• merde alors@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    “he/him” probably isn’t he/him in their non-gendered language. In some languages there’s no he or she, there’s only a pronoun that means “that person”

    Armenian, Persian, Tagalog, Finnish, Georgian, Turkish, Swahili &c

    • lad@programming.dev
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      4 days ago

      That’s true, but you can’t help but notice that when people coming from this background are taught English, they are usually taught that ‘male’ pronouns are the default.

      If anything, I would support the removal of ‘he/him’ for all the backlash it will generate.

      • merde alors@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        in france “they” invented “iel”, a gender neutral pronoun, to replace “il” and “elle”. Young people (some?) adopted it rapidly and were using it naturally but the state banned the use of “inclusive language” on all official communications (which includes schools)

        i remember thinking that inventing a new pronoun, like they did, was a better solution than choosing one of the two as gender neutral

        • brsrklf@jlai.lu
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          4 days ago

          I’m working in (local) French public service. We’ve developed apps with basic gender inclusive language (not iel, more like including genders in form titles and messages), a while before the government banned it from official communication.

          As of now, nobody has done anything to remove that from the apps, because we don’t see the point and we have way more important things to do to actually improve services.

        • lad@programming.dev
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          4 days ago

          Outright banned, I’m guessing because blindly following rules by the book, but I think it’s not a move in the right direction.

          In Spain people are trying to make neutral words by placing @ where a/o should go in the gendered words, I think it never made to any documentation but it wasn’t banned yet, at least.