this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I tried Raddle and the people there are crazy. I gave it a fair chance but even calling someone "he" is seen as an attack because I didn't instruct myself "whether or not the person wanted to be called he or she or they". This is the hill they are dying on.
I tried lemmy and the big problem is that people are attracted to the most populated subs, namely the subs hosted on lemmy.ml, which is administrated by the crazy chinese. It doesn't matter if you register yourself on beehaw, you will still talk on lemmy.ml, and when you are banned because you said "Taiwan number one" or because you insulted Putin, then you are out of the biggest channels. You can still talk on your own server, sure, but you will talk in a ghost town. The federation model has a limit. This is why we should populate Kbin and not jump on the lemmy.ml ship when the cloudflare component is eventually removed. Build here, stay here.
I don't want to start a war here, and I don't have the context of what you experienced over there. Perhaps they did go too far. But if you don't know the gender of someone, it is indeed incorrect to assume "he" is OK. That's inclusion 101: don't assume things about people. There is a commonly accepted solution to this problem, used e.g. in the academic peer review world where the reviewer is anonymous, which is to default to "they". That's a good habit to take, costs nothing, and helps (particularly) women feel included. That's a hill I'd happily die on.
Speaking about assuming things about people, don't assume everyone is an English native. In some other languages there is no gender-neutral equivalent and instead the normal and expected way to address a stranger is by using male pronouns. Reacting aggressively instead of just politely correcting someone is the difference between making someone have a positive or a negative opinion on a given topic.
Being a non-native speaker doesn't help, for sure, but one can learn. Point in fact: I'm french :) And as a non-native speaker, I find it great that English has well-known gender neutral pronouns, so I'm more than happy to use them. I wish French had one so commonly accepted as "they" and "it".
Also I don't know if you refer to my post as aggressive, but if so I'd appreciate if you could tell me why. I haven't called anyone names, and I think I responded respectfully to the OP.