On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 02:43:28PM -0500, Glenn Maynard wrote: > On Sun, Jan 30, 2005 at 07:27:26PM +0000, Helen Faulkner wrote: > > Martin Michlmayr wrote: > > >Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt and Brian Nelson have recently joined the Front > > >Desk. I'm currently giving them some training and I have also written > > >documentation on the activities of the Front Desk. The documentation > > >is available from http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/nm/trunk/doc/ It's not > > >particularly exciting reading, but at least the functions of the Front > > >Desk are documented now. > > I was looking over some of the documentation on the page you mentioned, > > and I noticed that some of the templates assume that the people referred > > to will be male. [1] assumes that a NM applicant is male. [2] assumes > > that any DD, or any respectable person who might be contacted to verify > > the applicant's identity will be male. > > Could you please reword these to use gender-neutral language. My > > suggested solutions for the problematic paragraphs are included below. > Ugh. English has no gender-neutral third person singular pronoun, "they". > which means that the use of "he" and "his" for an unspecific third party > assumes nothing about his gender. Your objections to [1] and [2] are > patently false. Grammatical prescriptions do not negate the visceral responses people have to this sort of pronoun use. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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