Vermont, thank you for your passionate comments during the session about respecting fellow contributors’ self-identities. I admire your work on Wikipedia, UCOC, and around the Wikimedia movement.
I was in two minds about whether to reach out to you after the session, since it appeared to me that you were responding to a strawman that arose from multiple layers of paraphrasing following my original comment. However, now that you have responded here and stated your assumptions about my assumptions, I am compelled to respond.
Respect should be universal. Tolerance should be universal. However, pronouns are language-specific.
Half the languages I speak do not use pronouns like English does. My native language, Cantonese, has no grammatical gender and has one singular pronoun for everybody and every countable object. In Japanese, of which I have an intermediate level of command, using any pronoun in the middle of a conversation would signify emotional distance and would thus be considered disrespectful if one knew the name or job title of the person being referred to. “How to respect the way someone identifies” is culture-specific. We should appreciate that maybe, just maybe, the way you show respect for someone’s identity can vary between cultures and we should be gracious to one another when we cross linguistic boundaries.
If it is the committee’s consensus that it is unacceptable to even discuss the possibility that the way we’re handling pronoun respect is somewhat biased towards English and similar languages, I can only apologise and disengage.
But I was not trying to make a point specific to pronouns, but rather to use it as an example to illustrate a wider phenomenon. The fact that we are having our international discourse in English means that behavioural issues more prominent in English-speaking discourse have tended to be more prominent in UCOC as well. I think the UCOC process has done a good job listening to editors who speak languages that don’t work like English about these issues: the caveat “As a sign of respect, use these terms […] where linguistically or technically feasible” is the result of a lot of good compromise, and we should stay vigilant moving forward.