If all that my 20+ years of carefully writing gender-balanced text has done is to encourage people like you feel entitled to lecture me from your moral high horse on any occasion when I don’t measure up completely to your standards, then I’m done being gender-neutral.
Does that mean that you are only gender neutral because you like approval from the gender neutrality cops, and if they stop approving of you, you have no reason to continue to pursue/improve your decades-long policy of trying to do the right thing?
It means that being gender neutral has encouraged you to feel like you have the right to tell other people how to write, and to look down on anyone who uses the word “he”.
I would not have objected to your use of a male-specific phrase if you had not written in the second person. I’d be willing to take your word for it that your choice was random and I wouldn’t care—if it were about some hypothetical person who was male. It was about a “you” addressed in the post, and I, as a reader, was therefore excluded.
I’d like to delete this conversation from Less Wrong. I’d rather have done this by email. Nobody else seems to be reading it anyway. You can reach me at @yahoo.
In my experience, disagreements get more heated when done in public posts than in private emails.
I don’t like to delete things that have gone on for this long. In the future, you could PM people who make comments you’d like to reply to but think may develop into “heated disagreements”. But if no one else is reading it, then some of the votes on the comments are unaccounted for.
Does that mean that you are only gender neutral because you like approval from the gender neutrality cops, and if they stop approving of you, you have no reason to continue to pursue/improve your decades-long policy of trying to do the right thing?
It means that being gender neutral has encouraged you to feel like you have the right to tell other people how to write, and to look down on anyone who uses the word “he”.
I would not have objected to your use of a male-specific phrase if you had not written in the second person. I’d be willing to take your word for it that your choice was random and I wouldn’t care—if it were about some hypothetical person who was male. It was about a “you” addressed in the post, and I, as a reader, was therefore excluded.
I can understand that a little better.
I’d like to delete this conversation from Less Wrong. I’d rather have done this by email. Nobody else seems to be reading it anyway. You can reach me at @yahoo.
In my experience, disagreements get more heated when done in public posts than in private emails.
I don’t like to delete things that have gone on for this long. In the future, you could PM people who make comments you’d like to reply to but think may develop into “heated disagreements”. But if no one else is reading it, then some of the votes on the comments are unaccounted for.