Hello everybody! I’m your ethics game show host Wink Smarmy, and welcome to “Worth Confronting or Too Trivial To Bitch About?”,” the popular ethics game show where our contestants try to decide whether clearly unethical conduct is worth only a shrug and a giggle, or is serious enough to try to stop.
Here’s our special guest, Touchy McCrankface, with the problem he encountered recently…
“Hello, panel. My name is is Touchy McCrankface. For some reason I am still a Facebook user despite that platform banning my favorite blog Ethics Alarms for almost two years because one of their censors decided that it was racist to even discuss the topic of blackface’s appearance in some classic movies. When a Facebook friend I actually care about has allowed his or her birthday to be announced on Facebook, I will sometimes, as I am prompted, wish that friend a “Happy Birthday.”
“I do not use the stupid and juvenile pre-programmed emojis Facebook tries to stick on my message, the little cakes, candles and party hats. Recently I sent just such a birthday message to an old friend. Let’s call him “Mike.”
After I sent my “Happy Birthday”, Facebook sent me the equivalent of a receipt. I have no idea why. Maybe it has always done this, but I’ve never noticed one before, or if I have, I never bothered to read one. The message to me read,
“You wished Michael XXXXX a happy birthday on their profile.”
“Thank-you, Wink. I’ve written a fair amount about the pronoun nonsense, which we have been dealing with for getting on to a decade now, and we are in danger of being stuck with it forever. The last time I addressed the issue, in an ethics quiz in April, involved Trump officials refusing to answer inquiries from New York Times reporters who had their preferred pronouns attached to their email signatures. I left the call up to the commenters, but my own position was and is that this was a petty practice by the Trump people, needlessly adversarial, and that, as you would put it here, too trivial to bitch about.
“I don’t feel the same way about the Facebook note, however. It is grooming of a sort, as well as Facebook deliberately trying to create a cultural norm that makes no sense. Unless Mike told Facebook that he wanted to be called “they,” and based on what Touchy says, that seems unlikely, then referring to him in the plural is presumptuous and even rude, as well as offensive to the English language, our official national language, finally.
“This practice is becoming compelled speech. I hate compelled speech: if you try to make me say tomato, I’ll say to-mah-to as my code for “Bite me!” A freind who works for the Alexandria public school system sent me as email last week and it had “she/her” by her name. She told me that all school employees are required to list their preferred pronouns, to which I replied, ‘Well screw that. I wouldn’t do it, and I think it’s worth a law suit as compelled speech, which violates the First Amendment.'”
Gee, what do you really think, Jack? OK, panel, now its up to you! What’s your assessment: is Facebook’s gratuitous pronoun propaganda “Worth Confronting or Too Trivial To Bitch About?”
You have 30 seconds to be ready to answer…
Ethics Alarms 
I screwed up recently and now I somehow get notices in my email when almost anyone on earth posts something on Facebook. Sigh. I simply avoid Facebook. That’ll take care of the problem, Wink.
First of all, I’m glad I’m not alone in finding the suggested birthday emoji annoying. If someone wants to use emoji on purpose, well and good, but I prefer to type my own messages without having emoji put in my mouth. (…put on my fingertips?) Anyway…
Based on some recent structural changes in the Facebook system and the help pages I’ve consulted, I believe that the technical oversight and design of Facebook is generally incompetent and I’m amazed it works as well as it does.
In this case, if you go into the About section of your Facebook profile, and then “Contact and basic info”, you will see your system pronouns. Clicking the Edit pencil reveals this message: “System pronouns will be used for Facebook app notifications, i.e. ‘Wish them a happy birthday’. Your system pronouns are public and can be seen by anyone.”
(I don’t know if they’re wrong about the pronouns being public or if my friends just didn’t fill theirs in.) I’d recommend checking the friend’s “Contact and basic info” in the About section of his profile to see if he specified his pronouns. If he did, and Facebook ignored them in exactly the scenario it said they would be used, that’s definitely an issue.
Separately, I still consider it bizarre that you’re against “they/them” as a third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun. It’s apparently been in use for centuries, and I’m not surprised. I grew up hearing it used for people of unknown gender or nameless people in hypothetical scenarios. There are a lot of flaws in the naturally developed languages of Earth, and a very common one is lacking a pronoun to refer to a single person whose gender is unknown, nonconforming, or irrelevant. I don’t want unnecessary assumptions built into the words I use.
How do you feel about English getting rid of the second person “singular or informal thou/thee, plural or formal you/you” pronoun distinction? For that matter, we could use a distinction for whether the first person singular “we/us” includes the second person “you” or not.
I’m on the fence about requiring people to list their pronouns in emails. On the one hand, I do want people to be able to infer pronouns from context in most cases (or just use they/them until they know) without anyone making a big deal if they’re wrong. On the other hand, if it were required or customary, then people with gender-neutral names could clarify their pronouns without being thought of as making a statement of political allegiance. I wouldn’t mind the practice becoming normal and unremarkable.
I’m against it because, as you will frequently see in prose, it is confusing when the plural pronoun makes who or what is being referred to uncertain. “They” is plural. That we accept it in certain informal circumstances doesn’t make it the natural default. The forced use of it is based on LGBTQ bullying.
The singular “they” is plenty formal from what I’ve seen, and it is the natural default for anyone who doesn’t want to go around saying “he or she”.
All pronouns by definition require you to infer from context which noun they refer to. Whether this causes any ambiguity problems depends on how well you use them.
For example: The Green Team has been at war with the Purple Team ever since they stole their supplies and dumped them in the river.
No uses of the singular “they”, but can you tell me what happened?
it is the natural default for anyone who doesn’t want to go around saying “he or she”.
I have no problem with that use. But that’s not the use of “their” we are discussing.
I’m glad we agree on that point. I occasionally experience some confusion when I hear a single specific person referred to as “they”, but it passes quickly and has never caused any problems. It may be that I’m just used to it, or my habits of clarifying communication lead me to ask questions if I notice ambiguity on important points. Has it ever caused problems for you?
I lean towards the “too trivial” side, not because I think the pronoun thing isn’t an issue, but because “their” is what I have seen as cheap programming used by those who generally don’t care and want to skip the additional lines of code needed to figure out if they need to put him or her. Also, “their” keeps the gender police off the lazy indifferent person’s back.
I don’t really condone laziness, but sometimes I can appreciate a busted “give a damn” on these issues.
Came here for this point. There are all kinds of odd nuances across expressions of singularity and plurality that are surprisingly easy to get wrong, and only a junior programmer would be dumb enough to step into the pronoun minefield purposefully.
Add on top of that internationalization–like interpreting time– do the minimum possible and get out, or use someone else’s library to handle it, and write test cases against it to ensure it behaves.
I identify as a Threat. My Pronouns are Try/Me.
Problem easily solved by deleting excess words:
“You wished Michael a Happy Birthday”
no need for a pronoun at all.
Another fix: Switch to Mandarin. No pronouns whatsoever.
This is why native Chinese speakers will not infrequently “misgender people” because they can’t remember which of the options to use, sort of like how I constantly pick the wrong case in Ukrainian.
When I speak French, I’m confident that I routinely misgender all sorts of objects. (Hmm, just read an article that suggests that native French speaker are also not typically infallible, although surely they make fewer mistakes than I do…)
A side complaint. This same ambiguity of language is creeping into my crossword puzzling. It is really annoying and makes completion of the puzzle difficult.
Speaking as a programmer, I’m going to say I’m firmly in the Too Trivial To Bitch About camp.
I don’t know whether the code that generated this message had access to an advanced text substitution markup system capable of knowing the proper “his/her” possessive pronoun to use, and I’ll assume that it doesn’t (at least . . . beyond the simple substitution of the first and last name).
So . . . assuming arguendo that it doesn’t . . . what sort of text string is a programmer to write that makes sense? My expectation is that, rather than try to write some complex algorithm to figure out a “his” or “her” to use based on the name just for this otherwise-throw-away confirmation message, the programmer went the lazy way and used “their” instead . . . and probably did it without thinking a single thought about political / transsexual issues.
Lazy programmers are, in similar situations, the reason you see messages like “You have 1 new messages” or “today is the 21th of May” because spitting out the same thing every time (“messages” and “-th”) is easier and quicker than working out the syntactically correct phrasing without affecting the essential function of the code, and without introducing the possibility of new bugs in the code where you might get it wrong.
So bottom line: Lazy, not Political.
–Dwayne
P.S. Before you get the wrong idea about “Lazy Programmers”, I should point out that the three essential qualities of a good programmer are Hubris, Persistence, and Laziness (according to Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl programming language, with whom I heartily agree).
With Hubris, a programmer will take on any challenge, even something that at first glance seems extremely difficult or impossible.
With Persistence, a programmer will keep going until the code it written and tested, without giving up half-way.
With Laziness, a programmer will always seek out the quickest, simplest, and shortest method to accomplish a task–which is also, 99% of the time, the fastest, most efficient, and most bug-free method one could use.
Trivial. FB probably just uses “They/Their” for absolutely everyone – otherwise FB would have to program the auto-bot to dig into each profile, see if there are designated pronouns, if not, see if there’s a defined “sex” or “gender” and infer from that and risk getting it wrong – ultimately just using compute resources rather than just lay it bare. But above we did see a comment of how it could be written without pronouns, so…it should probably just be that.