Re: [PATCH] docs: process: use gender-neutral pronouns

On Thu, Sep 10, 2026 at 08:59:04AM +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:

On 9/9/26 20:47, Kees Cook wrote:

quoted

On Wed, Sep 09, 2026 at 09:14:04AM -0600, Jonathan Corbet wrote:

quoted

Ruben Sutton writes:

quoted

Several process documents use gendered pronouns when referring
generically to developers and maintainers. Use singular they instead,
making the language inclusive without changing its meaning.

Leave pronouns referring to named people and text in attributed
quotations unchanged.

Ouch.

I have no objection in principle to this change, but if we try to clean
up the whole kernel in this way we're going to have a *lot* of churn
and, undoubtedly, some unpleasant discussions at some point.

I'm tempted to raise this question at the maintainers summit to see if I
can get some sort of project-wide policy laid out.

FWIW, I'd agree "indefinite they" (or "singular they") is the right
language here: "his or her" is both annoying to read (too many words)
and non-inclusive. Using "their" solves both.

I do, too.

But all this makes me wonder: In case we decide to go down that route,
how do we prevent gendered pronouns from accidentally sneaking back in,
for example, through subsystems that change their docs directly? Do we
maybe have something already somewhere that watches changes to
Documentation/ where we could plug in a test script that yells if it
detects this in next? And yes, obviously someone would then also need to
write such a script.

This appears to me as similar to the words we decided to ban in commit
a5f526ecb075 ("CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology"). As far as I'm
aware, there's no tooling to enforce this, we instead rely on reviewers
(and authors in the first place of course) knowing the rules. The
inclusive terminology discussion that occurred back then made the news,
helping us to raise awareness of the rules. For gender-neutral pronouns
we may need to communicate a bit more proactively towards at least
subsystem maintainers.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart