You're certainly right that this is an inflammatory topic with strong political and ideological overlap, and as the guidelines explain, we don't want flamewar here, and we don't want ideological or political battle. The site exists for intellectual curiosity, and those things aren't compatible. There's a great deal of established moderation practice around this, if anyone wants to read past explanations:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That doesn't automatically make a story like this off topic for HN. It depends on whether there's enough new information in a story to support a substantive discussion. In this case, the topic is not just "gender ideology", it's ongoing developments at universities and in the discourse at large. All of these are significant and interesting phenomena. For that reason I turned the flags off on this submission. That's also established moderation practice (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It requires a judgment call, of course, and we don't always make the right calls—but not making any would be an even worse call.
Of course it's commenters' responsibility to stick to the side guidelines if posting in such a thread. That means curious, thoughtful conversation and respect toward other commenters (and other people generally). Flamewar, flamebait, snark, name-calling, personal attacks and so on are not ok. People sometimes think that just because a topic is inflammatory it means they get carte blanche to spew what they will (e.g. "if you don't want me to post like this then you shouldn't allow this thread in the first place"). I call that argument "the topic made me do it", and not only is it false, the opposite is true: commenters here are under a greater obligation in cases like this, as the site guidelines make clear: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
I think that's the problem with a topic like this on HN. There will be little learning going on, with many statements made with certainty by individuals that have never studied any of these concepts in any detail. The level of dismissal in the comments is itself a reason to pull the plug.
I've written extensively about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490.
If anyone has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is, and if you know a better way for HN to relate to political topics while fulfilling its mandate of curiosity, I'd really like to know what it is. Just please familiarize yourself with the past material first, because if it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've answered many times already why it won't work.
This has advantages and disadvantages, as with all such design choices, but it's good to be conscious of what one's design actually is, since otherwise one might end up fucking with the DNA, which doesn't seem like a great idea.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=silo%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all...
This is the first time I've "heard" you curse.
I don't know, it was just a little jarring. Not in a bad way. Just... different, I guess. Well done.
I was going to link you to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... but it looks like most of those are quoting other people.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=4&prefix=true&que...
Understandable.
That said, HN is the watering hole for people with multiple political approaches on a fairly wide spectrum.
I think debate between these people is best facilitated by prompts and articles which raise multiple nuanced questions. And I think we do have useful debates at this point.
What isn't useful is something like an overt manifesto for one or another "side" on this political spectrum. And HN generally avoids such things.
But there's a kind of article, like this one imo, that is more or less a manifesto - an article that stake out a position and only give apparent gestures at balance. These have the same low-quality potential as manifestos. In important questions, it's unfortunate have a lot of uninformed posts even when they aren't flame bait.
In the case of the present article, I don't think readers of the article will come away with any greater understanding of "Gender Theory" and what gives rise to it and so it's not really a generator of good quality discussion even when people are not shouting at each.
Edit: Another thing I should add is that in the case of article that are effectively manifestos, upvotes and downvotes are going to gravitate to being just around the popularity of various positions and that too lowers the quality of discussion.
Either way, I've been finding a lot of what's being said here today as interesting and mentally engaging on some level.
There are, of course, some pretty reptitive comment threads, but you can collapse those and generally find more interesting discussion somewhere (don't forget there are often multiple pages of comments.)
Fwiw, current college student. My school isn't particularly "woke" beyond having a LGBT support center, but that strikes me as common decency rather than wokeness.
People like me are very much liberal, left leaning, and dislike fascism. But as of now, it feels like freedom of speech is more of "freedom to speak about only certain things." Simply because so many people are kowtowing to these zealots. Of course you're going to get more vocal people opposed to this line of thinking. It's the exact same thing left leaning people like myself got away from in our psychotic religious upbringings. Only for us to see the exact same thing on the left, but with even more drastic and unfair measures.
And on two occassions, it seemed as if somebody was so vindictive as to visit my comment history and downvote tens of older comments from threads that were a few days old. At least I cannot explain the unexpected loss of precisely 1 karma point from multiple comments in multiple threads at once.
I wonder how such people look into the mirror without feeling even a slight pang of doubt about themselves.
To which I can only respond: "so?".
There are a decent number of folks in my circles who are gender-nonconforming. I'll bet, sans decades-plus of social pressure, there are more in your kids' classes. What's the problem with asking? And why does asking make you characterize the effect upon higher education as "big"?
How is it "bigger" than a prof or a TA asking if I want to be called Edward, Ed, or Ted?
I just really want people in this thread to learn about emotional labor and to consider what they’re asking of marginalized people when they want to “discuss” the validity of their needs.
I'm a trans individual. I celebrate this and all the healing and personal growth that's come from coming to terms with this fact and so does mostly everyone I've ever been close with, and I live far outside the 'liberal bubble' of SV/etc. I am comfortable with having discussions and educating, but merely existing and advocating for one's own safety and happiness seems to be enough to start debates, even here. I don't want to have a 'culture war' or participate in a 'gender agenda', but as an adult human who wishes (i'd argue that it's somewhat of an obligation) to have an active role in civil society I must also advocate for myself and people like me.
I urge people to listen more if they haven't been through it themselves. I know there's a lot of information out there about trans individuals that has inspired a lot of confusion and concern. It can be a confusing topic! Trans people tend to know a lot about it by necessity but seem to be listened to the least when the topic comes up. I personally think there's more intellectual curiosity to be had in the meta-conversation around why this discourse is the way it is given the fact that we have plenty of testimony, data and research to indicate the talking points being wheeled into the discussion are mostly facile and misconstrued to stoke fears, much like we did already over homosexuality?
When I entered this discussion, the top comment on the article was talking about how trans people freak out when you just bring up the issue of one trans women in sports and try to “have a discussion”.
And it’s just like… I cannot leave that as the top comment and not say something. I mean, I could leave it, but I have to decide which is more upsetting - saying nothing or trying to engage and being shot down. We deserve better than that as the top comment on a thread about us.
Really glad dang stepped in and remoderated some comments.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
n.b. "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Yes, gender ideology is pretty political (should it be?). But learning about it can obviously gratify one's intellectual curiosity if they're approaching it in good faith. So I don't think you're necessarily able to just make a blanket statement like "this isn't appropriate."
As for having much to lose, if you feel alienated by a good faith intellectual discussion -- regardless of topic -- that's your problem. This sort of thing is discussed daily in liberal arts programs across the US and in most of the world. You have to be able to discuss and learn about topics, even divisive ones, without losing your shit.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: And it looks like in the period of time it took me to type this half a dozen other people said the same thing.
So the next time one of my co-workers suggests we should do more to be inclusive when our software asks a user if they are male/female, I should tell them that gender has nothing to do with software development?
Trans people are a tiny minority that is only now coming into the public consciousness. We're going to have to work through a lot of ignorant discussions and bad faith actors to get to a healthier place.
Why are there so many gatekeeping people around that want to prevent discussions on topics that they aren't interested in?
I'm pretty close to no longer visiting here.
I know that was a bit off-topic but I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s okay to create distance between you and the things that bring you down. I’ve found so much interesting content through Hacker News and it would be a shame to throw that away just because the politics here don’t always align with my own.
There was a great deal of Trump discussion here, too. Such perceptions are prone to sample bias.
Supporting evidence: I've gotta keep tabs on which places I shouldn't travel to in my own country where I was born and raised because people keep trying to make it illegal to use the bathroom safely [1] after getting scared by conversations such as the ones I've seen in this thread.
[1] - https://www.ncsl.org/research/education/-bathroom-bill-legis...