Ada

If transphobia wasn’t rampant, that would be ideal. But transphobia is rampant, and it just means each and every sport defaults to exclusion. That’s how it worked before this IOC ruling. That’s how it worked at the last Olympics, in which zero trans women were able to compete.

Idealised scenarios that assume fairness and good will don’t work. They just lead to exclusion, and worse, they make it impossible to gather more data.

And the reason for that is that everyone thinks like you. Which is to say, everyone thinks “Biology matters”, but for some reason, is never working to challenge that assumption by acknowledging that trans folks biology changes with the introduction of hormone replacement. It’s also a space with a lot of bad faith and actively misleading research, because of the aforementioned transphobia.

Excluding trans people from sport is an openly acknowledged “first step” of a where they’re using to normalise exclusion of trans folk in wider society. These are the folk generating much of this research, research that normally would be laughed out of the room, but when it’s about trans people and aligns with the “common sense” belief that trans folks have an advantage in sports, somehow the research gets taken seriously.

That’s the environment we live in. And that’s the environment that tried your approach, as a stepping stone to the outright exclusion we have now.

The only trans woman to ever compete in the Olympics was a power lifter. She came last.

Your intuition about trans athletes is wrong.

I’m a vegan. When i see people eating beef, I don’t claim “either you like hurting cows, or you’ve been duped by people who hate animals”.

I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian, but I wouldn’t argue with you if you made that claim, because the only reason we as a society eat as much meat as we do, is because it’s normalised at every level for economic reasons.

If I can manage that, you can manage to not argue with trans people trying to deal with the active and ongoing exclusion they face.

I don’t think enough people realize that this is catastrophically bad. It’ll discourage people from becoming open source developers, it’ll discourage people from using Linux, and it’ll discourage legislators from taking the Linux community seriously.

Sure, but personally, I don’t want a linux community that’s driven by corporate needs and governments that have been paid off by them. I don’t view it as a catastrophe, if that’s the version of “the linux community” that we lose.

None of that is to say that harassing devs is correct. It’s not, and never is. Harassing anyone with death threats and dogpiling is not on. But if we take that out of the picture, negative pushback that drives away devs that would otherwise have helped implement universal age gating isn’t something I’m terribly upset over, because I don’t want the version of community they’re taking us towards

No they’re not. Hexbear defederated blahaj.zone because we were considering defederating them because of their habit of co-ordinated dogpiling and harassment. A hexbear admin approached me asking me if we could make it work, because lots of hexbear users were keen to use 196 (our largest community), but the explicitly anti tanky leaning of the 196 mod team was a barrier for hexbear participation in that community. Ultimately, because I wasn’t willing to over-ride the 196 mods and tell them how to run their community, the hexbear community turned on blahaj.zone, and defederated us.

The message from the hexbear admin was “We want to use 196, but it’s anti tanky” but somehow, that morphed in to a hexbear community opinion of “196 mods are transphobic, and the blahaj admins won’t do anything about it”.

The truth is, hexbear and blahaj.zone both prioritise the needs of trans folk more than any other instances you will find on lemmy. But hexbear is driven by a political ideology, and blahaj.zone is not (though we have communities that are). And that difference in ideological perspective drives all of the rest of the noise and tension between our instances.