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Comment by duncan_bayne | Hacker News Reader

"The review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective."

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/30/health.mental...

But that's not the point, is it?

It doesn't really matter whether he's right about gender dysphoria or not. Coraline is requesting his removal as a contributor because he has publicly stated his opinion on this matter, and that opinion is unacceptable to her.

As far as I know, what he did didn't even violate Coraline's own (excellent) contributor charter:

http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/1/0/

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

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The issue hinges on the meaning of "represent". Merely mentioning in the bio of a personal account that I work on a certain open source project is not the same as asserting that this personal account represents the project. Reasonable people do not confuse these concepts.

SJWs willfully conflate these ideas, though, and that's because they're not working in good faith. In reality, they're trying to blacklist people whose political views they find abhorrent, and one weapon in their extensive arsenal is the unreasonable interpretation of reasonable-sounding policy.

Personally, I don't see any evidence that the charter was created in bad faith. It seems like an entirely reasonable set of guidelines that would be good to follow.

As you say, it all hinges on 'representation'. That's why I asked for clarification on the charter GitHub project.

Basically: how do the creators of the charter see this working, and how will they prevent it being used in ways you suggest, to suppress unpopular speech?

There is so much anger on this topic it's remarkably hard to get a clear picture of what's going on.

I've opened a PR to clarify this: https://github.com/CoralineAda/contributor_covenant/pull/74

> But that's not the point, is it?

It very much is the point. You are being a bully as much as everyone else in that Github thread was.

There are several other studies that show different results than the one you quoted. The data is mostly inconclusive, but there are plenty of cases where sex-reassignment therapy is effective:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_reassignment_therapy#Effec...

> Coraline is requesting his removal as a contributor because he has publicly stated his opinion on this matter, and that opinion is unacceptable to her.

If he were posting on his own Twitter account and claimed no relationship to Opal, perhaps. But he lists himself as a core contributor. He's being particularly hurtful to a prominent group within the free software community (for whatever reason, the online free community attracts a higher proportion of transgendered people than the overall population). If he were saying that white men are all disgusting and should be removed from society, or that straight men should be forcibly castrated if accused of a rape, even in his private Twitter account, would you still want him as a prominent contributor?

> If he were saying that white men are all disgusting and should be removed from society, or that straight men should be forcibly castrated if accused of a rape, even in his private Twitter account, would you still want him as a prominent contributor?

If his code is good, and he doesn't bring these off topic things up on project mailing lists, forums, and the like, then yes, I'd be OK with it. What he says on his personal Twitter is irrelevant unless he purports to speak on behalf of the project.

And no, simply including in his profile information on his personal twitter account that he is a contributor does not make him a spokesman for the project, any more than the fact that he also includes that he is a Catholic makes him a spokesman for the Catholic Church.

You give an @octave.org email address in your HN profile and say that you are a core Octave developer. Does that mean you intend for people to take your comments as representing the position of the Octave project on the subjects you comment on here?

> Does that mean you intend for people to take your comments as representing the position of the Octave project on the subjects you comment on here?

In my case, yes. I act here as an ambassador for Octave and the GNU project. If I were being too much of a jerk, that could reflect badly on the Octave community. Since I do not want Octave's image to suffer, I try to not be a jerk and make amends when I am.

If someone ever thinks to themself that they would have liked to use or contribute to Octave but would rather not because they don't want to deal with me, then I have almost certainly done something very wrong that I should not have done.

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