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Comment by dpkonofa | Hacker News Reader

This is a poor breakdown that blames the victims of peoples' dishonesty (and that includes the conference organizers). It is not the fault of the organizers that these men were dishonest. It is the men's fault that they were dishonest. Full stop.

By your own admission, they could redefine the policy to only include women and not include non-binary people and, as long as people are willing to be dishonest, it would fix nothing because they could just say they're women and still have the same situation.

How dare you give these dishonest men a pass and lay the blame at the people trying to better reflect the diversity of the people they're attempting to help.

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Yes, this was mob of disrespectful, intrusive men taking advantage of the situation, as men often do. I agree with you on this and I'm not sure why you read my comment as acceptance of their behavior.

However, if the organizers want to avoid this mass incursion of males at next year's event, they need to learn from the policy failure that enabled it this time round. It's not like men are suddenly going to learn to behave themselves honorably, there need to be clearly defined boundaries that prevent abuse. As an important part of that, any policy that prioritizes declarations of 'gender identity' over the reality of being female really needs to be got rid of.

I mean, women at the event reported being pushed out of the way and hurt by men barging past them. So clearly everyone is well aware of who the men are despite whatever 'gender identity' they might claim.

But it's difficult to speak out about it when policy is actively working against you: the code of conduct for the event stated "unacceptable behaviors include ... offensive verbal comments including as related to ... gender identity" which effectively bans any attendee from pointing out the obvious, and pressures women to ignore their natural instincts, lower their personal boundaries, stay silent in their discomfort, and basically just be nice and tolerant and accepting of the injustice they see before their very eyes.

How would you propose to verify that attendees are ‘really’ women? You keep dodging this issue. Anyone can lie and say that they have a womb, a vagina, two X chromosomes, or whatever your criterion is. How are you going to check? And as the article points out, it would probably be illegal to ban men anyway.

Spare your righteous indignation. You can't suddenly act like there is a test or standard when self-id has been the rule all along, and furthermore is acceptable to change one's identity as often as desired.

It's acceptable to change your identity and presentation as often as necessary to accurately reflect your self understanding.

Lying about it to gain access to an event not intended for you is dishonest and asocial at the very best. And completely unrelated to norms around self-identification, except that it is crudely taking advantage of them.

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