Pronouns and Gender

[biosafetylvl5]

Changes to the Gender section of the style guide to better reflect the currently agreed upon pronoun usage practices.

[biosafetylvl5]

(Also some small edits automatically made by my editor, mostly the removal of spaces at the end of lines)

[hexagon5un]

"currently agreed upon pronoun usage" is vastly overstating the degree of consensus on the he/she/they issue.

Until a week ago (!) the AP style guide insisted on "they" as a plural. The big news is that it now allows for the singular "they" in cases where there is no person referred to ("everyone loves syrup on their pancakes") and avoiding "they" is impossible. In the general case, however, the AP says "rewording usually is possible and always is preferable."

The AP also says that if the actual person reported on prefers "they", you can use it, but you're supposed to make explicit note in the article to avoid confusion. (Which I think sounds clumsy and is crappy to the person in question to put them under that spotlight.) In any case where the hacker expresses any preference for a prounoun, I'd be inclined to respect their wishes without further comment.

https://blog.ap.org/products-and-services/making-a-case-for-a-singular-they

The AP may be too conservative, but the Chicago Manual of Style doesn't allow the singular "they" at all, so it's even more in the "anti-they" camp. I would love to read the NYT's style guide, but it's behind a paywall. I suppose I should fork out the $50.

Anyway, I don't think there is a clear consensus.

None of these guides seem to consider our most common case at Hackaday -- where the person probably would identify as he or she, but we just don't know. That's a bummer. I suppose we could ask for clarification -- in the end, it's our job as writers to get it right or not write it down.

So, I'm not going to merge these changes as-is, but I'm going to go back through all of the included links and see what else we can say. I'm still not satisfied with the state of the big US journalistic style guides, but I'm not convinced that the generic use of the singular "they" is consensus.