Iran likely obtains a nuke from North Korea. Detonating one in a religiously historic city is a no go. It could be put on a rocket, but expensive risk of getting shot down. If Israel's army gets concentrated for some reason preferably in rural area such as outside Gaza that would be a tactical vulnerability.
The fact that the 20% of the company laid off were all minority groups is absolutely insane. LinkedIn says they have at minimum 50 employees, meaning at least 10 people were laid off.
Here is their LinkedIn post (linked on their website),
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7058845...
" It is estimated that one in five transgender people will experience homelessness. Unfortunately, it's my turn. After six months of searching, I was not able to find a new role in time, and I have lost my home."
> Approximately 20% of the company was laid off, and to the best of my knowledge 100% of them were members of historically marginalized groups. Women, people of color, queer folks, and multiple people on disability and even maternity leave were specifically and disproportionately targeted. In the aftermath I could not find even one single person who did not belong to a protected class.
So bear in mind that this is very expansive group of people. This is not referring to "minority groups" as the parent comment wrote (women are the majority of the population). The author did not provide the denominator - that is, how many people at the company fit this group of people she's referring to - so it's hard to discern any significant discrimination without that piece of information. San Francisco and Seattle (where Rune labs and the author are located, respectively) are very diverse places, so it's not inconceivable that most of the company is comprised of "minority groups". A quick glance at the company's page shows that these "minority groups" comprise about 2/3rds of its leadership [1].
Furthermore, I don't think the author understands the term "protected class" [2]. Race, age, religion, gender, and disability are all protected classes, workplace discrimination on the basis of these is illegal. Everyone belongs to several protected classes (age, race, and gender, at minimum), so I'm not sure what she means when she writes, "I could not find even one single person who did not belong to a protected class".
… but you have to ask - why can’t this person find a job? Surely not every employer is non-inclusive. There’s smells of a partial story all through this.
As another trans person that's been in a similar position before, it's really frustrating how many loops I've gone through where the moment I'd get to some part where it wasn't voice only anymore, you could just hear the tone shift and get rejected shortly after.
Combine that with the current tech market being on a downswing and it's not unreasonable that this would take a while to find a new place.
I've met more than one hiring manager who tacitly refuses to hire anyone who is transgendered. Of course this is only revealed in confidence, and they'll deny it if asked.
The reason is typically one or more of:
- they don't want the rest of the team to have to walk on eggshells regarding pronouns and so on, or
- they don't want to have to deal with any fallout from female employees getting pissed about males using their bathroom, or
- they've had a bad experience hiring a transgender previously (typically due to the previous two reasons) and don't want to repeat it with another.
Kind of sucks for the transgendered applicants, but understandable I suppose, given the circumstances these days.
> Kind of sucks for the transgendered applicants, but understandable I suppose, given the circumstances these days.
Yikes. That's true in exactly the same way that segregation kinda sucked for the black kids, but was understandable given the circumstances of the postbellum south.
Discrimination against a minority solely for the social conveniences of the majority is a terrible sin. Haven't we had this fight a thousand times already? Why do it again?
Thank you for this comment, I was just about to rage and you eloquently expressed a great reply!
In addition I was about to add:
How about the manager not use their internal prejudices to influence their decision and hide behind a thin veil of “what about my employees” and actually let their employees LEARN how to correctly interact with transgendered, queer, ethnically diverse co-workers and possibly come out of their cotton-wool lined shells.
What if you had an employee who was horrified at their coworkers' eternal damnation and worked tirelessly to save their souls? Seems like that might cause friction as well. Seems like we might have a standard answer for that sort of friction that works for most environments.
The bulk of which, frankly, is just "don't be an asshole". But at the margins, we back that up with "at the very least, don't discriminate and refuse to hire the trans/christians/muslims/whatever, that's just awful".
> This isn't really a comparable issue that comes up with employees who have particular religious beliefs
Ah yes, because we all know the famous bible verse "Thou shalt misgender transgender individuals because the lord thy god thinks they are icky".
There aren't religious beliefs around transgenderism, only bigotry using religion as a shroud. And, it's an old trick. We seen slave owners use religion to justify slavery. Religion was used to justify anti-miscegenation laws. It was used to "keep women in the home". It's been used to fight against gay rights.
You really want us to believe that a deity will punish some christian for referring to someone as "they" when they think they are a "him"?
If you've ever wondered why the young folk are leaving religion, this is it.
The parent didn't say the hypothetical employee objected to transgenderism on religious grounds. Plenty of atheists object to transgenderism too.
As a broader point, there seems to be this strange argumentative move I see where contemporary Western progressives assume that their particular ethical stances are universal, or that only Abrahamic religionists disagree with them.
Indeed, I found it quite an eye-opener to learn what the left-wing radical feminists think about this whole topic of gender, and their reasons for doing so.
I mean, this kind of "fight" is basically what society is about, and it is unfortunately always hard earned to get anywhere, but i'm also honestly not sure there is a way around this.
The principle you give is essentially limitless - your "social convenience" part is doing all the work here - but you can't just define away the things you like but the majority doesn't currently accept [1] as "social convenience" whether the causes happen to be "good" or not.
Because everyone who is part of a group that is discriminated against thinks they are in the right and that the majority doesn't accept them for, essentially, social convenience reasons.
And people in the majority don't see it as social convenience reasons.
If the two "sides" didn't have this disagreement, the minority wouldn't be discriminated against in the first place!
You are essentially arguing that the right things should just take hold immediately, without any work, and people shouldn't fight about it, but they would if people agreed they were the right things in the first place.
You can't just pre-define people as wrong and then say "why are they fighting about things when they are so wrong, and are always so wrong about these things"?
Humans as a group are slow to accept, and fairly wary of acceptance of new social things - it's incredibly rare for significant social change to take less than a generation to take hold overall, or to gain acceptance across all living generations simultaneously.
There are lots of reasons for this, most (AFAIK) to do with our survival over the long term.
That sucks, for sure, in the short term. But i'm not sure what the better answer is.
I certainly wish there was a way to ensure society reaches a reasonable fixpoint on good ideas faster, if for no other reason than the obvious pain to people living it, but if there is, we haven't found it so far, and attempts to reach faster fixpoints have not .. always led to good paths, and attempts to legislate away resistance has never worked ...
[1] I honestly don't know if being inclusive of transgender folks falls into the category of what the majority of folks accept or not, i'm just presuming it doesn't based on your statement. The surveys i see seem .. complex and varying
IE https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...
> You are essentially arguing that the right things should just take hold immediately
I... don't think that's at all what I'm saying. Upthread commenter was saying that refusing to hire trans people "kind of sucks for them, but is understandable" in a pretty clear oh-well-what-you-gonna-do-about-it frame.
I think that's bad. And the reason it's bad is it's the same logic deployed to serve horrific goals.
I don't think you're saying that it's OK to refuse to hire trans people either. Are you?
Basically: sure, you and your reactionary gender normative compatriots are more than welcome to "fight about it". That's what you're doing right now. Just don't take it to the point where you're trying to exclude people from your workplaces. Because that's fucking awful.
"I don't think you're saying that it's OK to refuse to hire trans people either. Are you?"
No, of course not. But there is a difference between whether it is "okay" in some moral sense, and whether society deems it "okay", and whether it's normal/possible/desirable/etc for that to take time to change.
Replace "trans people" with something you hate in your arguments, and you can see that they apply equally well.
"sure, you and your reactionary gender normative compatriots"
Please don't assume you know anything about my view. I was careful not to express a view, but here you label me with one, in a fairly pejorative way.
That is not okay, in any way, shape, or form. If you want to know my view, then ask. You'd apparently be surprised to learn that i have spent lots of time and energy trying to help trans folks.
You really do keep missing the point, and appear very focused on how you feel about this particular thing.
Other people feel equally powerful but opposite. You do simply define them as wrong. They do the same thing to you!
Your logic is actually the logic deployed to serve horrific ends, and i'm really not sure why you don't see it.
You claim you are not defining others as wrong, but you are in fact doing it, right here:
"Just don't take it to the point where you're trying to exclude people from your workplaces. Because that's fucking awful."
See here you've defined people who exclude trans people as wrong (again, i happen to agree if you really must know). I presume it is fairly fundamental to your beliefs, based on how hard you argue here.
But take people who believe the complete opposite of you - militantly (i don't care whether it's about trans people or anything else). That logic you just use applies equally well to that horrific end. Do you think these militantly opposite people should be excluded from their workplace? Do they get to think that you should be excluded because they think you are fucking awful? If not, why?
Because your logic applies equally well there - because, as i said, it is the logic you are using that leads to a horrific end.
Most people i talk with about excluding militantly transphobic people say "yes, i'm okay with"
Which I agree with, but not simply because i define the other side as wrong.
Now, as for what will happen, in practice, society will, over time, likely decide it's okay to not hire people who are transphobic, the same way society is okay not hiring all sorts of people that society does not agree with. Because that's what society is - a community and grouping, and a society always defines the acceptability bounds for the group.
But changing those bounds takes time, and always takes time.
In the meantime, society is not sure where it stands, and will be okay with lots of things it will not be okay with in the future. That is, again, normal, and IMHO, hard to avoid. Even if it is pretty horrific for those involved. As mentioned, it doesn't seem like we've ever been able to successfully avoid it.
> That is not okay, in any way, shape, or form. If you want to know my view, then ask. You'd apparently be surprised to learn that i have spent lots of time and energy trying to help trans folks.
It was a turn of phrase, and I apologize. The point was to poke fun at the rhetoric.
And now I've read that through about three times... and I genuinely can't see what your point is? You say you don't want trans people fired or excluded, but you're going to the mattresses to point out that someone who feels like like you do is... wrong? No, you don't say I'm wrong.
You're just making a meta point that I should recognize that my personal moral compass isn't the only one in the world? Like I don't already know that? How would you suggest I argue this point? Upthread, you're straight up celebrating society being able to "fight about" these issues. But only in defense of the other side?
Coming back: I still can't understand how you're deploying the abstractions above in defense of refusing to hire someone because they're trans. I mean... OK! You're right. Morality is complicated. But... is this really what you want to be defending? There are times where we need to pick sides, right?
It read to me like he was just commenting on your frustration that the law and all our norms don't instantaneously proscribe all possible forms of discrimination, that there isn't a plausible generalizable principle of "just don't discriminate", even if it's easy to anticipate that we shouldn't allow discrimination against e.g. trans people.
> there isn't a plausible generalizable principle of "just don't discriminate"
You'd at least agree that there ought to be an extremely high bar for "do not hire" exclusions like this, no?
It seems like both of you are interpreting what I wrote above in a senselessly absolutist way, which seems deeply uncharitable. I'm all for debating moral ethics in the abstract. I'm just a little horrified to see two major thought leaders on this site engaging in this particular direction.
Absolutely. I assume he would too. I don't have an opinion about what you wrote, but I make a habit of reading all of Berlin's comments, and it seemed like you two were just communicating at cross purposes. I'm not judging or anything.
> Now, as for what will happen, in practice, society will, over time, likely decide it's okay to not hire people who are transphobic, the same way society is okay not hiring all sorts of people that society does not agree with
I hope you're right, but I also worry you're giving "society" too much credit. In many countries, trans people are executed. There are very few where they have the same protections and status that they do in, say, Canada, and there is still a ton of transphobia in Canada (the U.S. is certainly quite far behind Canada in policy)
While it's nice the tech is more progressive with regards to inclusivity than many other male-dominated industries, this thread is living proof that even in a community which has been shaped by the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley (and the accompanying progressive lean of its historically LGBTQ-heavy constituency), there is still tons of transphobia.
Conceptually, this isn't really an accurate depiction. Many who are critical of the belief system of gender identity are also very much against the imposition of gender norms, and will argue against transgenderism on that basis.
I’ve heard of managers who are so inclusive of trans women that they talk down to them and give them menial clerical tasks (as an engineer) as if they were cis women.
It's a common enough sentiment here and on reddit when the topic comes up. But if Blind is any indication, it's possible more people would trash a resume that lists pronouns before just... using it to inform how they address the candidate
As is the case with many anti-discrimination policies, often the actual result can be the opposite of what was intended.
Many employees are not comfortable with the accommodations for trans colleagues required of them by their employer (and by our current legal environment). Those employees don't really have a means to have their concerns addressed: it is either comply or quit/get fired. A way around that is to simply avoid hiring trans people.
That you do not understand those concerns does mean they are not understandable.
While it’s unrealistic to believe that every bad thing that happens to you is because of discrimination, being part of a commonly discriminated group has an effect of making everything harder.
Lots of people struggle to find a job. Now imagine if on top of that, some additional percentage of jobs are off the table to begin with.
In a way, this reminds me of climate change. You can’t usually point to any one event and definitively say “this was caused by discimination,” but you’re quite aware it’s happening overall.
San Francisco and Seattle aren't exactly hotbeds of intolerance. The large-scale studies on discrimination in tech companies did find slight gender discrimination, in favor of women: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
My company has a goal of 35% women in executive position. The thing is that we are working in the industry, you know, factories and machines. This environment does not attract women, we barely have women engineers.
That means that any women in engineering willing to take responsibility is fast tracked to management.
This was the same at my previous employers.
Anecdotal story time, when I was a young student in France, I believed that discrimination was mostly a thing from the past, I believed that in 2000, being black wouldn't affect hiring decisions that much and wouldn't make it much harder to find a job.
Then two very good friends of mine graduated, they were both black, they were both French citizens from the French islands, they both graduated as electronics engineers within the top 10% of their class, they were well-spoken, and pretty much serious model students. The average time to find a class for people who graduated in their major was less than 2 months. One of my friend found a job in 6 months, the other in 5 months. Both of them had a starting salary that was more than 40% lower than the average salary of the other students in my university graduating in the same major.
That's when I discovered that discrimination still exists and that it has tremendous impact. So, it doesn't surprise me at all that being transgendered makes finding a job significantly harder.
Many manager are reluctant of hiring members of certain minority groups, as they are afraid of the potential HR issues; as far too many people play the discrimination card when they are involved in any kind of conflict or face disciplinary action. Sometimes measure to prevent discrimination can do the opposite.
Probably because they sound absolutely insufferable to work with.
Who demands extensive requirements docs in <100 person startups? Who organizes ERGs in that context? Who spends all their time obsessing over process, planning, and identity instead of actually building stuff?
According to the article she was actually moving up the ranks and getting promoted, so it sounds like the company did in fact think she was doing something right.
My reading of that claim is 10 out of 10 people laid off were from marginalized groups. Not 20% of 10.
> Approximately 20% of the company was laid off, and to the best of my knowledge 100% of them were members of historically marginalized groups. Women, people of color, queer folks, and multiple people on disability and even maternity leave were specifically and disproportionately targeted.
Interesting quote.
Statistically, if you add up all these 'historically marginalized groups', it seems like you end up with the overwhelming majority of the population.
Women are a bit over half. Then add on all non-straight people, all non-white people, all people with some serious health (mental or otherwise) diagnosis. Globally this covers like 95% of the human population. Even in America these 'historically marginalized groups' are like 75-85% of the population.
I suspect the complainant is casting a wide net when they try to define who counts as 'historically marginalized groups', to the point where this could happen by random chance. Though it's hard to know without knowing the full profiles of everyone at the company.
Also we can note that these 'historically marginalized groups' tend to concentrate in certain types of jobs; if a company were to downsize their HR department for example, they'd be firing nearly all women even without targeting women, just as if they were to downsize programming they'd be firing nearly all men.
Problem is that when you have with so many marginalized groups and increasing number of people claiming their membership in them, majority of the company could belong to at least one group. So it could easily be just a chance that no non-disabled white straight male was laid off. As for firing people on disability and maternity leave, it's kind of understandable - when you have a choice of firing 2 roughly equally productive people and one of them has additional needs that you must accommodate, it's obvious who will you choose. With maternal leave it's similar.
It's not that 20% of those laid off were from minority groups. It's that 20% of the company was laid off and they're all from historically underrepresented groups in tech.
Makes sense considering both the correlations between being an autistic spectrum male and adopting a sex-incongruent gender identity, and being an autistic spectrum male and working in tech.
As frob said, given the size of the company and the statistic they gave that 20% of the company was laid off. The company laid off at least 10 people, and as she said in the article, they were ALL minorities. This feels statistically unlikely to be random chance.
