Replacing lines for "Other" gender

[wildweasel]

If this becomes such an issue, the only way everybody can be satisfied is to make people fill in their pronouns in the Player Setup window.

[Hellser]

That should be feasible, I think. It'll lead to weird obituaries, but hey. With the recent mindset of the world, have to please everyone.

[Arctangent]

As I said before, I don't mind it. Don't see how it is insulting, personally.

To be honest, this is a really crappy attitude to have towards stuff people find insulting.

[Shadelight]

Why not Xe or Xirself?

[Kostov]

Sirself.

[Xaser]

If this becomes such an issue, the only way everybody can be satisfied is to make people fill in their pronouns in the Player Setup window.

I super-like this idea, if only because that means I can fill in "Fronk" in the blanks. :O

[mallo]

Why not Xe or Xirself?

I like this idea

[Kostov]

Oh, how creative all of you are.

[phantombeta]

If this becomes such an issue, the only way everybody can be satisfied is to make people fill in their pronouns in the Player Setup window.

Bad idea IMO.
This removes the ability to translate pronouns, which would completely destroy translated text. (Hint, ZDoom has support for languages that aren't english and has working translations in zdoom.pk3.)

[Laggy]

How about keeping the "it" gender but call it "cyborg" and make different "other/unknown" gender with "them" or "one" pronouns.
EDIT: Derp, yeah, basically the same thing others already said, haha.

[Kostov]

Basically the same as what I said. All of these other people wanted fancy custom terms just because Wildweasel suggested something which seems like a bad idea.

[mallo]

Xe/xir isn't a "fancy custom term". It's a real pronoun.

[Kostov]

Oh dear...

[GFD]

Trying to support every pronoun set that's ever seen usage is a lost cause. However, the "they/them" set is part of standard English, and supporting those as a fourth gender option in ZDoom has been on my wishlist for a while. How best to implement them is a bit of a thinker, though. Perhaps a new fourth gender option of "unspecified"? Maybe it could even become the default gender.

How do those pronoun references work in other languages in ZDoom, anyway? I imagine the answer is "not well / at all."

[Gez]

I think they're hardcoded.

Even if they're not, though, it remains complicated, because largely it depends on the language. For example in French, possessive pronouns agree with the gender of the possessed, not the possessor. I.e., in English the feminine form for the third person possessive pronoun is "her", and the masculine form is "his". In French, the feminine form is "sa" and the masculine "son"; but you cannot translate "her" by "sa" or "his" by "son"!

To quote wikipedia:

In some languages, possessive determiners are subject to agreement with the noun they modify, and possessive pronouns may be subject to agreement with their antecedent, in terms of relevant categories of gender, number and case. For example, French has mon, ma, mes, respectively the masculine singular, feminine singular and plural forms corresponding to the English my, as well as the various possessive pronoun forms le mien, la mienne, les mien(ne)s corresponding to English mine.

Since personal pronouns may also agree in number and gender with their own antecedent or referent, the possessive forms may consequently show agreement with either the "possessor" or the "possessed", or both. In French (and most other Romance languages) the third-person singular possessives do not indicate the gender of the possessor, although they agree with the possessed (son, sa and ses can all mean either "his", "her" or "its"). This contrasts with English and standard Dutch, where the form of the possessives (his, her, its; zijn, haar) indicates the grammatical or natural gender of the possessor, but does not depend on properties of the possessed. However German and several Dutch dialects[2] additionally inflect their possessives, thus giving agreement with both possessor and possessed; German has sein and ihr meaning "his" and "her" respectively, but these inflect to give (for example) feminine forms like seine and ihre, depending on the gender (and number and case) of the thing possessed.

So in a ZDoom context, for something like "%o killed %hself with %p own rocket launcher", in French you'd have "%o s'est tué avec son propre lance-roquette" -- notice how two %-placeholders have been removed, the first by the presence of a reflexive form for the verb, and the second because the possessive pronoun does not depend upon the possessor's gender and here you know the gender of the rocket launcher. (Remember: gender is a grammatical notion, not a biological one. Male and female aren't genders, they're sexes. Genders are masculine, feminine, neutral, and whatever other oddity there can be in a language, including sometimes genders that cannot be tied to sex at all, such as "animate" and "inanimate".)

On the other hand, if you want to convey the same emphasis as in a sentence like "%o killed %p own dumb self" then it becomes harder, you'd have to add "elle-même" or "toute seule" (feminine) and "lui-même" or "tout seul" (masculine) and that's already harder. French also has agreements on adjectives, and that's by far the biggest issue with gendered strings in ZDoom. The feminine form is usually the same as the masculine form with the addition of an 'e' at the end, but sometimes this causes the doubling of the previous consonant, but it's not always the case. To get it right, you have to use morphological rules (overkill) or lists (simpler to implement, but also overkill).