Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project – Issue #941 | Hacker News Reader

Transphobic maintainer should be removed from project – Issue #941

github.com

33 pointssmacktoward43 comments

What I see is idiotic intruders to an Open Source project, bringing their political agenda and wanting to blacklist a person because of what he believes.

I don't give a fuck if a project member is a gay communist atheist or a religious KKK member as long as he doesn't try to advertise that from within the project code, forums etc.

But I do take offense of people coming out of nowhere and saying about a contributor "he has opinions we don't like, we want you to throw them out of the project". Those people should be shown the door. They could start their own project and dictate terms there.

Wanting everyone regardless of their beliefs is inclusive. Wanting only people with certain beliefs is exlusive. Guess which hurts participation more?

I submitted this because I personally think the situation is more complicated than that.

I tend to agree with the notion that people shouldn't be run out of projects (or organizations, or jobs) just because of their private beliefs, even when those beliefs offend me. It's too easy to imagine the mechanism that ran them out of town being turned around to run me out of town, should my beliefs fall out of fashion.

But as you note, there is a line where private beliefs stop being private and start being public. You put the line here:

> as long as he doesn't try to advertise that from within the project code, forums etc.

... but the developer in question was publishing the opinions in question on Twitter, which isn't exactly a private space. If you say something on Twitter, you are saying it in public. If you are a high-profile member of a project, the fact that the space doesn't have the project logo on it doesn't necessarily mean people aren't going to look at what you say and connect it back to the project. And it doesn't strike me as implausible that, if you're one of those developers and what you're saying is offensive to a group of people, those people are going to assume that the project you're the face of isn't a space where their contributions would be welcome. And that's going to hurt contribution to the project.

So I'm of two minds on this particular case, I guess. Which isn't very helpful, but does make it a question that I think could benefit from wider discussion. We as a culture have to hash out exactly where in these new online spaces we've created these new lines are appropriately drawn.

>... but the developer in question was publishing the opinions in question on Twitter, which isn't exactly a private space.

That's still OK with me. Twitter might not be a private space, but his opinion is his own to broadcast in his Twitter stream.

As long as he doesn't attribute this opinion to the project or anything.

>If you are a high-profile member of a project, the fact that the space doesn't have the project logo on it doesn't necessarily mean people aren't going to look at what you say and connect it back to the project.

Even if it means that, they shouldn't (connect what one person says with the project). What if it was his political or religious opinions? Shouldn't he be able to say he is an atheist / democract / devout / republican whatever in his Twitter stream? Post jokes about Obama or Bush, etc? Pro or against the death penalty? Etc.

If that's allowed, then why wouldn't be having an opinion about sexuality (which is another topic people see as political/religious/moral/whatever).

I find that the reason some people ask (and get) people fired from their jobs or thrown out of projects because of their view on such issues, is not because such issues are more clean cut than the others mentioned, but because they can get away with it.

In conservative places they hurt people with progressive opinions, in progresive places they hurt people with conservative opinions. And that's what I dislike the most, people seeing so that active harm happens to others they disagree with (as opposed to those others just stating their opinion). For me that's worse than being a bigot -- it's being a bad human.

His twitter bio has "@opalrb core" in it, making him a representative of the project though.

Yeah, that sounds like it should be a project twitter account.

That would be in violation of a project's public image even if he just posted cat pictures...

It seems like splitting Twitter accounts - one for Opal-related stuff, the other for personal - would be the right thing to do. I've asked for clarification here: https://github.com/CoralineAda/contributor_covenant/issues/5...

Why shouldn't I be able to mention biographical details in a personal account? I should be able to mention being from Milwaukee, liking hot dogs, or working on Redis if I want to.

Indeed. That's my take on it too, which is why I've asked Coraline (or any other contributors) for clarification.

You should.

You just shouldn't name that account with the name of a project that's not yours and you're just one of the people that work on it, giving a false sense that yours is some kind of project account.

I think there's a miscommunication in this thread.

@opalrb is the project's account, and is not the account Elia was tweeting from. His personal account is named with his own name, not the project's. The complaint was about what he said on his personal account.

When comrh said "His twitter bio has "@opalrb core" in it" they mean that in the description for Elia's personal account he calls himself a "Ruby hacker and @opalrb core" (and a bunch of non-code related things).

If I'm imagining this misunderstanding then please ignore.

Yeah, that's my understanding too - which I wouldn't have described as representing the project.

I understand your perspective on this and have a similar one, however I definitely think a double-standard is applied to these sorts of issues due to the fashionability of certain political stances. For example, Steve Klabnik has tweeted crassly about how capitalists should be killed, but I don't see anyone clamoring to remove him from projects. Those offended by his quasi-threatening political posturing (and there are many) simply aren't interested in publicly silencing him for his opinions, while its become a common tactic for those on the other side of many issues. That disparity is a cause for concern for me, personally.

This is troubling for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that there is some support for the idea that being transgender is itself a mental disorder, unlike say homosexuality.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/11/surgical-sex

"As for the adults who came to us claiming to have discovered their “true” sexual identity and to have heard about sex-change operations, we psychiatrists have been distracted from studying the causes and natures of their mental misdirections by preparing them for surgery and for a life in the other sex. We have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it."

Who let the Social Justice Warriors out? Whilst I really don't care what people do in their own time, and with their own sexuality (their business) I see a lot of people in that thread essentially saying "I was going to contribute, but now I won't"...

Sigh. My grandma used to tell me that when she was angry with me, and I didn't fall for it then. Also, it is open source - meaningful code contributions count. The rest is secondary, noise, or fluff. Do I believe the guy is a dick for his views on transgenders - certainly. Does it mean I believe he has to be booted out of a project, his job, be publicly shamed, and be punished? Certainly not - after all, he has as much right and freedom to express his views and opinions as transgender people have to flaunt their sexuality, and the SJW have to go on rampaging crusades.

Owch, before this it wouldn't have occurred to me that a "Code of Conduct" would be crafted for the purpose of giving identity politics some leverage into open source projects, for twitter mobs to better harass developers. I would have taken the idea at face value - a codification of "don't be a dick".

They seem to have a twitter smear campaign running in parallel to bring in random people to pile on. Unless the dev has said something else, I can't see any hate from him (though I disagree with his view).

Actually, the contributor charter that Coraline herself created only applies to statements made when representing the project:

"This code of conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community."

The problem I have with this is that the contributor is being crucified for stating his opinion when doing neither of those things.

You don't think they're going to claim he's representing the project on twitter by mentioning his involvement in his twitter description?

This could be a genuine effort to improve things, but the portrayal of him has not seemed honest so far, which leaves me assuming their call for CoC is so bullies can go:

"you have a different opinion to me, so I'm going to stop you from being able to mention that thing you spend your time on"

I guess I'll reserve judgement until it happens - cool heads will be the ones deciding what constitutes "representing the project".

No, I'd actually hoped that the reason Coraline included that language in the charter was precisely to prevent this sort of thing. Time will tell whether that's misplaced optimism.

I've asked the question explicitly on the covenant GitHub:

https://github.com/CoralineAda/contributor_covenant/issues/5...

Will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of it.

That was a good idea. Opal now seem to be getting back to coding under a CoC which lacks that clause.

It looks like the clause was hammered out during the Opal discussion and the version on the covenant website was updated but not the master branch of the covenant git repo, so when Opal grabbed the standard CoC they got version 1.0 without the new "Elia clause" in it.

I don't know whether that was luck or foresight, but I see people are now pushing Opal to adopt for v1.1:

"This is a necessary change, version 1.0 of the contributor covenant fails to address the situation which started this: the gross misconduct of one of your core maintainers spewing a veritable mountain of hate and ignorance about LGBT people on a social media platform where he constantly ties himself to your project and refers to himself as a core maintainer."

Misdirection like that doesn't lessen my worry that the clause is there to open OSS to bullying from outside. Having read what the tweats actually said, it has me nodding with rewqfdsa that "this isn't happening in good faith" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743357).

Even with cool heads deciding what counts as "representing the project", the clause lets outside mobs gum up a project with drama until the contributors learn to self-censor in all aspects of life. When some poor maintainer doesn't give the "represents" ruling that the twitter mob desires, that person in the middle will start being personally smeared all over the internet as "supporting a mountain of hate and ignorance about LGBT people" etc in an effort to make them relent.

So good idea for asking, v1.1 Code of Conduct is looking like a submarine poison pill. It's a shame nobody will read closed issues (locked too).

I've opened a pull request to clarify the language in the CoC, with the stated intent of avoiding this sort of problem:

https://github.com/CoralineAda/contributor_covenant/pull/74

Having spent several years living with a self-confessed homophobic person, I saw their attitude turn around (70%) when they met my gay friends. Maybe the people on the github discussion should try to "educate" the transphobic maintainer instead of hammering away at them.

My thoughts exactly. The way to change people's bigoted attitudes is to demonstrate that they're wrong, not to drive them into exile.

Ok i cannot stop reading. Someone buy meh a beer(hell if he is in japan i will). I would have lost patience a long time ago(and im onlt 1/3 through). Honestly, that guys doing an amazing job.

I agree. I don't understand how he finds the patience to calmly explain his position to this mob. Kind of pointless though, sjws have never been convinced by logic and arguments. I sometimes wonder if they actually realize how close their methods are from the ones that were used in Soviet Russia.

It seems like it wasn't all that long ago that people were up in arms about companies considering everything an employee said on their own time to potentially represent the company. This is why companies did that, because interlopers come along and threaten you bad publicity if you don't do something about the person with the wrongthink.

There was never a general reciprocity principle at play with these people, it was always about who has power over whom. if they have power, they punish people they dislike. If they don't have power, they appeal to fairness until they can get into a position of power. Don't give them power by acceding to threats.

An update to my involvement in this discussion: my request for explicit clarification of the term 'representing' was closed without useful comment, so I've opened a pull request to clarify the language in the charter itself.

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9748555

Favorite SJW tactic. Publicly shame someone when they disagree with them and go after their job/reputation/etc.

"He doesn't think like me, fire him"

How is that called again?

What I see here is a software project using a community-centric development model not willing to do anything about a core dev publicly acting in such a way to act alienating to the community. I don't think he should necessarily be removed from the project, but to act like it's not of concern to the project at all is a bad way to handle it.

I suspect the number of people alienated by a project getting into thought policing is far higher than the number of people alienated by this particular issue.

I'm not particularly convinced that "alienating to the community." is really appropriate, because by and large it doesn't seem to be their community up in arms.

In the past the "transphobic" would mob the people against the "trans".. today is the other way around. We evolved so much. When will the anti-witch hunt start ?

"384 comments"

What's really awful is that most of the people posting in that thread aren't ever going to use or contribute to Opal, they just want to remove someone who doesn't share their worldview.

Holy hello-kitty-on-rocketship thats a lot of self satisfying circle jerk. Look the giys views suck, but it hasnt (from what i read), come up at all in any way related to the product. Gods i feel sorry for that meh guy, hes pretty much speaking to himself, as no ones listening.

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