Be inclusive by adding gender options and pronoun options

[Giordano Bruno 1974]

Non-binary or gender fluid are not actual medical conditions, legally recognised alternatives to male and female or linguistically accepted in English. I don't accept this as being a real thing that the world needs to acknowledge.

Changing all pronouns to "they" is not representing people better, I'm not a "they", I'm a "he". Some games already refer to all players as "they", I don't like it but I'm not going to make a big fuss about it.

But acting like treating everybody as "gender fluid" is somehow an improvement.

[N_Faker]

Also it's one of the logical fallacies to say that one thing can't be fixed, just because EVERYTHING can't be fixed . That's blowing the problem up so large that it can never be solved and so you get your way, by pretenting to be helpless... or just unwilling to make the effort.

Unlike all those other problems this one would make a BIG difference for a relatively small amount of effort . In terms of cost-benefit analysis , it seems to me Like a win-win overall for the board.. And everyone playing on it .

Do feel free to go through all instances in which pronouns are used on BGA, in which replacing them with "they" won't change the meaning or make it ambiguous as to if it is meant as a plural or non-gendered singular.

Take charge, make the effort.

It is not as if BGA is opposed to gender-neutral options or avoiding pronouns altogether.

[Les Jaunes]

I am a white cisgendered heterosexual male, who used to work in web development, and I voted in favour of the suggestion linked in the original message, because I believe it would make this community more welcoming to more people. I'd like to share a few thoughts on how to foster a spirit of collaboration that would help make this change a reality.

People asking for this change: do not assume anything about the amount of work needed to make it happen. This would in no way be a small undertaking. It would involve rewriting thousands of sentences in BGA and its games' hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lines of code. Most of the games are developed by volunteers, who would need to put up some of their time to either make the changes themselves or train someone else to do them. Then there's the issue of localization. As others have pointed out, BGA is a multilingual platform. This contributes to its inclusiveness and can't just be ignored. Each language has its own way of dealing with gender, so there would need to be a discussion about this change in each of BGA's supported language and then a plenary where each language's solution was evaluated with the goal of a single codebase supporting all of them. So it's like Kennedy said: "Ask not what BGA can do for you, ask what you can do for BGA [to make this change happen]".

BGA staff: I've got a Kennedy quote for you too. "We choose to implement inclusive gender options not because it is easy but because it is hard." You've only given one answer in this thread and it contained two points:

* This is harder than you think.
* You're forgetting about other languages.

I agree with both of those, as stated above. I don't agree with the way you appear to be using them to shut down the discussion. Instead, why don't you expand on how the community can help you undertake this and ask for volunteers? You might be surprised at the responses you'll get.

Me: I'll lead by example. I can contribute:

* String replacement in BGA and/or games code
* Writing new gender-inclusive French translations if provided with a guide

Thanks for taking the time to read me.

[merlin they them]

"her / his / their" sounds like a reasonable list of pronouns to me

Agree.

Non-binary people exist and adding an extra pronoun/gender option is a respectful solution.

That's already what's being done here if you take the time to look into it.
Probably not perfect or complete (BGA was created by French people not aware of this English language notion initially so we used his/her in the beginning), but it's the general case now. You can find some discussions about this in the forum if you take the time for a little research.

It is sort of being used on BGA, but the profile preference section only has options for "a man", "a woman", and "do not display". At a minimum, this needs to be updated to have an "other/write your own" option, which would equate to "do not display." It's not the ideal solution by any means, but it's better than not having it at all.

Also, I request that you please prevent Giordano Bruno 1974 from continuing to reply in this thread. Giordano Bruno 1974 is not actually contributing to the discussion and furthermore states the below which is harmful and offensive. Additionally this is not the first time, that Giordano Bruno 1974 has done this. In another thread Giordano Bruno 1974, stated "Far too much of that kind of toxic politics in the world already" in which toxic politics referred to the consideration of historical oppression. Source

Non-binary or gender fluid are not actual medical conditions, legally recognised alternatives to male and female or linguistically accepted in English. I don't accept this [referring to non-binary and gender fluid] as being a real thing that the world needs to acknowledge.

As shown in the below articles, nonbinary and gender fluid are scientifically proven, legally recognized, and linguistically accepted in English. These are facts. And Giordano Bruno 1974 is choosing to ignore the facts to insult people that have valid identities.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_rec ... ary_gender
• https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-his ... ular-they/
• https://cadehildreth.com/gender-spectrum/
• https://massivesci.com/articles/sex-gen ... -title-ix/

[BlondeVegan]

Add inclusive options, it's 2021 and having only mars and venus icons is outdated.

[epsalon]

I've read through this thread and I want to add some important information.

I wrote a pretty long article about this question: https://medium.com/@epsalon/the-argumen ... 01e69158b0

Let me begin and state that I think trolls that disrespect nonbinary identities do not belong on this (or any other) websites. I am not going to join the argument about whether or not gender identities need to be respected. They do. End of story.

Now, if BGA was an English-only site, there would be two options that are reasonable:

* Completely remove gender from the site, use they/them/their pronouns everywhere. This is probably the easiest solution to implement, and is respectful to all. Most simple English-only sites should follow this rule.
* Allow a selection of pronouns to be used from a decently long list of pronouns (e.g. using the pronoun.is database). Additional pronouns would have to be approved by an admin and added by request. This prevents trolls from abusing the pronoun field. Then these pronouns should be used in all UI elements that refer to that person, whether they are the ones using the site or not.

Unfortunately, neither of these options work for a multilingual site. In the case of a multilingual site we need to ask people for their grammatical gender. This selection must include masculine, feminine, and neuter (with neuter being default).

If a user has a UI set to a language where neuter forms don't really exist, we should let the user choose a default gender (for others) that only affects their own UI. This should allow masculine, feminine or masculine/feminine.

This gender support is a bare minimum for a multilingual site if it wants to support any language that does not support a neuter/unknown gender. This is not cheap or easy to build and requires redoing translations in a framework that supports grammatical gender. The only reasonable alternative is to use unsightly UX such as צריכ/ה.

Now, a good multilingual site can add support for language-specific preferences, e.g. pronoun selection for English and possibly separate pronouns for German, etc. This is especially useful for sites that are mostly used in English but still support other languages. The pronoun selections can default to being based on grammatical gender but could be customized by the user, from an approved list to prevent abuse.