Given the additional stresses and oppresive social experiences trans people face and are outspoken about, this is entirely unsurprising.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
It's also a bad bet to assume that a trollish account isn't aware that they're banned here; the majority are perfectly well aware, and most have created many accounts and been banned many times. They continue to post with banned accounts as a way of continuing to spew into the forum and troll the minority of users who have 'showdead' turned on.
Note my name. I was shadow-banned for one sarcastic comment eight years ago, despite being an otherwise good-faith, decent contributor. Maybe things are different now, but I've never gotten over the feeling of wasting my time putting thoughts together and responding to a conversation and finding out I muted.
Hell, I'm a mod of a city subreddit, and one of the other mods has shadowbanned a complete asshat of a person. I don't have ban powers, otherwise I would ban them outright. It makes me uncomfortable to be a party to disrespect like that.
The exceptions are spammers and serial trolls. For those we continue to use shadowbanning, for different reasons. In the case of spammers, telling them they're banned would just invite more spam, and in the case of serial trolls, would invite more trolling—besides which, serial trolls know perfectly well that they're banned. That's what "serial troll" means. The account you thought you were helping by telling them they were banned is one of the latter, and if you saw the shockingly abusive things they'd posted in the past I'm pretty sure you would think twice before casting them as an innocent victim.
Don't you think it would be fair to update your views after 8 years? HN moderation has changed massively since then. When pg was the sole moderator of HN, it was impossible for him to put the kind of attention into moderation that we've been doing since we took over in 2014. That's the primary difference.
If you look through my comment history you'll see that I've posted tens of thousands of comments and spent thousands of hours exhorting users to follow HN's rules, cajoling them and coaxing them and warning and scolding and coaching and helping and teaching. We cut people an incredible amount of slack before banning them. It's repetitive work and frequently meets with aggressive attacks and imaginary accusations. I think it's reasonable to expect a decade-long user like yourself to cut us a little slack too. If you think that we're beheading people without consideration, or treating them in any way disrespectfully, let alone unethically, I would invite you to observe more closely. I slip up sometimes and am happy to make corrections when people point that out, but I don't think charges of systemic malpractice are justified.
I know it takes a lot to sit down and write out a response like this over and above the work you put in to making the site a usable venue. Doing so makes a difference.
I'm not trying to bring you down. I really am talking in good faith. And I know agitators can wear you down. Perhaps I haven't come to terms with the needs to isolate or sandbox people online. Perhaps I didn't read his history, but I tend to give HN accounts the benefit of the doubt more than most.
Anyway. No worries. I hear you.
This is exactly one of the problems with modern internet discourse. And I know someone is reading this comment wondering if I'm "one of the good ones". This mindset is, in itself, toxic and irrational. While bad intent matters, the absense of evidence of bad intent should be good enough ground to stand on.
That said, you'll find more LGBT people "online" on dating/hookup apps (or even just on Instagram) than on Twitter, Tumblr and co.
[1] The term is always a bit difficult, as obviously, LGBT people are not a monolithic bloc (and I think that, in particular, gay, lesbian, bi, inter and trans, each differ significantly from each other in terms not only of their challenges but also of their daily lives, interaction patterns, etc.). The term "LGBT community" also often fails to specify whether we're talking about political activists which are a very small subset of the "wider" community. It is true that LGBT people face similar challenges and have shared experiences that may lead them to share certain viewpoints, and it is true that there are certain venues and safe spots that many (though not all) LGBT people will frequent occasionally (some very often, others more rarely); also, just very naturally, LGBT members often interact e.g. through dating and friendship patterns. So I don't want to say that the term "LGBT community" is wrong or doesn't mean anything, as there is certainly something binding all these experiences together however loosely, but the term is certainly fraught with complications when used so broadly.
[2] Though which ones these are often differ between the different "sub-communities". E.g. the average attitude towards high-risk sex behaviour is definitely not the same for gay men as for lesbian women.
Trans people who actively post online about their trans status are a narrowly selected subset of trans people as a whole, and those who act obnoxious enough to be a foremost example of OP's point even more peculiarly so. One should never try to derive generalized descriptive statements from such narrow anecdata.
There's a line between avoiding harmful stereotypes that lead to unfair discrimination and willful ignorance or misrepresentation of facts in service of political correctness.
It's extremely hard to say where this line is.
But we still have to be aware of its existence.
There's no shortage of people linking transgendered people and mental illness, just as there's no shortage of people linking homosexuality to mental illness. If you're not trying to strengthen those assumptions, then use different examples... it seems lazy to just try to hand-wave it away in a sentence rather than using a different example.
>I’m certainly not saying that all trans people have personality disorders or that being trans is a mental illness.
A little bit of whiplash on this one. Despite the sentence or two claiming what the author is purportedly not doing, the rest of the article seems to indicate otherwise. If you don't want an article that makes you look like you're conflating trans people and mental illness... don't use a trans person as a springboard to talk about mental illness.