[Koha-devel] Gender-neutral pronouns

[David Cook]

+1 for gender neutral pronouns, and I agree with Galen; we all have our own
priorities, as well as our own limitations and capabilities, when it comes
to contributing to Koha. While I think it's the prerogative of the QA team
and Release Manager to prioritize certain patches, I don't see any problems
with people contributing patches regardless of their perceived importance.

As for gender neutral pronouns, users of modern online English interfaces
may notice that websites like Facebook are already doing this on their
front-end. Instead of "X changed his status" or "X changed her status", it's
now "X changed their status" - at least in cases where gender isn't
specified. 

I graduated with a master's degree less than 5 years ago, and the norm was
to use "they" instead of "him/her" or "him or her" in academic writing. As
others have noted on Bugzilla, "him or her" or "him/her" is heavy to read
and non-inclusive. The idea of using "her" instead of "him" (as Phillippe
suggested) was used by some writers in the early 21st century, but it's
mostly fallen out of fashion. While it was politically significant, it's not
inclusive/accurate. While some people might think "they" is overly
politically correct, it seems perfectly logical to me. It's more concise,
inclusive, and accurate. 

Consider the following scenario. Your child goes to the doctor as they are
feeling ill. They come home and you say, "you've been to the doctor? What
was their medical opinion?". You wouldn't say "What was her medical
opinion?" or "What was his medical opinion?" as you don't know the gender of
the doctor. (Also you are being inclusive of trans and non-gender conforming
people as well.) (Note also that I didn't specify the gender of your child
either, as I don't know the gender of your child, so I used "they" there
too.)

I can understand that this might be difficult to understand for people whose
primary languages are heavily gendered like French and Spanish. While those
languages have engaged with the concept of gender neutrality
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_grammatic
al_gender), I think pronouns haven't quite been worked out. I've seen
proposals for new gender neutral pronouns in both languages, but I don't
think they're widely recognized, while "they" is quite widely used in
contemporary English.

If I understand Bug 18432 correctly, the change is just to code comments,
which are in English anyway, so I don't think there is the problem of gender
neutrality in other languages. If we're using gender neutral pronouns in
templates/code, I can see that becoming more difficult. 

David Cook
Systems Librarian
Prosentient Systems
72/330 Wattle St
Ultimo, NSW 2007
Australia

Office: 02 9212 0899
Direct: 02 8005 0595


> -----Original Message-----
> From: koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org [mailto:koha-devel-
> bounces at lists.koha-community.org] On Behalf Of Galen Charlton
> Sent: Friday, 21 April 2017 1:15 AM
> To: Paul Poulain <paul.poulain at biblibre.com>
> Cc: koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
> Subject: Re: [Koha-devel] Gender-neutral pronouns
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 10:59 AM, Paul Poulain <paul.poulain at biblibre.com>
> wrote:
> > I'll probably be poorly ranked here, but in my opinion there are more
> > important things to fix in Koha... (randomly chosen: clean the wiki
> > from severely outdated pages, test one of the 205 patches waiting for
> > sign-off, improve documentation, investigate why we have 10 blockers
> > or critical bugs open -without a patch-, one of them BZ14731 being
> > >1yr old)
> 
> Well, folks remain free to set their personal priorities in how they
choose to
> contribute to Koha. Trying to be more inclusive by measuring our words
more
> carefully does not preclude working on bugs or updating the wiki... and
may
> also result in more potential contributors deciding to stick around and
pitch in.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Galen
> --
> Galen Charlton
> Infrastructure and Added Services Manager Equinox Open Library Initiative
> phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
> email:  gmc at equinoxInitiative.org
> web:  https://equinoxInitiative.org
> direct: +1 770-709-5581
> cell:   +1 404-984-4366
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