This is one of the few things that my unique and unfortunate biology give me some authority to speak about.
I'm trans -- and that means I've done time as a female developer, and as a male developer.
When I was a guy, I used to laugh in the face of women that complained about things like gendered pronouns in source comments.
Now, with different ears to hear, it has gone from (say) this:
The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop him from sending it twice
To this:
The POTENTIALLY-YOU needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop NOT-POSSIBLY-YOU from sending it twice
It is jarring because while the syntactic form of the sentence remains static, changing the reader alters the semantic form of the sentence to one with an inconsistent grammar. Even more than the (obvious, probably unavoidable) implied suggestion that the typical user is male, it is this post-parse grammatical inconsistency which makes the text itself weirdly difficult to read.
Sexism comes in at the level of parsing.
If this doesn't make sense to you, please google 'indexicals' (in the advanced-logic sense) and read what the grey eminences have to say about pronoun resolution in sentential signification.
Comments
This is one of the few things that my unique and unfortunate biology give me some authority to speak about.
I'm trans -- and that means I've done time as a female developer, and as a male developer.
When I was a guy, I used to laugh in the face of women that complained about things like gendered pronouns in source comments.
Now, with different ears to hear, it has gone from (say) this:
To this: It is jarring because while the syntactic form of the sentence remains static, changing the reader alters the semantic form of the sentence to one with an inconsistent grammar. Even more than the (obvious, probably unavoidable) implied suggestion that the typical user is male, it is this post-parse grammatical inconsistency which makes the text itself weirdly difficult to read.Sexism comes in at the level of parsing.
If this doesn't make sense to you, please google 'indexicals' (in the advanced-logic sense) and read what the grey eminences have to say about pronoun resolution in sentential signification.