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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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> The pony IS her authentic self. Forcing her to suppress that aspect of her identity is as oppressive as forcing gay or transgender people to suppress their identities.

That gave me a chuckle over my morning coffee. A beautifully absurd paragraph. Please write more of this comedy.

> The pony IS her authentic self

As a trans woman, I will pitch in and say this kind of stuff (from fringes of trans/queer community) is why we get hate crimed.

There's medical basis (decades of research and literature) for asserting that one's gender does not match their biological sex. There's not a DSM V criteria for being a pony.

There is also nobody claiming to be a pony. If you're a trans woman you shouldn't be baited so easily.

I assure you they would keep "hate criming" you no matter how many cartoons you like.

> nobody claiming to be a pony

The person above literally said "The pony IS her authentic self", word for word.

I said someone claiming to be a pony, not someone assigned pony by rando.

> If you cannot deal with people bringing their true identities to the job, you are free to choose another industry to work in.

I don’t know, looks like VMWare found another way to deal with it.

They dealt with problematic tweets, not an "edgy fursona."

Yup. Everyone in the office loves edgy fart-porn childrens-cartoon fursonas who have regular consent-accidents.

It’s dubious whether this person brought their social media personality into the office. And who’s to say that the entire localized team might not share in the same culture? Would be interesting to hear accounts from the coworkers. Certainly it sounds like there was at least one who had the author’s back. Finally, I am unsure whether that is an accurate, or fair, assessment about their particular subculture. Are you operating with additional insight on that subject? From an insider’s perspective, perhaps?

I don't necessarily disagree with the substance but I think the logic is very sound here. Saying "you are free to choose another industry to work in." if you don't like a specific aspect of an industry is I think a quite exclusionary and condescending view. Nothing ever improves if everyone just leaves everything ranging from jobs or even entire fields when they don't like some of it.

There are many people who want to improve things instead of leaving.

Bringing more bigotry to the industry is not improving it. There was a subtext of "bigots are not welcome here".

Of course, that is not an improvement at all..... god I wish we just left all personal stuff and identity outside work and unrelated hobbies, it would be much easier... I remember when most people only had a username and zero personal information about themselves so everyone was pretty much faceless, so this wasn't as big of a problem.

> There was a subtext of "bigots are not welcome here".

Talk about being inclusive, huh.

I don't see what one's preference in how to have sex and what implements are being shoved where is relevant to Kubernetes. So I'd rather have my coworkers to not bring that to the job unless I ask them about it. I am not showing anybody my private parts unsolicited, and I expect the same courtesy from others, especially on the job.

Looks like she ended up very proud of her authentic self, thanks to VMware.

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