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Player Gender
    Keywords: SL description

This page discusses the use of gender in Sensei's Library.


(Unknown Author): At Sensei's Library we usually refer to White as "she" and to Black as "he" if the players are unknown. This simplifies the discussion of diagrams. See also: WikiEtiquette.


Matt Noonan: I was under the impression that Black was typically called "she" and White was "he". Isn't this more in line with the gender/color relations in the yin/yang sense?

MortenPahle: I asked this question over on RGG some time (about two years?) back. However, with Deja being taken over by Google, I cannot seem to find the posts anymore. I seem to remember that the 'normal' use is Black:male and White:female, but that Janice Kim consistently uses the opposite. There was also someone who linked the actual yin/yang colours into the discussion, but my memory doesn't quite stretch far enough .... Google is promising to bring the full archives back up, so maybe these fascinating posts can be resurrected...

How's that for a useless comment ;-?

Jonathan Cano: For what it's worth, Whole Board Thinking In Joseki (vols 1 and 2) by Yi-Lun Yang uses

  • Black == male
  • White == female

(But more Chinese know that: Black =yin, White = yang and yin = female, yang = male.)

I think I've seen this convention in one or two other published books so I think it is good to stay with color/gender choice.

The only thing worse than a bad standard is a constantly changing standard.

Kevin Greer: In the Translator's Preface for the book Essential Joseki by Rui Naiwei, 9 dan (who is a woman), the editor says that he reverses the Daoist convention of referring to the feminine as Black, as a way of honouring the author. Indeed, not many of us could play White against Rui Naiwei.

Hu Of KGS: Why bother introducing gender and all its complications into an abstract game? Gender pronouns in Go are completely unnecessary and archaic. The convention is used one way in some books and the other way in other books. A duplicitous convention is worse than no convention. It is not hard to use gender neutral language:

  • Write "White" or "Black" or "W" or "B" explicitly.
  • Use the word "one", as in "One may play a shimari".
  • Using "they", "themself", and "their" in generic singular context is the original way of English until 18th century grammarians took it upon themselves to arbitrarily change the language.
  • Eliminate pronouns entirely.
    • "Black may play her stone at A" becomes "Black may play at A".
    • "Black will crush her opponent" becomes "Black will crush the opponent".
    • "White builds his wall" becomes "White builds a wall".

ChrisSchack: For that matter, the passive sentence forms could be used. Instead of saying "<pronoun> may play a shimari", it's certainly possible to say "A shimari may be played". Of course, this may not be the most natural thing for some statements...

Neil: The last thing the English language needs is for people to encourage the use of the passive voice. Especially on this site, where japanese jargon already obscures the meanings at times, unnecessary passive voice would make things hard to understand.


Charles Matthews Well, I have written a whole book in gender-neutral language. It can be done, once you have the knack. More impersonal, though. I still like the SL convention.


Bill Spight: Mathematical Go uses masculine pronouns for White and feminine for Black, only accidentally in tune with yin and yang associations. It associates Black with the Left player and White with the Right player, via Belle BLack and WRight White. ;-) It also uses feminine pronouns for players in general.


Nathaniel Rounds: My understanding of yin and yang is that black is yang and white is yin. (Because black represents all colors, or fullness, and white represents no colors, or emptyness.) I attended a Chinese Buddhist school in California, and that's what they taught me. Thus it seems like:
black == yang == male
white == yin == female


Tamsin: I don't think it matters whether Black is male or female, so long as the writer uses their own choice consistently or so long as which colour is meant is always clear.

I have no objection to gender neutral language, either, but using "he" and "she" does have a pleasing, personal feel about it, and that appeals to me.


Sebastian: I wonder what made them say that. Firstly, black is not the combination of all colors. That would be either brown (in subtractive color mixture) or white (in additive color mixture).[1]

Black is indeed the product of mixing all colours subtractively (more specifically, if you mix cyan, magenta, and yellow, you should get black). You get other colours in practice due to imperfect colours
our light blues are never precisely cyan, our purples are never precisely magenta, our yellows are always the slightly wrong shade of yellow.

Secondly, as any dictionary will tell you, the characters themselves clearly mean:[2]

[1] Hikaru79: I think it's safe to say that in 4000 B.C. or whenever Chinese Buddhism was at it's peak, there weren't any really advanced theories about subtractive color theory, etc. Black is dark, therefore it must have seemed like it was all colors. White is the color of paper, of light, therefore, no colors.
[2] Quoted from Concise English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary, Oxford University Press (admittedly not a concise title;-)

陽 Yang: 1. (in Chinese philosophy, medicine, etc.) Yang, the masculine or positive principle in nature. 2. the sun. [...]

陰 Yin: 1. (in Chinese philosophy, medicine, etc.) Yin, the feminine or negative principle in nature. [...] 3. shade. [...]

The Shuo Wen Jie Zi, published around AD 200, and the standard for all dictionaries of classical Chinese since, writes about Yin's root: "侌。从今。从云。曾意。雲覆日也。" ("Yin: From 'presently' and from 'cloud'. That is: clouds are covering the sun.")

On second thought, there might be a reason why they said that: Since they're from California, they might have had tan lines on their mind.

Seriously, though. For the sake of the great tradition of Go, I urge every author to stick with the convention that has stood the test of time for milennia.

See also YinYang Principle



This is a copy of the living page "Player Gender" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.