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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

This is a bad and dangerous take, spoken as someone that has never faced real abuse on twitter. If you're any kind of minority, the hate is endless. You're acting as if blocking is mainly used to "get the last word", which it's not. It's to not have people constantly harassing you for just existing.

And if you can only mute, you will not see it all but instead be a vessel to spread abuse to all your followers.

The town square analogy sucks. No one would accept a hate group going into their circle to shout slurs. Free speech absolutists don't care about other's freedom to live peacefully, only their own "right" to harass people.

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> If you're any kind of minority, the hate is endless.

I don't think this is true at all. People who get the most hate are not minorities but non-minority celebrities with controversial takes like J.K. Rowling.

No, Rowling is one of those spewing hate, then receiving pushback. Trans people however just want to live their lives in peace but get constantly harassed. A big difference.

... that's the far-left take on the dispute. It perfectly shows that what is viewed as "harassment" and what counts as "pushback" is highly subjective and dependent on political leaning. So blocking can be alternatively interpreted as blocking evil "harassment" or as unfairly blocking righteous "pushback". That's probably why so many people are in favor of blocking: They all employ the definitions of those terms in a way that is convenient to them.

She's asserting the rights of women to have female-only spaces, and to not be linguistically erased. That's not exactly "spewing hate" is it.

Perhaps trans women should have the right to a safe space as well, hence be able to block people?

No, because other people won't be able to block them either. Anything else would be unfair.

No, she's not.

Female only spaces would include all females. Not whomever Rowling decides has sufficient quantities of the essence of what she defines as woman.

A "female" is a biological sex category for all kinds of animals. It has little to do with the allegedly socially "constructed" concept of "gender identity".

"Trans woman Isla Bryson jailed for eight years for raping two women"

I wonder if you did not know about that, or if you think that that person should share dressing room and showers with biological women.

If you didn't know about that, maybe now it's simpler for you to at least a bit see how JKR is thinking?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/28/trans-woman-...

(Just to avoid misunderstandings: Such events are of course very rare, the trans people I know are kind and lovely people)

I don’t quite understand how you’re able to acknowledge the rarity of such a sensationalised case as Isla Bryson’s, yet still use it to justify your support for policy that would hurt the trans people you know.

Acknowledge? It is unclear whether MtF transsexuals have an incidence of commiting rape more similar to biological males or to biological females. So whether it is in fact "rare" (relative to the male base rate) or "frequent" (relative to the female base rate) is not established here.

The data gathered so far shows that they have a pattern of criminality similar to other men, particularly regarding sex crimes:

https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-se...

More research is needed, but I think it's not an unexpected conclusion. I mean, the only difference between these men and other men is that they're calling themselves women. Most of them keep their genitals intact, and most are driven to identify as women due to a paraphilia.

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