tim_chevalier

It's named after a fungus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28fungus%29

There's plenty that's been written about trans issues and gender issues, much of which is available for free on the Web. Trans people are not unpaid tutors or teachers for cis people (if you don't know what "cis people" means, look it up). Do the research, and then come with questions that show you've done it.

On this point, I recommend Douglas Hofstadter's "Person Paper on Purity in Language": http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

Hofstadter makes the same point (that words that claim to be both gendered and gender-neutral are never the latter) in a less snarky way in Chapter 7 of his book _Metamagical Themas_, entitled "Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness". You can find it on Google Books.

So if somebody raped your mother, it would make you happier if they felt no remorse than if they said they were sorry about what they'd done?

puzzled

My name, as the author, is at the top. Do you know a lot of women named "Tim"? (Kake, the original author, is a woman, but I contributed that particular item. Yes, I know that's not obvious from the list, which is why I clarified.)

The second point was meant to be about inanimate software constructs: for example, "This guy jumps to that guy without pushing a new stack frame."

The difference between "hi guys and girls" and "hi guys and girls, I guess, too, if you want to get really technical about it!!" is that the second sentence goes out of its way to call attention to the Other-ness of the marginalized group. But why not circumvent the issue entirely and use a gender-neutral term like "folks", "everyone", or (depending on the formality of the occasion) "distinguished colleagues"? It perplexes me that people who have no trouble writing a compiler or debugging device drivers apparently find it so difficult to phrase a simple sentence in a way that doesn't exclude anyone.

Sorry, I call bullshit. Under some theories (not particularly more or less credible than yours), rape is an "evolutionary urge". As is sex between adult men and 13-year-olds, as are all kinds of violent acts. Part of being an adult human is to control your "evolutionary urges and drives" so you can live in a society.

Would you accept "the estrogen made me do it" from a woman as an excuse for behaving incivilly?

I'm a guy.

Interestingly enough, the maintainer of the checklist (me) is a man who went to Wellesley.