John,

2017-03-23 6:46 GMT+01:00 John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au>:

>
> In my mistaken belief that ng0 was trying to impose upon the world new
> rules of English grammar, I considered this to be an assault on
> freedom of speech.   I told ng0 I would refuse to comply, having
> completely misunderstood (and failed to clarify) the request.
>
> Ng0's angry response, I attributed to wounded pride, an over-inflated
> ego and a childish temperament on ng0's part.   I now see that this was
> totally unfounded.  Under the circumstances, ng0 had every right to
> feel extremely insulted and very angry at what I said.   The people who
> sprang to his defence are commendable.
>
>
[...]


I apologise to ng0 without reservation.
>

as far as I'm concerned, I appreciate the apology and the clarification.

Admittedly, I also had misunderstood your motivations. Knowing that I was
wrong about those is a relief.

In this regard, I'd like to point out that you observed how these gender
based objections are often raised by male cisgender people about
mislabeling transgender women but not as often by cisgender women about
mislabeling transgender men.

Was that just an unfortunate rhetoric tool ?

Or did you already run in such clashes in the past, maybe in different
communities ?

If it was a rhetoric accident, then ok

But if you already run into this this kind of misunderstanding before, my
suggestion is to go to those people and clarify your motivation to them too

In fact, mistaking your motivations for political ones can turn out to be
bitter to lgbt people.

Some say that this could hurt software projects in keeping some people
away, but I prefer to focus on feelings and moods.

Life is what it is, there's no need to let badly formulated sentences to
leave back more sour than it is necessary

If I ever have cause to discuss ng0 in the third person, I will of course
> do so using their pronoun of choice.
>

Please, remember not offering alternative views when ng0 asks people to use
the singular they/them for them ;-)


>
> I apologise too, to the rest of this list for wasting time and resources,
> on a completely unnecessary flame-war, which could have been avoided
> if only I had fully read a post before replying.
>

The good part of this is that the community as a whole had an opportunity
to elaborate the issue and some important points were made in the process.

The appropriateness of the discussion for the mailing list, the invitation
to read about the subject, the statement of priorities for this project.

I want to thank Ludo and Ricardo. Their position is not easy, managing
conflicts is a thankless job, probably more so than reviewing patches ;-)

But in my view they did the right thing.