A persons right to exist is not political
(This isn't a dig at OP but it's worth restating)
It is, both in the literal sense of political as “relating to government or public affairs”, and also quite often in the frequently used sense of “controversial between political parties or factions”.
The fact that your political view is that it should not be political (in presumably the latter sense) does not change the fact that it often factually is.
I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.
Some people however strive to "live above" politics, or to breathlessly demand things be "apolitical" based on their own biases. That bias in of itself being as "political" as anything else
I cannot believe this. Simply outrageous. I never understood the religious people before - to me this is a sacrilege.
Universal human rights are the hill I will literally die on.
I hope my extreme summarization is not completely useless.
https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-191-tran... // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiE5rBLrIgM
Second: the biggest straw man I have ever seen. Rage bait Philosophy.Just because human rights are violated does not mean, that they are useless or non existence.
It's a good word of caution specially the normalizing states of emergency and dehumanizing people.
Civil libertys and democracy are fragile achievements, that need to be protected by the citizens. Human rights are rights against an overbearing state.
All the examples given are valid points, that violate human rights. And for every issue there is a human right group, that fights against the violations.
I dont buy his conclusion about potential either... Another magical force.
Regarding organisations and corporations he should really read up on Luhmann.
So maybe I am a fanatic - none of his arguments strike true for me.
Thanks for exposing me to this ideas!
Oh, here's one more video on human rights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhRBsJYWR8Q (by Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, a collectivist/Marxist?)
It is, example?
Nord Korea signed it, the US and Canada just ratified it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_the_Rights_of_th...
Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/, the US hasn't. Do you have a source?
I don't think anyone is saying anyone else should not exist.
The Alan Turing comparison springs to mind.
Human rights: can be abrogated ad hoc with enough power, or enforced against the same abrogators.
Human rights are absolutely political: if you support human rights you can (and should!) do politics to protect them, and also to protect any Charter, Constitution or Bill of Rights which enshrines them in law in your jurisdiction.
I don't think anyone disagrees with that, I think the disagreement comes from the way that activists insist that the best solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc] is to "socially and heavy handedly force everyone to complete the illusion by treating transgender individuals as indistinguishable from their biological counterparts in every way". That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).
Just going to keep pointing out that human beings have very little sexual dimorphism compared to the other great apes, and that any difference is any sport that does not actually employ the genitals is probably more down to food access and/or training disparities than actual “significant” biological factors.
I'm not really going to defend the other side here because sports are (by definition) fundamentally arbitrary, but is this really borne out by reality? To use an easy comparison, elite adult womens' track and field athletes might be competitive against high school boys, but not at any higher level. Compare, for example, the international womens' records [0] to the records from this random high school nationals track meet [1]. What food access and/or training advantage are high school kids going to have over the most capable athletes in their sport?
[0] https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/womens-world-records/
The unequal distribution of height and muscle mass is part of sexual dimorphism.
> no obvious biological reason to simply assume that two adult peers that had the same dietary and exercise and skills training regimes would have vastly different athletic performance characteristics
Imagine you convinced someone this was true. They could say trans women should be banned from women's sports because boys receive superior training.
The effects of hormones are not assumptions.
What is your explanation for trans men gaining athletic advantages and trans women losing athletic advantages during transition?
No, it’s potential evidence for sexual dimorphism. It’s also potential evidence for systemic dietary sexism. You’d need to establish that the latter doesn’t exist to establish that the former does.
> Imagine you convinced someone this was true. They could say trans women should be banned from women's sports because boys receive superior training.
At that point we’d have shown that sexual dimorphism was not at play and that gendered sports were inherently discriminatory, so that hypothetical person would now be an idiot arguing against reality. The obvious solution would be to redirect better training at the now know equally capable athletes.
> The effects of hormones are not assumptions.
Actually they largely are… we really don’t have more than minimal and crude knowledge of precisely how hormones work or what their actual effects are.
Citation definitely needed. The gap is large, and consistent, across different nations and sports.
We would not have this in the year 2024 otherwise: https://boysvswomen.com/
In other words the (very circular reasoning) chart your source provides doesn’t obviously show sexual dimorphism when confounding variables of food and training (and the funding and social incentives that provide both) exist.
For an example of results see https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/11/586. A lot of the papers I see trying to support the opposing views try to use data of cis men which have not undergone hormone therapy to stand-in for trans women as if there was no difference but again it's quite apparent that this is not the case.
For many other areas, often people will use one incident to collectively label an entire group as deviant. This happened the same way with gay rights over the years and I've got many friends who got labelled all sorts of things because of it. As far as that's concerned, people love to arm-chair what is and isn't an effective course. None of these things are new, just American, or ignoring biological factors but it seems like those who would like to restrict acceptance of transgender people like to paint it as such.
Many of my friends have taught me a lot just by being bold enough to be seen as themselves. I don't think it's actually unreasonable to extend the benefit of the doubt to how trans people choose to affirm themselves.
Here we see that the term 'illusion' is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the background, and implies some kind of bias or preconceived notion of "real" vs "fake" or "imaginary". If this is what you get from advocates and activists, then I think you either receive this through a filter of some kind, or carry said filter within.
>That's not the only solution for treating [gender dysphoria, etc], just the current (and perhaps uniquely) American one, and it comes with a variety of problems the obvious of which stem from significant biological factors that make the illusion impossible to complete (sports, etc).
This is the treatment method that has consistently demonstrated the best outcomes for the people concerned over time. It is not uniquely American, as it was pioneered in Europe before taken to the next level in the US, among other countries/regions. Again, furtherance of the idea there is an 'illusion that must be completed'. This is not the case. Trans people are very aware just how much they do or do not fit in compared to the average population at large. No one needs to point this out to them, nor does anyone need to coddle them. By far, just being treated as how one wishes to be treated goes a long, long way.
In regards to sports, if the person in question has medically transitioned and has done so with HRT for some year(s) (I think 2 is the baseline minimum from studies?), then their overall performance in sports will be measurably less then their peers of the same gender in most instances. The few that excel are not statistically more significant than the few natural athletes who excel due to some developmental advantage (larger heart/lung capacity, etc) due to early or sustained training, genetic factors, etc. At least this is what the preliminary data is showing us so far. On average, the distribution remains about the same and on par with other athletes. This is almost always a talking point/dog whistle that is, once you peel the onion, much ado about nothing. Just like most all other contentious talking points about transgender folks, which do not vary significantly from the same points about gay rights, marriage equality, racial segregation/integration debates, or equality in voting and women's rights, etc, etc.
This means that which ethical framework we as a society use to decide what counts as a human right is an inherently political question: it's a decision that we try to make as a society in as nonviolent a manner as possible.
And before we get too far off the deep end, I want to note that both sides of the aisle firmly believe that the other side ignores fundamental human rights that their side respects. This is what happens when good people operate with completely opposite ethical frameworks, and we won't get anywhere by just shouting that our framework is the only valid one.
It's not the mere existence of a person that's an issue, but rather the coercive, punishing activism that takes place around a false idea that human rights are at risk, while these personal choices are simultaneously being celebrated by nearly every government institution and major corporation in existence.
The same activism requires full acceptance by parents, families, and children who do not want these choices influencing their personal lives.
To say these rights are at risk is an outright lie.
It's one thing to have a significant voter base opposed to those choices and still be fully able to live and express those choices freely and publicly — while it's a whole different issue to have governments actively enforcing a different private life against their will (specifically LGBTQ folks).
(Edits: re-word for clarification)
For the former, we campaigned for equal treatment under the law. Like when we said we want to get married, we made the point that this doesn't affect in any way the marriage that heterosexual people have, because the rights are actually the same.
The trans activists don't want that. Equal treatment and tolerance isn't enough for them, they demand dominance above all else.
Disney's leaked hiring standards document earlier this year is a smoking gun, and it's a safe assumption most other corporations towing the same line have the same or similar reprehensible hiring standards.
DEI is patently anti-white and anti-straight, and its rhetoric and materials (everything from training to editorials) are not shy about expressing it in plain terms that it is a revenge campaign masked by good intentions and a smile. All in a way that mirrors the beginnings of 20th century atrocities around the world, that were also rooted in hatred towards specific groups perceived as threats to society on the basis of immutable traits.
Equal treatment and tolerance.. Ever since I started transitioning, people have treated me much worse, and I live in a so called liberal city. My pharmacist looks at me like I'm a freak. I've had slurs thrown at me several times while I'm just out minding my business. Half my family wont even... I don't know what parallel universe you live in where people are treated like this equally..
Where do you find all this time to hate on a group you don't even remotely understand? I'm happier than I've ever been and it seems like all of yall are making it your business to make that as miserable as possible.
If activists belonging to protected classes are creating such enormous fear, do you feel misrepresented by them? What are you willing to do to help remove that fear? Do you think it creates an unfair imbalance?
Anyway, you're conflating fear with disgust. I haven't seen much fear, if at all; what I have seen a lot of is, hate that looks the exact same as before trans activists had any platform.
Even if it was "natural" you're making the choice to treat someone like shit. You can backpedal onto what all your peers are doing all you want, but that doesn't change how you as an individual are making another human being, who has done nothing to you, feel
Not true.
> the choice to treat someone like shit
Telling a man he's a man and that he's not allowed in the women's locker room or whatever isn't treating him like shit, it's treating him like any other man.
I'm not aware of anyone trying to alter their own genes to be red-headed, and for those who dye their hair, I don't see them holding parades exposing their genitalia to minors. I also don't see anyone getting fired from their jobs for openly disliking red hair, out of personal preference.
> who has done nothing to you
Not personally, no, but fads widely supported by institutions and corporations have major consequences. Parents are choosing their children's gender and following through with irreversible transition surgery in order to gain status among their peers, politically. This surgery is not only costly, but potentially lethal, given how necessary it is for long-term use of antibiotics and resistances that develop as a result.
1. https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1772127389964771628?t=HCqM...
2. https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1761015172309676256?t=EwOj...
3. https://x.com/Misty_G_17/status/1622977671427661827?t=M_9pZ-...
4. https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1798009502178107722?t=zHvk...
5. https://x.com/DrLoupis/status/1680224690105733122?t=0qXZdnHN...
6. https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1799609251729649698?t=blXt...
But please, gaslight me harder daddy.
> The trans activists don't want that. Equal treatment and tolerance isn't enough for them, they demand dominance above all else.
Gay rights opponents said the same about you. A gay man and a straight man had the same right to marry a woman. You denied it was equal. And a separate but mostly equal status wasn't enough for you. You demanded they call it marriage.
1) Nowhere, in history, does "government actively enforcing a different private life against one's will" mean "you are forced to live or participate in a transgender life". For the entirety of history government and corporations have actively forced "different" people like Lynn to conform to your expectations of them. See Lynn being fired from IBM.
2) "To say they are at risk is an outright lie". The rhetoric and social norms around the existence of transgender people enables violent people to murder them. They are absolutely actively at risk. What other phrase, besides "at risk", would you use to explain that transgender people are 4 times more likely to be murdered. They are literally killed for being different and because we dehumanize them.
I look forward to the day that what you say is true. That there are people who oppose those choices but that transgender people can live a free and public life without being murdered for being themselves. I think what you're putting forward sounds great.
It's the desire towards widely accepted societal norms, and a pushback against disrupting long-established acceptable norms.
2) The same applies to Black on Black crime, except hundredfold. The same applies to violence against straight White people. Every group suffers from targeted violence — an no amount of data to prove how disproportionate it is makes any instance more right/justified than another.
Similar to your wishes, I hope there's a day when random White people on the street aren't mobbed by dozens, if not hundreds, of people who aren't White. I've lost count how many videos I've seen of this happening. I'd love to see a world where transgender teenagers and young adults aren't motivated to shoot up Christian schools. I'd love to see no discriminatory violence at all someday — but it cannot come at the cost of marginalizing majority groups who are just trying to live normal lives too, and too often, it does.
This is very incorrect, and an indicator that you should broaden the sources you get information from. Your other comments corroborate this, you have skewed view of the world that is based on looking at a small slice. It's not that they're fabricating things, it's that they do not give you an accurate view of the magnitudes of the forces and movements in the world.
And, gender aside, the most important thing to consider is the existence of intersex people, the diaspora of their bodies, and to consider how you think we should talk about them. Sex is, even outside gender, in fact not immutable. It's biology. These people are also historically denigrated.
Please imagine how ~150 years ago we collectively thought (and some people still think) that a person's race determined their intelligence. Historically "fundamental truths" usually end up with people being thought of as subhuman. The "fundamental truth" of sex, as it's presented by those who consider trans folks not people, is the same sort of truth. Biological sex is a spectrum, demonstrably. Gender is also demonstrably a spectrum. I don't care what people believe sex is or isn't. I care that we treat everyone, no matter how "weird" with respect.
You could argue though that it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society. In some other country, society might collectively decide not to accommodate said wishes and instead treat sex and gender as immutable and indistinguishable. Such a course would result in a simpler classification system: XX = female, XY = male, anything else = unclassified (genetic defect handled on a case-by-case basis).
There are a a few pretty big upsides I can think of to using a simpler social gender classification system: less social friction/discord/controversy (too much of this and your country falls apart and everyone is worse off), less social confusion/cognitive burden (pronouns, as one example, have basically become a third name that you have to memorize in addition to first and and secondary names whereas they used to just be a derived property that you didn't have to memorize).
This system can break down for some trans people (although I bet most make excessive effort to present as their preferred gender), but it also breaks down for effeminate males and masculine women (and I bet this is the larger category). Despite these difficulties, it's worked for literally all of history until people started pretending they don't know how pronouns work. Test it yourself by taking a look at Lynn's picture and asking which pronouns you'd use.
I'm not sure how invoking genetics simplifies anything. Have you had your sex chromosomes checked? I haven't, and triple-X and KS are often undiagnosed! I'd hate to have to update my drivers license to "unclassified" in my 30s.
I actually don't really care too much which classification system is used (chromosomes vs. observable genitalia at birth vs. something else), I just think the pros of collectively treating certain aspects of identity as immutable such as gender, race, and possibly even name, outweigh the cons of making a tiny fraction of the populace slightly more uncomfortable.
I'll be honest. I'm confused.
But to directly address your point... the main difference here is that "dead names" and "dead pronouns" are considered harmful and/or offensive and are therefore actively hunted and scrubbed from history by activists, unlike maiden names which are considered benign.
Evidence and data seems to support this as we learn and discover more.
There are however a bunch of things which is political like: Laws governing universal health care, laws governing minors rights to make decisions as minors, laws that makes distinctions between genders, cultural norms around bathrooms (which is mostly a stupid cost-cutting measure), and norms around cultural sports (which are fairly arbitrary).
Out of those, the first two should likely remain being political, while the two last ones should be resolved, and the middle one should just not exist.
Everything isn't politics and its ok to have a space where arguments about identity and politics aren't constantly surfaced.
That simply is not true. Apolitical topics do exist, and it is incredibly annoying when people try to force politics into an apolitical topic (looking at you, Rust community).
Let's say Lynn were a rust developer and felt as though the the tone of the community and the discussion of her work made her feel unwelcome. Let's say Lynn spoke out against that. Would you entertain that conversation? I imagine that is not too far from what happened at IBM when Lynn was fired. When is it "allowed" to be political in your mind?
Intentionally addressing the ability of marginalized people to be a part of a community, in my mind, is precisely apolitical. If it's clear that anyone is welcome then you don't really need to talk about politics, do you.
Presumably that kind of talk was about transgender issues and not some technical topic about rust which would make her uncomfortable.
So, in that circumstance, it seems only fair that if a person can express their political opinion, so can another person.
But,maybe the leader of the project should have shutdown whatever was making Hypothetical Lynn uncomfortable before she was forced to mount a response to it?
EDIT: unfortunately I can’t reply to the comments as I have been banned
EDIT 2: I have been banned to reply to the commenter, dang told me
You can talk about films and critically analyze them without doing a deep dive into how props are made. It’s OK to have separate contexts.
It isn’t a “gotcha” that “everything is political” - it just doesn’t matter when trying to do most things. It’s distracting and pointless; it’s a null statement.
You can talk about anything without having to include politics the same way you can discuss literature without examining types of paper.
Your account is rate-limited though. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars. That's probably what I told you.
Even saying "no politics!" will be seen by some people a political stance — as an approval of the status quo (which may be unfavorable to some groups of people), or even as a denial that certain social problems exist, and a red flag that you won't help them if someone discriminates against them.
Even in a "no politics" environment the you will end up having to decide what is "political" and what isn't, and that is a political stance! Someone will have a Bible quote in their email signature — is that neutral or political? Then is Quran okay too, or rainbow emoji? And when you tell people to stop this circus, the "no politics" policy itself will be questioned as a political stance against free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of association, etc.
There's this saying some people have, "there's three things you don't talk about at work: sex, politics and religion". (I think an older version had "money" instead of "sex"–from the days when sex wasn't talked about so much that we didn't even talk about the fact that we didn't talk about it.)
And it isn't necessarily bad advice. Do we really want heated workplace arguments about Israel-and-Palestine, Biden-vs-Trump, etc? We have to work with people who have completely different views from us on big picture political issues. Sometimes it is better we just agree to disagree and focus on what we have in common – airing those disagreements in detail can just produce negative feelings and disruption.
But of course, every office, every open source project has politics. But that's the thing, people traditionally draw a distinction between "micropolitics" (the politics of our workplace) and "macropolitics" (national politics, geopolitics). You cannot escape micropolitics, it is everywhere, it is inevitable. But macropolitics, yes, we should avoid it at work whenever possible.
Of course, people will then bring up "the personal is the political", and it is true. Transgender issues, for example: a big political controversy, but obviously for transgender people a very personal one.
However, even there, I think there is a useful distinction. A transgender employee isn't breaking the "no macropolitics at work" rule by being transgender, or talking about their personal experiences, or so on. But, consider Lynn Conway's public campaigns against the psychologist J. Michael Bailey and the sexologist Ray Blanchard – even though that was obviously very personal for her, it wouldn't have been appropriate for her to carry it on at work. Well, she actually did use her UMich web page for those campaigns, but the norms about this are different in academia than in your average workplace.
And politics is personal for all kinds of people: I remember back in 2010 when the Israeli military intercepted the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla", the team I was in at the time had some very heated discussion over it. Afterwards, a Jewish team member talked to me privately, and I could tell the whole discussion had made him feel rather uncomfortable, because it felt personal to him. And one of the other participants in the conversation was Palestinian, so it was obviously personal to him too. But still, in hindsight I wish the whole discussion had never happened, and I regret my own (rather peripheral) role in it. We broke the "no politics at work" rule, and it did pointless harm to our cohesion as a team.
If I live in Germany in 1930 and a coworker believes that he has a moral duty to gas as many Jews as possible, I should rightfully refuse to work with him, not pretend I don't know he thinks that, or pretend it's just a minor disagreement or irrelevant. And there are some disagreements today which are of the same level of importance.
He would be wise not to let me know he believes that. But I would have no qualms saying that I'd refuse to work with people who believe that. "No politics in the workplace" is itself political.
this is the kind of hyperbole I dont want my coworkers hyperventilating about. the problem in nazi germany was brownshirts cracking heads and smashing windows in streets. not off-color water cooler chitchat
asserting everything is political is a mindset i want to avoid. you imagine people with good ideas are confronting people with bad ideas. but really its just hyperengaged people haranguing the uninterested.
To ignore where such contributions to humanity come from, is to ignore a person's existence, their struggles and what makes them, well, them.
I recently stumbled on [1],
> I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans.
which is a reminder that so many years later, the same issues, vitriol and discrimination that Lynn dealt with still plague us. What are we, if we can not show empathy to people who struggle with something as fundamental as their gender identity? Who are we to deny them the life they want to lead every day? Who are we to dehumanize others?
This thought-terminating cliché is bafflingly popular on HN. It's a classic example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy, where the strong claim (the motte) is "everything is political," and the strong claim is "therefore, it's okay to bring politics into everything." (the bailey).
Sure, you can MAKE anything appear political, but not everything is intertwined with politics. Many activities are driven purely by personal interest, scientific curiosity, or artistic expression, without any direct political implications.
Such "political" discussions and the impact technology has on them are an important part of the discourse here. I'm sad she is gone but I'm glad to see that this post is high up the front page. If you're inclined to denigrate transgender people, I encourage you to consider that they are trying to lead an honest life. I encourage you to consider what you're taking away from them and from the world by dehumanizing them. No matter why they are who they are.