Should RPG.SE enforce a specific standard for handling gender pronouns?

Question

In this question, a user repeatedly left comments suggesting 'correction' of gender pronouns in cases where the original text wasn't itself incorrect. These comments were later deleted by moderators. No posts were actually edited by the person suggesting the corrections.

Independent of the actual reasons for asking for such changes, the effect of those comments was not to improve the answers but instead an effective derailment, unsurprisingly generating user comments about gendered language.

Should RPG.SE enforce a specific language standard (here: with regard to gender) even when the original text is correct according to the rules of English grammar?

Answer 1

All pronouns are neutral and should be enforced as such.

I personally think that nobody should be harassed, or be in the red for guessing wrong on how someone wants to be called, and this should extend to RPG.SE. no pronoun should have a negative connotation, whether being misused or otherwise.

Unless otherwise stated, all questions are gender agnostic.

This means that 'he/him', 'they/their', and 'she/her' pronouns are correct, and none of them are incorrect. Good answers simply maintain continuity, and don't switch to refer to the same people. The answer may decide to change pronouns if the answerer wishes, but there is no correct gender. An answer should never be wrong because the gender is 'incorrect', because no gender option is incorrect. If the OP puts in the post that this is a gender-issue, then correct pronouns should be used.

Answer 2

We don't enforce specific expectations around how people gender things and should not really do so. It's up to individuals to determine how they want to handle things: I like singular 'they', others like to use 'he or she' or 'he/she', others use default male. Use whatever works for you and the discussion. Sometimes I catch myself using default male and make a point of using default female instead because why not.

Stay consistent with Be Nice: call people by the appropriate pronouns, respect a trans individual's gender expression, etc. That's business as usual though.

Our goal is to be a valuable RPG Q&A site. Respecting gender diversity is an admirable goal and something we should aim for. I don't much like default male either myself. Having an enforced policy of gender pronoun usage however is going to cause a lot of trouble for our community — that's the kind of thing that requires major buy-in, and it requires people to understand how to navigate this gender space appropriately. It's a significant expenditure of energy which I don't believe will be worthwhile.

Those interested in getting that buy-in would do better by opening up a conversation and requesting a certain practice. That may secure buy-in from individuals interested who can voluntarily write their own posts this way. I believe when SevenSidedDie mentioned opening a meta about it whilst correcting that user, SSD probably meant less "propose a policy", more "point out there's a lot of default-male and make a constructive request that we can handle it another way, and open the floor to discussion on the matter" which would work better to that end. (That's not to say you were attempting to follow SSD's suggestion, just that's what I imagine SSD meant.)

Answer 3

No

I'm going to give you the super short mxyzplk version of this. No, we are not interested in enforcing gender pronouns. Feel free and promulgate a voluntary best practice people can use here on meta. More inclusive language is welcome.

Even better, lead by example by YOU writing questions and answers that use inclusive language in the way you want it to.

Do not hassle individual questioners and answerers about it via comments unless it's objectively wrong (e.g. used him for a woman).

You can submit edits in specific cases, but if you submit edits on every question/answer ever changing "he" to "he or she" or the like that's going to end very quickly.

We are also not interested in the arguments that infest other Internet sites between the usual two sides. So take it to reddit. Here we are professional and polite and that's it.

Answer 4

Enforce? No.

Encourage? Absolutely.

Let me quote from a very important document that governs how our site is run — and how it should be run when we forget:

Be welcoming, be patient, and assume good intentions. […]

Language likely to offend or alienate individuals or groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. will not be tolerated. At all. (Those are just a few examples; when in doubt, just don't.)

[…]

We're proud to be a large, user-driven space on the internet where name-calling, harassment, and other online nastiness are almost non-existent. It's up to all of us to keep it that way.

In summary, have fun, and be good to each other.

That's from Be Nice, our policy on acceptable behaviour on the site.

Be Nice is usually invoked when someone is doing something wrong, but that's not its only purpose, just the most common time we remind people about it. Be Nice is also, at its core, an aspirational statement about who this site is for.

We don't have that policy of what's okay only to stop people who don't follow it — we have that policy also because it describes who we are and want to be.

And who is that? Everyone. And how does it say we achieve that? By including everyone, and requiring that everyone be included.

How is that relevant here? Because as a community, the RPG community is really, really bad at including women and girls as fully-fledged members.

And as we all know, words are important — things like game rules can turn on a single word. How we use words on the site reflects who we are, and who we welcome, and how well we accomlish that.

Words have power. So that's why people raise things like using default “he” as an issue — because that word choice has power, in a way that practically and directly impacts the core mission of our site.

The wider RPG community has a poor gender record

The roleplaying games community has a bit of a gender problem, in that girls and women are generally not noticed, ignored, minimised, or otherwise not included when we talk about RPG fans. The image of RPG fans is generally male — and that's self-perpetuating.

Our policy on inclusiveness seeks to amend that, but preventing people from being mean isn't enough. People who are traditionally put on the “outside” looking in — like girls and women have been in the RPG community — need to be actively shown that they're welcome in order to overcome the barrier that past (and ongoing, elsewhere) exclusion created. It's not enough to be neutral — as the document says, we have to be welcoming.

We have to create that welcoming atmosphere on our site, and being a site made out of words, we do that with our words.

A side trek: Grammatical correctness is a red herring

Grammatical correctness is a red herring. There are many things which are grammatically correct which do merit changing a post. Being grammatically correct is not the minimum bar for quality here — far from it! Grammatically incorrect posts are generally just fine, and are sometimes fixed up, but we have no rule about requiring it. Conversely, we do have rules that require fixing up a post when it crosses certain lines.

Am I saying that using “he” as a default is crossing a line? No — maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that's not the point this section is making. The point here is that grammatical correctness is utterly irrelevant in discussions like this about how we govern ourselves as a community. Defending something because it's “grammatically correct” is at best a misunderstanding of what's important to the site.

A further historical side trek: Default Masculine is neither grammatically correct nor incorrect

Believing that default masculine is the correct English grammar is actually a relatively new invention. It was created in the 19th century by England grammarians specifically to attempt to make it incorrect to use singular “they” for entities in a sentence of unknown (grammatical) gender. (Yes, that's right! Singular “they” is older than the default-masculine rule, dating at least to the 1700s, and obviously likely earlier too.) The official reason they did it is what we now recognise as stupid reasons: because “they” has weird number-agreement, grammatically. (This is a stupid reason because singular “you” has the exact same number-agreement dynamic — and a well-documented potential replacement in “thou” — yet they saw no need to “fix” that pronoun.)

So masculine default has no special historical or grammatical weight that makes it more correct, and the Victorian and Georgian grammarians who falsely taught that it did (along with other invented “rules”) were engaging in language revisionism that still causes problems today.

(Side-trek ended.)

What we should do

As I said, we encourage everyone to feel welcome here. And we require that people assume good faith.

So when someone in good faith proposes that a post's writing is reinforcing the perception that we, the RPG.se community, consider men to be the default RPG audience, through transforming gender-unknown subjects into masculine subjects, we should in good faith listen to that critique of the writing.

When possible, we should strive to show that we are actively including people who are generally given a harder row to hoe in our community, and we can do that in such small ways as correcting unnecessary re-gendering. (Or mis-gendering! We not only get unknown genders transformed into ‘he’s, I've seen even female characters in questions transformed into men by the answers.) We can rearrange sentences to not need a pronoun. We can use “he or she” or “she or he” or singular “they”. We can do like some RPG texts do and use default-she for GMs and default-he for players. We can alternate, looking at what's already on the page and choosing the other pronoun to balance.

(And if we do enough of that, the occasional default-he becomes better: just another stylistic choice among many, instead of the most common default used on the site. Doing more to avoid default-he means, paradoxically, that we don't even have to strive for some kind of perfection of non-masculine writing — which would go right past inclusive and comes back around to excluding some people.)

We can, in short, approach this thoughtfully and with consideration. We can show that we're making an effort, and not just dismissing or ignoring.

Should this be enforced?

Like I said at the beginning, no, this shouldn't be enforced. We don't need a mandate, just a shared aspiration.

We want to imagine that girl or woman reading a particular post and feel like they can see themselves in our writing, even if only because the writing doesn't assume they're a boy or man. Some of us are that girl or woman who wants to see us included in the site's writing! (That should go without saying, but sadly it still needs saying.)

It should not be enforced. It should be encouraged.

And I encourage each and every one of us to help in our own small ways, as authors and editors. I encourage everyone to be part of welcoming everyone. We have our small powers granted by the site, and we can use them for the betterment of this site for all our community.

Not just for girls and women

Although “he or she” is what prompted this meta, and so I address that specifically throughout, the principles I talk about are much more general and making girls and women feel welcome is just a specific application thereof. I'm a bit uncomfortable making this an endnote, but I'm not sure how best to convey that earlier or throughout while addressing the actual situation at hand.

I would hope that it's obvious how this applies to all people though. If not — focus on the principles underlying the answer. …Or tell me how to fix it. :)

Answer 5

Our policy should be as politically neutral as "Be Nice" allows. This means that pronouns not used to refer to specific people should be allowed as written by the author of the post within the constraints of readable grammar.

When it comes to Pronouns used to refer to specific people, one should follow one of two patterns:

1. Use a suitably 'correct' pronoun of the person referred to, as defined by that person.

2. Don't use pronouns.

Regardless of a person's political opinion, the above guidelines can be followed, without offending anyone. There is simply no excuse for using a contentious pronoun because pronouns are optional.

This is largely in agreement with doppelgreener's answer, but that answer does not address a case that should, imho, be addressed directly.

Answer 6

I care not one bit for political correctness; but am a stickler for correctness. Uses of he or she invokes a feeling of annoyance in any place I see its use but they produce no more annoyance than the use of he or she when used individually when not applying to an actual character.

I think the site should encourage the use of singular they. I can put up with my feelings of annoyance but my annoyance isn't coming from some sense of political correctness but purely one of accuracy. Now encourage is different than enforce. Just saying: We like singular they but he is accepted here, as well as she, he/she or like variants. Should be enough.

Here is an example:

Q: "How many spell slots does a wizard have at level three?"

A: "He or she has X spell slots."

I'm thinking: [insert favourite expletive], it's an abstract question! There is no actual person just say "They have X spell slots."

This is fantasy land, it could be a sentient animated rock wizard, or a self replicating amoeba wizard, both incidentally have no gender while the later could still reproduce. I digress, the point is when asking a RPG rules questions you generally don't need gender and introducing it is just an annoyance in keeping things simple. It's just Occam's razor don't go adding things when you don't need to.

Now another example which has to do with role playing:

Q: I'm playing Henrieta a female barbarian gnome with a penchant for baking, she lives in the great mushroom forest of [some made up land], what should she bake for a group of visiting elvish dignitaries?

A: She should bake mushroom strudel because it's loved by elves and gnomes alike and is a well known delicacy of [some made up land].

Obviously she is appropriate [you could replace she with Your barbarian gnome... but that's a bit obtuse].

In the context of this question by the OP, the actual question as far as I'm concerned is: Should people use he/she in contexts for which pronouns aren't needed as they aren't referencing anyone? And the answer should be yes, lets be tolerant, I just want to be painfully clear that tolerance is good and I hope the above makes it clear that it is still just wrong, but we're gracious and can overlook it [although with the above I hope we are in agreement that such people are still the worse for doing so].

Further issues with use of pronouns when not referring to actual people:

Hopefully the above is enough but personally speaking pronouns have deep meaning, and I think they have deep meaning for more than just myself, consider if a friend spoke the following sentence:

[pronoun] was walking down the street and [pronoun] was [adjective].

I would say the above sentence is evocative, that is it would conjure vivid imagery for most audiences and would be filled with vivid detail from the type of day to the type of person and clothing. Taking into consideration the speaker and the assumed environment. This sentence is about as devoid of content as possible and it still packs a punch. So kindly, if one doesn't need to be introducing some character into my though processes, because there isn't one, don't do it, it annoys me.

Because of how fundamental pronouns are we start building context off them immediately and you can't have a he-or-she, logically it isn't possible, it feels awkward because we are going to create a contextual frame [correct or not] and then have it screwed up in an way that can't even logically exist. To be clear someone is either: He, She, Both, Neither, or one of the previous but currently indeterminate... Unless someone wants to be a jerk and creates a situation where Schrodinger's cat is inseminated and the moment of conception is held in some sort of quantum state... other than that you can't have he-or-she.

Oxymoron's despite their name should be beautiful, who can't appreciate deafening silence, seriously funny, or burning cold. Our brains build a context, in this case the appropriate connotation and meaning from the first word is determined by the second, if it is something that can be adapted but isn't typically we spend a bit more time, but we savour the moment, it deepens meaning. But if we hit something like he-she, my mind pauses and then says: "[expletive] you". It's just a bloody awkward expression, that seemingly only exists to state: I want to derail your reading process.

Not that everyone will agree but I hope to have conveyed why I hate the expression, in such a way that you could see how a lot of people could very reasonably come to the same opinion.