>> I am not staff in any way, but in the spirit of the community, I would just like to point out the relevant guideline here.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
The correct course of action if the article is inappropriate is to flag it. Same for transphobic comments.
Transphobia leads to the suicide & murder of highly oppressed people, so I’m going to choose to continuously break this rule whenever it needs to be mentioned. For doing so, moderation can ban me if they please
I should keep my mouth shut but... I am genuinely very curious: Can you please explain how this sort of conduct is supposed to help reduce transphobia and the associated suicides/murders? I don't follow at all.
When people learn that those whose work/passions they find interesting absolutely despise them & their ideologies
Something clicks in their head. “Why does somebody who leads such a cool life/does cool things not like me/my views?”
In this case, we’re talking about transphobia.
If one person who’s transphobic goes on to find out that Foone, who does cool/interesting enough things that they regularly make it to the front page of HN, is trans - they may finally realize “maybe I’m the bad guy” & change for the better.
This, in theory, leads to less hatred of trans people- which, in theory, leads to less trans suicides/murders.
This probably wasn’t the explanation you were after, nor is it amazingly well articulated, but it’s all I can offer you in this instance.
Not going to reply to anything past this in the thread as a whole - I have posted what I wanted and spent my karma.
If this was the point you were trying to make, then I would agree. And frankly, I truly believe the vast majority of HN users are not hateful despite that it is clear there is an increasing perception that it is. Usually when I flag obvious transphobia and hatred, it is already downvoted to the minimum score. I would hope anyone here would view suicide of any kind as a preventable tragedy. We've seen it happen here before plenty of times to people I'd like to think were highly respected by HN.
Personally I would not take the karma hit too seriously. Like any community with voting, the votes are ascribed more meaning than deserved. People vote mostly out of irrational emotion.
I will close with this: if this was the point you were making I hope you can understand why I didn't get it. The first post seems like you wanted this removed, which is a reasonable perspective, but the best way to get an article removed is probably to flag and email staff. If you don't think this should be removed, or at least are neutral about it, I think the best we can do is at least flag the off-topic comments that made Foone hate this place in the first place. I really hate this conundrum, because Foone makes amazingly good content, and I genuinely, truly believe that it finds it's way here out of virtue that it's just that good, not out of malice.
Unfortunately, as it always is, a minority of terrible people are always out to ruin nice things.
Oh well. I should leave this thread too, at this point.
Promoting a belief that people are born with gendered brains causes (and has caused throughout history) far more harm (in the utilitarian sense of: negative discrimination x females affected) than ‘transphobia’ (which I’m taking to mean simple principled disbelief in innate gender identity and rejection of socially constructed gender of as a primary basis for personal identity).
I really wasn't intending to start a general discussion, I genuinely just wanted to understand what one might hope to accomplish by making off-topic comments, vs the prescribed course of action (flagging the article, contacting HN moderation via email, etc.)
If HN staff doesn't want to prohibit links even at the author's request, I don't see what can be done here. It's a link to a publicly available resource. But I figure making comments like these just stokes the flames, like it evidently is right now. Seems these divisive and irrelevant conversations are more likely to promote hatred than to prevent it.
Unfortunately I've contributed by replying in the first place.
> I really wasn't intending to start a general discussion, I genuinely just wanted to understand what one might hope to accomplish by making off-topic comments, vs the prescribed course of action (flagging the article, contacting HN moderation via email, etc.)
Some topics seem to cause some people psychological distress if they can’t explicitly repudiate the opposing worldview when encountered.
[Honest disclosure] My bad, too - couldn’t not counterpoint my own gender critical beliefs in response to your OP’s implied position.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. The correct course of action if the article is inappropriate is to flag it. Same for transphobic comments.
Transphobia leads to the suicide & murder of highly oppressed people, so I’m going to choose to continuously break this rule whenever it needs to be mentioned. For doing so, moderation can ban me if they please