, it doesn't make sense.However, switching it from one pronoun to another is politically motivated in the sense that it's virtue signaling a certain brand of inclusiveness. The only gender that could make sense is whatever is used most frequently, e.g. w/ ships we use "she/her" for whatever reason, despite gender having absolutely no reason to exist. If a gender is used, I've seen the masculine, but again, that's incredibly rare because any technical writer worth their salt would avoid the use of genders altogether because it doesn't make sense to use a gender in that context.
And why would he need to clarify anything? The simplest explanation is that this person is knee-jerk reacting to pronouns, and trying to change something that doesn't matter at all because they see pronoun and think "must be gender neutral." If they took a couple seconds to think, they would've realized that gender doesn't matter at all here. It's a useless change, and the reviewer shouldn't spend any time on it at all.
I've rejected tons of minor changes (e.g. whitespace changes) because it seemed the user was just looking to get their name in the commit log to build a resume or something. That's a waste of everyone's time, and this change looks no different.
Yeah, that makes sense for most things, but for technical writing, the most important thing is clarity. Throwing a gender where it doesn't belong is a distraction, and using active voice where it doesn't belong is as well.
Check out The Elements of Nonsexist Usage: A Guide to Inclusive Spoken and Written English, in Chapter 4 the author recommends exactly what I've outlined here: use "the user" instead of "he/she." Here's as Stack Exchange discussion about just that (which mentions this book):
If the PR removed gender entirely, it would've had a better change of being considered. It's still a largely worthless PR though, unless it's fixing something tangible in the documentation.
You seem content to entirely gloss over the issue, which isn't the pros/cons of a particular writing style, it's that the maintainer could have said ANY of the things you said, but he didn't
I can't speak for the maintainer. What I can say is that FOSS maintainers tend to not like putting up with noise.
This is the extent of what they said:
Then the github issue got brigaded. Why are there hundreds of reactions to a one-sentence response to a one-word change that doesn't matter at all? The fact that we're even having this discussion is crazy imo.
It literally does not matter, and I'd prefer their developers write code than engage in a culture war.
I don't know kling's personal politics, nor do I particularly care. What I care about is the quality of the code in the project, and if they're able to attract the type of talent that would constructively contribute to the project. A one-off rejection of a noise PR isn't an indication of issues IMO.
I really can't figure out if you are trolling or not.
nah. it may not be a huge deal (esp. if you're male) and "screaming" might be exaggerating it, but "keep personal politics out of code" is classic "I consider your existence political".
I'm happy to see if the guy's politics has changed in the years since this happened, and I don't know if their involvement in the project is worthy of a boycott, but those are personal choices (and the relevant comment was even helpfully linked).
Follow the link. He denied a pull request for gender neutral language in documentation, calling it "personal politics." https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecomment-830793992
In other words, Andreas insists the OS developer be referred to as "he/him" instead of not assuming gender. Not only that, he's doubling down. It's textbook misogyny. Fuck him.
"Personal politics" is a vague phrase that generally just means someone's views and priorities. There is nothing pejorative about it, nor in the way he used it.
The build instructions in question follow English language conventions that have existed for hundreds of years (and are shared by more than few other languages). All he did was decline someone's proposed change that would have applied a very new convention regarding pronouns for a hypothetical person. This is not the same as insisting that anyone refer to anyone else in a particular way.
It's also not unreasonable. We can ask people to adopt new conventions, but we don't get to expect or demand it.
Change to a language takes time.
No, it is not.
Singular they is old. It may be newer than the gender neutral he, but its not new
Certain forms of singular they are old, but the drive to make it the general convention when referring to a hypothetical person is new.
Nobody ask this person their thoughts on federal marriage law conventions in the us in the year 2015
Yes, it is.
It's sexist when you assume someone is a man because they're a doctor. It's sexist when you assume someone is a woman because they're a nurse. And it's sexist when you assume someone is a man because they're an OS developer.
When you continue insisting that the OS developer be a man, even though it's been clarified to you that they just as well may not be, that's when your behavior crosses the line to misogynistic.
It isn't a fucking "convention" to push women down by insinuating they're not welcome in your profession, and it's not a "new convention" to fucking avoid doing that.
None of what you claim was done in the document being discussed.
No, but choosing either the male or female pronoun when writing about a hypothetical person has been the convention for a long time, and using the male one has been the usual default for far longer than any of us has been alive. It's not to push women down; it's a grammar compromise, and is not exclusive English.
You are misunderstanding the language as it was used, and you have jumped to a false conclusion that seems to make you so angry that you think it's okay to publicly vilify someone... for your own mistake.
I hope things get better for you.
Good day.
pronouns are really nothing new. he/him has meant a male person for hundreds of years, didn't it?
Either a male person or a hypothetical person whose gender is unknowable.
Someone with undetermined/unknowable gender would use the pronouns they/them, never he/him.
We're not discussing what someone would use for themselves. We are discussing what someone would use when writing about a hypothetical person.
If you believe that he or him would never be used in this case, then I suggest you do some research on the history of language.
Edit to clarify: And by history, I include recent history, meaning usage by people alive today, who learned it in school not terribly long ago.
And that changes it how? It's insulting to misgender someone, though I can understand how you'd think that there's no harm in insulting someone hypothetical.
Per your suggestion, "they" has been used to refer to a singular person since the 14th century. "He" is currently masculine-only. I apologize if you misunderstood my use of "never" to refer to things around the 18th and 19th century (when it apparently was considered bad to use "they" in the singular) when I presumed that there was an implicit limit to modern usage of English.
Annoying that you're being downvoted, you are absolutely correct. We should not support Ladybird as long as Andreas is involved.
Do what you want, but IMO that's a really lame reason to hate on a software project. Evaluate the software on its merits, not the merits of random people associated with it.
When you donate to a software project, you're not giving money to some inanimate concept. You're giving it to the developers, the "random people associated with it."
Kling's actions are harmful, and contribute to an open source environment less welcoming to ~4 billion people. I don't want to reward that. Unless you do, you would be better off putting your support elsewhere, too.
I reject the premise here. If you're going to subject contributors to a purity test, we'll just get fewer contributors.
I haven't yet seen anything Kling did that made the project less welcoming. The only evidence I've seen provided here is a rejected PR that changed a system user's pronouns (i.e. something nobody would actually use directly) to gender neutral pronouns. The correct solution here isn't to make the pronouns gender-neutral, but to elide them altogether, because a system user cannot have a gender because it's just a technical concept. It's not talking about the human user, but a random system user, like
rootornobody. The pronoun doesn't matter, so the only rational motivation here for the change is virtue signaling (system users can be women, trans, etc too!), and that's just political crap nobody wants.I'd agree with you if it was referring to the user of the software. But it's not. No gender makes sense here, so one gender over another is irrelevant. The better change is to remove the pronoun entirely because it literally doesn't make sense as a concept here.
I haven't been keeping much of an eye on Ladybird, what happened with Andreas?