alt Hacker NewsSure, but why would I go out of my way to use gender neutral pronouns like "they" when they can just tell me their preferred pronouns?
Sure, but why would I go out of my way to use gender neutral pronouns like "they" when they can just tell me their preferred pronouns?
It's only "out of your way" if you never learned to write gender neutral from the ground up.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the default in many Commonwealth locales to not assume that (say) Rob Owens writing mathematics and engineering papers was male (as it turns out, she isn't, the Rob is short for Robyn).
So much correspondence was with people who had Initial Surname or abstract handles that didn't broadcast gender.