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> indicating she no longer thinks her accusations hold any water

This is the only thing in your summary I disagree with. From my reading of the issue and knowledge from following it I think Leah still very much believes in her accusations. She just has realized that at this point even if she's right nothing positive is going to happen and realizes she handled the whole situation awfully so is apologizing for that.

I didn't read anything that suggested that she didn't think the accusations were true anymore.

I didn't get that.

What I got was that she thinks her prior actions, although incorrectly reasoned, were still reasoned.

It's almost but importantly not identical to "Based on what I knew at the time, I was correct. Based on what I now know, I was incorrect" - except that part of the "what I knew" was how herself was functioning.

As a child, I always used to hate the phrase "that's just an excuse". I'd do something my parents didn't like, they'd ask why, I'd answer, they'd reply - that's just an excuse. It's not, it's the causal reason [that I could identify].

She saying she did things based on actual reasons. She's also saying that those reasons, in hindsight, were wrong, and that those resulting actions were wrong. She's accurately reporting the emotional states at the relevant times. This is a good thing.

I hope she is OK now. I was horrified to see that certain people on IRC were egging her on, when this all started.

the cynic in me suspects the apology is a result of Leah's bottom line being seriously affected: Leah has a business that sells libreboot based products

I'm also missing a lot of context here, but I was looking at the leter and she says she's especially sorry she slandered John Sullivan and Ruben Rodriguez.

Wondering exactly how she slandered those two people in particular, I tried googling her name and those two and got some archived mailinglist (and later checked an archived version of her own denounciation of the FSF on the libreboot.org page). She seems to have wanted to see those two people fired. But also another one - Stephen Mahood (who she names "the bully" on the archived page https://web.archive.org/web/20170114100921/https://libreboot... ) . On an archived mail she seems to call both Stephen and Ruben the bullies. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreboot/2016-09/msg0005...

Given that her heaviest accusations are leveled (also) against Stephen, and that she feels she especially needs to apologise to the other two guys but NOT to Stephen, should we conclude that she still believes at least that guy was guilty of bullying the unnamend transgendered employee of the FSF?

Everybody has personal problems.

To put her issues in perspective, suicide rates for transgender individuals are around 45%.

It doesn't excuse her childish actions but it helps understand the burden and stress transgender individuals are constantly under.

> suicide rates for transgender individuals are around 45%.

If that were true, it would be alarming and possibly grounds for involuntary commitment based on someone being trans.

Fortunately it is not true.

Sorry, English isn't my primary language. What I meant by suicide rates is indeed attempted suicide.

It would be really scary if all of those succeeded.

I wouldn't dismiss unsuccessful suicides. Someone who doesn't succeed or turn back before committing isn't cured or any happier and may very well attempt again or live under a black cloud of depression and stress.

As for your comment on involuntary commitment, it makes no sense. There is a well known "cure" for gender dysphoria and it is gender transition. "after treatment, 26 (2.4%) of the MTF subjects and 7 (1.4%) of the FTM subjects still reported depression"[1]. According to this study, only 2.4% still report depression after transition. There are more studies reporting similar results, find them yourself.

[1] http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/827713

Edit: I've reread your post and your other post. I understand that your comment on involuntary commitment was meant if my mistake was true and the successful suicide rate was indeed 45%.

Being in a high risk group isn't grounds for involuntary commitment.

There is no group (including trans people) with such a "high risk" of suicide, outside of people who meet the criteria for involuntary commitment because they are at risk of suicide.

For one thing, that isn't true. People with certain mental illnesses and a history of suicide attempts have lifetime suicide rates in that range. More importantly, involuntarily committing someone for suicide risk requires evidence of suicidal behavior or thought.

*suicide _attempt_ rates

That's also self-reporting to the single question "have you ever attempted suicide?" without probing for an actual intent to die. In other surveys this has found to be about double the rate compared to when something would qualify as a suicide attempt to a mental health professional.

Do you have any sources?

This is the actual study that found the stat: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/AF...

This and other limitations are located in the aptly named "Methods and Limitations" section.

So even if we cut the 41% in half we still get 20%, which is much higher than the 4.6% (or 2.7%) of the general population.

The underlying facts are not controversial - being transgender puts someone at considerably higher risk of dying by suicide, of attempting suicide, and of having suicidal ideation.

One of the problems we have is that coroners refuse to gather this kind of information, and a bunch of suicide stats are still tied to coroner's decisions.

From the same section: "The lack of systematic mental health information in the NTDS data significanty limited our ability to identify the pathways to suicidal behavior among the respondents."

IOW "being transgender" cannot be identified as a factor putting someone at higher risk. It could be comorbid mental health issues, it could be adverse life experiences related to being transgender or gender-nonconforming.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make.

Adverse life experiences related to being transgender is exactly what we man when we say "being transgender inceases a person's risk of death by suicide".

There's no judgement of trans people in that comment - indeed, the point is to make society more accepting of trans people.

In this specific case, my point is meant to caution people (like another commenter) from considering surgical and hormonal transition a "cure" that can reduce this suicide attempt rate, whatever the actual number turns out to be.

The data simply does not support that conclusion, according to the study itself.

"Respondents who said they had received transition related health care or wanted to have it someday were more likely to report having attempted suicide than those who said they did not want it."

"The survey did not provide information about the timing of reported suicide attempts in relation to receiving transition-related health care, which precluded investigation of transition-related explanations for these patterns."

I agree that society should be more accepting of gender-nonconforming people regardless of their gender identity or approach to transition, if any. I wonder if this lack of acceptance is the cause of suicide, rather than dysphoria which in some cases is alleviated through medical intervention.

That's not the message I got from your earlier posts, which to me were saying that people who are trans are not at very much increased risk (whatever the cause might be) of attempted suicide.

Which was weird to me because from the evidence we have they are.

Well, they're definitely not a population with a 41% suicide rate, and probably not a population with a 41% suicide attempt rate. The study where that statistic comes from uses a sample of convenience.

The tl;dr is we don't know, so we shouldn't frame our decisions and policies as if we do know.

Specifically in this question: is a surgical/endocrinological approach or a mental health approach more likely to result in positive outcomes?

I don't think this is the place to debate standards of care for trans people. Here's a review of some literature, if you're interested: http://www.sebastianmitchellbarr.com/blog/2015/10/8/why-are-...

I wasn't implying that she shouldn't do these things, or that her problems don't matter. Quite the contrary, the previous comment tl;dr could be understood as saying that she was an exception because she had personal problems.

>The FSF and Leah have mostly refrained from naming names when talking about who got fired

FWIW Leah never explicitly named the employee because they didn't want her to but Leah made some changes to the libreboot website as well as the accusations made on the mailing list that make it very very obvious who the fired employee was. The changes she made to the Libreboot website actually made Google list the fired employees full name as a related search for a very simple query about the drama. It's still up to this day and searching for the employee's name will also list a related search tying her back to this.

Luckily it doesn't directly confirm that she was the fired employee but still, if some potential employer is looking into her on Google it's way too easy to tie her back to this controversy that she never wanted to be a part of.