this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Someone made a PR to refer to users in documentation as "they" instead of "he". The lead maintainer rejected it saying "This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics." and then added a part against personal politics in the code of conduct. One brigade attracted for good reason later, another maintainer quietly merged the PR. It's very weird, but not anything too serious IMO.
Definitely won't be using ladybird then. If someone hates trans folks and just women in general enough that they literally see using inclusive language to refer to theoretical users as politics I don't see any reason to do anything to elevate their work.
Yeah, haven't looked into it again but when it came up first it had big "priviliged cishet white dude (as per usual with a lot of open source projects, thanks capitalism) not having enough empathy for others to change behaviour even the tiniest bit" energy. I'm not holding my breath but I have tinsy bit of hope they'll mature with the browser ...
An absolutely strange hill to die on, and may be an indicator of a bigger hissy fit in the future.
So weird, since "they/them" have always been used to refer to people who's gender/sex is not known!?
Since their first language is German, it might be that they think that they/them is like how it is in German, never used since it's gendered language, and definitely political in the sense that it's just wierd to see and making a statement of you use it.
The person that had the PR merged wasn't a maintainer, they just attempted to make the change using a different phrasing. ~~I remember they wrote "corrected grammar errors" and provided arguments and the PR got merged.~~ Here is the PR. They even posted on Mastodon about it at the time.
Edit: It seems now they require contributors to write documentation in gender-neutral language. However, the main dev still complains, to this day, how hard it is to run an OSS project while being "apolitical".