Re: New Front Desk members

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

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.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> 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, 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.  (Your rewritings, arbitrarily switching between plural and singular
forms, are clumsy.)

There are useful things for Debian to spend time on.  This is not one of
them.

-- 
Glenn Maynard