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Comment by undefined1 | Hacker News Reader

The bigger problem is left-leaning people getting harassed and immediately flagged as right/alt-right/-ist (i.e., "not one of us") when merely disagreeing with or challenging dogma. See Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker for some high profile examples.

Don't toe the line and echo approved orthodoxy? You're the enemy! This is extreme tribal behavior.

As a result, there is a chilling effect and a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left[1][2]. Certainly don't feel welcome to speak or think openly. This is incredibly regressive, damaging to liberalism and enlightenment values. Seriously, not being able to challenge your own side and engage in dialectic will send us back to the dark ages.

1. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right

2. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right/comm...

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Thinkers should instead crush tribalism, like this: http://blog.cr.yp.to/20160607-dueprocess.html

> a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left

"the left" isn't a discrete thinkspace. There is a political spectrum, which isn't linear. The individuals mentioned are still relatively leftist, regardless of whoever is critical or engaging in other disparaging acts. Implying there is 1 left-wing or 1 right-wing is tribal behavior.

This was addressed above, in the bit talking about people failing to put the same effort into empathising and understanding people who historically receive little to no empathy or understanding whatsoever. Ignore our personal feelings on the matter for a moment: do we honestly believe JK Rowling has made an effort to converse with, understand, and empathize with trans women?

> do we honestly believe JK Rowling has made an effort to converse with, understand, and empathize with trans women?

I don't agree with JK Rowling's take on these issues. But I actually think she likely has made at least some effort to do this. Some of her open letters certainly mention her knowing trans people and sympathising with their experiences.

Although in general I think the gender debate is a prime example of neither side listening to the other. There is a group of people who aren't listening to trans people when they say that they have gender feelings which are important to them. But equally trans people aren't listening to other people when they say that their physical bodies are important to them.

Being told your opinions are problematic and hurtful is part of the process of changing them. This is the "paradox of intolerance", without a certain degree of intolerance of unacceptable beliefs, intolerance itself spreads further.

It is really the same process as having any ingrained belief challenged, it is going to make that person uncomfortable because something they took on faith is being challenged. That doesn't mean it's not something that should happen.

Also a great way to solidify them and get people to dig in their heels.

Shaming is often more about making the shamer feel good than a rational calculation of persuasive power.

This seems like a false equivalence. Trans people aren't trying to tell cis people that their physical bodies aren't allowed to matter to them, nor to invalidate cis people's gender or force them to be treated as another gender.

Except when they are: As in the case of Caster Semenya. Never has it been more clear that trans rights are human rights.

> Trans people aren't trying to tell cis people that their physical bodies aren't allowed to matter to them

I feel like they are.

Specifically, if you believe that "feeling like" a gender makes you that gender, then it seems to me that logically you have to believe one of the following:

(1) That having the physiology associated with a given gender is not sufficient to count as a gender.

This invalidates the identity of people like me who don't experience the "gender feeling" that trans people (and some cis people) talk about, and therefore base their identity as a man/woman on their physicality.

(2) That gender categories are "open" where for example either feeling like a man OR having "male" physiology makes you a man.

But that seems to make the whole concept of gender pointless because people with penises don't share anything in common with people who feel like men (that they don't also share with people who feel like women and people with vaginas) unless they happen to be people who fall into both categories. It also makes it impossible for someone express that they have one of those things but not the other because there is only one label "man/woman" to describe two distinct phenomena.

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If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.

> If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.

This is called nonbinary, agender, or genderqueer. This is a fairly established situation. You may come across someone who uses nonstandard pronouns such as "they/them" or "zyr/zem" or something like that. There's even an LGBTQ flag for being nonbinary. (Q stands for queer/questioning as well). If you are assigned male at birth but don't identify as male or any other gender then you may be nonbinary or agender. If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organization to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!

(Additionally on technicality, trans means "anything that isn't identifiying as one's assigned gender at birth". Being nonbinary is a subset of being trans. Society is most familiar with binary trans identity, which is when someone is assigned F/M at birth but identifies as M/F, however this is not the entire set of trans identity. You are free to be assigned M at birth but identify with no gender, and still be trans.)

Right, so this deals with one side of the equation: it allows me to represent the fact that I don't have gender feelings. But it doesn't allow me to represent my biological maleness, in fact if anything it seems to deny it. My physiology is an important part of me (and my identity), and if I describe myself as non-binary or agender then that part of me isn't being communicated or represented. I want to be able to describe my (lack of) gender feelings and my physiology separately, and make the same distinction when talking about other people.

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> If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organisation to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!

I'm pretty familiar with the LGBTQ community in general, and I have spent a great deal of time over the last year or so reading up about and thinking about gender identity. My view is that the mainstream view in the LGBTQ community where one's gender identity (which label they use - man/woman/non-binary/etc) is assumed to correspond to "a feeling of gender" is quite naive. This is certainly true for some people, but there are also other reasons why people choose to use those labels including having certain physiologies or simply the fact that you were assigned the label and never bothered to change it. It seems to me that these other kinds of gender identity are equally valid and one way or another ought to find representation in whatever system of gender we settle one, but that a "gender feelings" focussed conception of gender doesn't provide this representation.

(one such system would be a system eschews having a single gender label at all and requires that we are more specific about which aspects of sex/gender we are talking about in situations where we need to make gendered distinctions)

> it allows me to represent the fact that I don't have gender feelings. But it doesn't allow me to represent my biological maleness, in fact if anything it seems to deny it.

You can identify as a masc nonbinary or AMAB nonbinary. These are distinctions that are pretty common to use in the LGBTQ community which is why I suggest not just reading up and thinking but actually going to a community and participating within it. Your local group may even be able to introduce you to other AMAB NB people that you can compare and contrast experiences with.

is there not room outside of the right for people who are not that empathetic or would rather not spend the energy to understand these people? I want action on climate change, I want single payer health care, subsidized college, reproductive rights, separation of church and state.

what i don't care about is how many genders an English department can create. I don't discriminate, but I also don't want to expend any energy understanding or empathizing .

Liberals aren't out here forcing each other at gunpoint to protest every cause that exists. If you don't want to engage on an issue, don't engage. The person being discussed above (Rowling) is being called out for making repeated, harmful public statements. Don't do that. Smile and nod and you'll be fine.

Maybe avoid characterizing your would-be allies in terms of dumb right-wing tropes like "how many genders an English department can create" while you're at it.

Interesting since 1 day later a major HN story is about a company (coinbase) blocking political discussions at the workplace. It created a big backlash by people who refused to follow that rule and insisted that anything and everything is politics, arguing that (lack of speech) is still speech, that speech is action, that being neutral is implicit or even active support of one side or the other, and many other completely extreme and unreasonable stances.

Maybe people aren't forcing each other at gunpoint, but it's pretty close.

I don't really see the parallel. The poster I responded to seemed to be asking the question in a personal capacity, not from a position of power over others. When you front an organization representing, and being represented by, hundreds of people, then yes, politics are unavoidable by definition.

Furthermore, unless there's more context I've skimmed over (I assume you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899), it's not clear that Coinbase will suffer any negative consequences from this whatsoever aside from being shunned by activists, which I presume is a consequence they're okay with since they published a blog post explicitly alienating that group. The only folks being forced I see are the employees being told to pipe down or ship out.

(also, while it may not be substantive to this discussion, the belief that neutrality, especially explicit neutrality, is tacit endorsement of the status quo is neither extreme nor unreasonable)

The people who were working there were forced discuss or be "activists" by other coworkers. That isn't a position of power, it's others directly encroaching on their space and working conditions.

This is a direct example of what you are denying, that people are somehow not being forced to participate in these politics. They are, and increasingly so, with very few companies taking such an active stance to combat it.

And yes, neutrality is specifically the absence of any single position. It cannot be an endorsement of anything, be definition. Redefining terms to be whatever is politically convenient to create strawman positions and drama is another tactic used by those who want to force politics into every situation.

> The people who were working there were forced discuss or be "activists" by other coworkers.

Source? I have no idea what this is referring to.

Effective neutrality due to lack of will or resources is one thing. But a declaration of neutrality is a message to other actors that you will not intervene in their affairs. It is a rejection of the cultural norm that extremism (outside the company) should be tempered. Sounds pretty political to me, but maybe you and I are working with different definitions of politics.

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