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Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid
(www.neowin.net)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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I sometimes like to read his political posts:
https://www.stallman.org/archives/2025-jul-oct.html
And honestly? I mostly agree with them? Like this:
He has some questionable beliefs as well, though for unusual reasons. He accepts non-binary people but refuses to use they/them pronouns because he doesn't like the ambiguity of singular/plural pronouns. So he has invented the neopronouns per/pers to refer to singular non-binary persons. I genuinely think no other person on this planet could hold this opinion.
Eh, I'm pretty close to this opinion.
A family member came out as non-binary, and I don't like to use they/them (for the same reason as Stallman), but I also think creating my own pronouns is more offensive, so I just use their first name, unless I can't easily avoid it (like this sentence). I'm not trying to be offensive, I just don't like they/them as angular pronouns. I also don't like "you" as both singular and plural, but I'm also not ready to use "y'all", so I refer to second person groups without the pronoun (if feasible).
On a related note, I also think gender is a social construct and not actually "real." Sex exists because it's a biological thing, but it shouldn't be directly tied to your role in society. To change my mind, I need empirical evidence that there's some unique difference between men and women (brain wave patterns?) that aligns groups of non-binary people or aligns trans people with people of the opposite sex. I personally don't think this exists, and gender fluidity is more a symptom of a culture that isn't well equipped to handle people who don't nicely fit into a bucket. I think gender is a useful metaphor for what's going on, and I absolutely support people fighting for using it to get the recognition they need, but I don't think it's an actual, scientifically proven thing.
The only real difference is that I use first names to refer to non-binary people's first names more frequently than to binary people. I hope that doesn't offend anyone, I just really don't like using the same pronoun for both singular and plural.
Singular they is over 600 years old by the way: https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/?tl=true
As a trans person, my gender dysphoria is not something caused entirely by social gender roles. Medical transition has greatly alleviated the majority of it. Anecdotally, within the first week of hormone therapy, my dysphoria improved dramatically while only being out of the closet to 2 people outside of my therapist and the medical professionals who prescribed my hormones. It has continued to improve, although I'm still waiting for the surgery that will resolve the remaining things that hormones can't fix.
Also, there are studies around brain structure differences between men and women, and transgender people tended to have brain structures in line with their gender, not their assigned sex at birth: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence#Brain_structure
Perhaps you should believe people when they tell you who they are, and get past your discomfort drawing arbitrary lines in grammar regarding pronouns, when singular they predates the fall of the Byzantine Empire by 75 years.
“They” as singular was really only made for when you didn’t know the sex of the person you were referring to, not as a pronoun for someone who you do. It had nothing to do with “gender identity” because that wasn’t a thing. Gender and sex were synonyms, 2 words for the same thing.
Eg “can my friend come to the party too?” “Yeah sure, what do they like on their pizza so I can make sure there is one they like?”
Not
“Can John come to the party?” “Yeah sure, what do they like on their pizza?”
In this instance you’d always have used “he” because you know with pretty much absolute certainty that John is male on account of being a male name.
It has only very recently been used as a choice that people tell people they want to be referred to by, because some people now believe in a “gender identity” being a separate thing to sex.
It existing as a singular pronoun doesn’t mean that it was used in the same context as it is now.