Read The Feminist Manualis a re-appropriation of RTFM (Readt h e F u c k i n g M a n u a l ) a n d a d d r e sse sg e n d e r d i sc r i m i n a t i o n i n t e c hdocumentation of FOSS.

i t c o n si st s o f a f i r e f o x a d d o n t h a tr e p l a c e s sh e a n d h e p r o n o u n s w i t h t h eneutral counterpart they.

this zine gathers info about thei n sp i r a t i o n o f t h e p r o j e c t , f e m i n i stse r v e r s, a n d i m a g e s f r o m o n l i n e v i e wo f t e c h m a n u a l s u si n g t h e a d d o n .

Introduction
The project Read the Feminist Manual is a re-appropriation of RTFM
(Read the Fucking Manual)and addresses gender discrimination in
the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities and thelack of support in accommodating marginalized voices. It started in
the context of Excavations, a online governance research organizedby the Media Enterprise Design Lab of Boulder University ofColorado. The output of the research is an experimental addon
which replaces gendered pronouns he and she to the neutral
pronoun they. In this zine here, you will find information about theidea behind the project, information about feminist servers,
information about the addon and browser screenshots of theresearch.
Enjoy the feminist reading!

1IndexContext and inspiration p.4
Feminist Servers p.7
Support/Resources p.9
RTFM addon p.10
Screenshots p.11
Cheat Sheet p.18

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Context and inspiration
Free and Open Source Software (aka FOSS) development happens
with code contributions within communities. This code is most often
technical, but sometimes is about code of conduct, meaning how
members shall engage with the community, and code
documentation, meaning how other developers and users caninteract with the code. The writing of these manuals often assume
the programmer/engineer is a he.
The idea for a feminist tech manual as a re-appropriation to RTFM
(Read the Fucking Manual) [note 1] came up when I was looking
online the documentation of a free software I was installing. I readthis from gettext docs:

In this manual, we use he when speaking of theprogrammer or maintainer, she when speaking of thetranslator, and they when speaking of the installers
or end users of the translated program.
[note 2]

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When I posted about this gender stereotype re-enforcement on
mastodon, someone pointed me to a patch that was submitted lastSeptember by a contributor in the GNU community, who wished tocorrect this issue by substituting he, she, his, her with they/their.
Incredibly but true, this patch was not accepted by the community.
Here are some excerpts of the responses to the patch contributor on
GNU mailing list (public and accessible) about the gender usage:

The GNU Kind Communication Guidelines don't
mandate gender-neutral speak in documentation.
[they] are about communication between people, notabout documentation. Therefore there is no need forgender-neutral speak in the GNU gettext
documentation.

[...] The patch you suggested requires reader toaccept "singular they" which is not commonly usedanywhere and is considered an error by many,
especially in formal writing.

41) In a specific document or documentation, do wewant gender-neutral speak?
2) If we want gender-neutral speak, what is theEnglish grammar element that works best?
Here, it's futile to discuss the second question, since
the answer to the first question is already "no".

This last quote was the end of the debate. So the question about
introducing gender-neutral speak was finally raised by one of themain contributors, only to reject it with the above reasoning.
Just for the records here, one response in favor of the change
pointed out:

It (they) is very much on the uprise. So much thatit's been chosen as the 'Word of The Year' in 2019by Merriam Webster, And 'Word of the Decade' by
The American Dialect Society.

[see the email thread on the GNU lists note 3]
If we dig further, Richard Stallman, one of the founders of the Free5

Software movement, refuses to use people's preferred pronouns, tothe point of dismissing the pronoun they as grammatically wrong andcoming up with his own random rules for new pronouns [note 4].
When we cannot have a say in the decision-making of thesecommunities with regards to language etiquette, gender inclusivity
and other forms of discrimination, we can at least circumvent themon another level. A browser addon can do that for the readers
without waiting for the gender emancipation of the GNU project andthe FOSS in general. But more about this later.
How this gender bias was backed with arguments of language
correctness is similar to another incident that happened in a Greek
hackerspace mailing list around 2019. What happened in a nutshell;me and a peer organized a presentation about our autonomous
feminist servers, and in the event's promotion we wrote a blurb,
where we referred to the server with a female pronoun, while in
Greek it is called with a male pronoun. The warriors of the Greek
language got furious (la rage!) and a long trolling unfolded. In bothincidents, it is clear that the language correctness is a pretext forrefusing to waiver the privilege of the male programmer/hacker. The
result though has further implications; these communities tend to bebiased and changes of social inclusion are (mostly) not happening.

6Feminist Servers
What is a feminist server?

All servers are ruled by different terms of service,
governance models and national legislation [...] This
somewhat technical definition can obscure thepossibilities for understanding the political aspectbehind the setting up and management of a server.
[Sophie Toupin, Alexandra Hache note 5]

From the experience of women and queer identified peers running
autonomous tech infrastructures, the following junctures are part of afeminist pedagogy: extensive documentation, be able to ask anyquestion without being judged by competitive colleages, and workwithout having to deal with a sexist discourse. These attitudes inspire
solidarity and participation from diversed identities, and challenges
the dominant FOSS monoculture.

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A list of feminist servers[see more info about each server in cheat-sheet note 7]
1 Alive projects
1.1 Anarchaserver
1.2 La Bekka
1.3 Cl4ndestina
1.4 CódigoSur
1.5 Fuxico + Feminist Pirate Box
1.6 MaadiX
1.7 Matriar.cat
1.8 Systerserver
1.9 Vedetas
1.10 1984
1.11 Diebin
2 Closed projects
2.1 Kefir.red8

Support/Resources
Although cyberfeminists have done a lot to put
forward their priorities as a movement to funders, it
can be argued that internet freedom funders remain
unconvinced of the centrality of gender issues andonly see it as an add-on or a subset of the sector.
[Ledys Sanjuan Mejia note 8]

There is an urgency for feminist internet infrastructures to provide foractivists, creatives and marginalized communities. And to do so theyneed more resources to grow their networks of solidarity. Support
that comes with strings attached, such as adjusting feminist techprojects into Big Tech aesthetics, or obssesing over technical rather
than social innovation, pressure on serving funders' agenda and soon, is often not a viable option for tech and cyber feminists who
mostly care about the access to and agency of technology, and notabout purely technocratic emancipation.

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RTFM add-on
A Firefox addon that replaces she and he pronouns with the neutral
counterpart they, by filtering webpage content, is under development
and released as an experimental extension. It can be installed from
the Mozilla addons gallery:
https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/read-the-feminist-manual/
Read the Feminist Manual version 1.0 of the addon provides thefollowing features:+ A user input to enter one or more URL for filtering. Click theaddon's icon to add hosts.
+ Replacement of he/she with they in bold.
+ A counting of all he/she occurrences found in the HTML text is
added at the top of the page.
So far, the addon has been tested with the following GNU manuals:

gnutils mailutils gettext tar emacs wgetFuture versions will include the option to print the filtered content intoa PDF.

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Screenshots

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

CHEAT-SHEET
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM
2. https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/
3.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gettext/2020-09/msg0001
2.html4. https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html
5.
https://giswatch.org/en/internet-rights/feminist-autonomous-infr
astructures
6. https://systerserver.net, https://anarchaserver.org
7.
https://alexandria.anarchaserver.org/index.php/You_can_chec
k_some_of_their_services_in_this_section
8.
https://www.genderit.org/feminist-talk/feminists-are-building-th
eir-own-technology-organise-where-are-funders-0

18this zine is created by Mara Karayanni and is partof the psaroskalazines.gr
It is the outcome of Excavations, an online
governance research organized by the MediaEnterprise Design Lab of Boulder University ofColorado.
Many thanks to Darija Medic and Nathan
Schneider for their inspiring feedback during
the Excavations' cohort research between
August and November 2021.
Cover, headers and colophon font: CasaleNBP
Content font: Helvetica

released in thepublic domain