this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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There was a pull request to change "he" to "they" somewhere in the code and the dev refused, saying people should leave "their politics" out of it. I wouldn't say it's transphobic specifically - it may also be misogynistic. Either way, it doesn't look good.
i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.
the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.
anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.
it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.
Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the "political" reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don't like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he's a bit like Brendan Eich. I'll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
yeah that ties in to my other comment; it's not political in american english culture (well it is, but only to chuds), but other countries don't have the same context for this stuff. and when those cultural barriers are crossed without knowing the differences, there is bound to be friction.