While many on HN likely consider it pretty gauche, to say the least, to be racist towards certain minority groups whose struggles Americans tend to have more awareness of, I do still see the subtle—and not-so-subtle—racism and prejudice regularly, especially when it comes to Asian groups, be it towards Arabs, like myself, Indians, Chinese, and many other people. So, I get the frustration.

However, that said, even if you intended for others to take your comment rhetorically rather than genuinely transphobically, to highlight how bad what the other person said sounds to you, I think it’s misguided at best; trans people get attacked enough as is, and I don’t think there is any need to bring imageboard slurs [1] into the mix to get the point across.

I don’t mean for all of that to come across as “virtue signaling” to distract from the original problem of racism by solely focusing on the transphobic language. The reason why I’m not ripping the parent comment apart or flagging it is that I interpreted it completely differently; I didn’t take it to be subtle racism toward Indians, as if they need to be “fixing the problem” (of not understanding the actual level of danger?), but rather that because Apple is seemingly so uninterested in addressing the issue, sarcastically, they should ship plastic laptops instead. Maybe this is too generous of an interpretation? I don’t know. But yeah, worth considering the other possibilities.

[1]: tbh, I’m not sure if we can refer to verbs as slurs or if they are solely nouns. I can’t actually think of another similar verb to compare (Maybe this is my wordcel moment). You get the point, though.