danShumway

I think you may have accidentally misread my post, or maybe I didn't word it carefully enough (in which case I apologize for the confusion). I don't prefer Steam. As a consumer, on principle in most cases I refuse to buy from it.

Steam effectively punishes creators for not steering users towards their monopoly, and they have a ton of tools for user lock-in: Steam Input, Steam Workshop, etc... They may not be as egregious as Apple, but they are often pretty egregious in their own right.

In a normal market, having a diverse set of users across multiple platforms would be a good thing as a creator, it would give you security and give each platform less power over you. Steam uses their review system to punish smaller creators who have a diverse userbase, and it uses their response to cement its market dominance even more and to give itself more power over those creators and their players. I would argue this is bad for the market.

My bigger point here is that Apple advocates will sometimes point to Steam and say "they charge high fees too, what's the problem?" There's are multiple reasons that Steam is able to charge higher fees than most of its PC competitors and remain the dominant platform for PC games, some of them due to the way that it methodically weaponizes incentives for both players and creators against alternatives. Comparing Apple to Steam does not make me like Apple more.

I'm already using Manifest V3 in Firefox for a few personal private addons that I develop, and I can confirm that blocking network requests already work perfectly fine in it. The only issues I have with Manifest V3 in Firefox are technical, I haven't noticed any issues that I think are problems of direction.

Firefox's Manifest V3 implementation arguably isn't ready for prime time (it has some pretty egregious bugs), but whenever they finally do get around to dropping Manifest V2 (which I have no idea when that would happen), I'm not really worried about extensions not being able to jump over.

> Ideally someone could create their own spec to replace or supplement declarativeNetRequest in mv3. And ideally write specifications to support that.

Or include it in MV3. Firefox's implementation for MV3 avoids this problem almost entirely by just not getting rid of the specification and integrating it into the new system.

There are technical problems with MV3 in Firefox (it's extraordinarily buggy right now), but my suspicion is that by the time it matures it will be a straight-up improvement over MV2 for both privacy and capability (especially if Firefox ever gets around to supporting extension service workers).

It's not really MV3 that's the problem, it's specifically Google's implementation of it and which APIs they've chosen not to include.

The downside for other browsers based on Chromium is that even if they go Firefox's route, they're all largely dependent on the Chrome web store for extensions, and I think it's unlikely that most extension developers continue to develop Chromium extensions that don't work in Chrome.

Fair point.

I do think Steam is engaged in anti-competitive behavior, but that doesn't mean they're the full equivalent of the app store. And we can see on the PC market the large number of indie games that very literally would not exist if PCs were locked into only using Steam.

My point here is more that Steam is not really a good argument for justifying a pricing model. But it's a good clarification that in many ways Steam has "only" mostly locked down the PC gaming market, where Apple has gone further and locked down the actual software that can be loaded onto the phone.

> by your argument Apple should get 99.9% of the fees

No, by my argument, even if someone believes that Apple is somehow morally entitled to a specific level of compensation for running the app store, it is absurd to argue that the amount of work they're putting into making specifically the Patreon app available is higher than the amount of work that was put into building Patreon.

If you want to argue that they're not morally entitled to a certain percentage of revenue, great! Then let's talk unemotionally about antitrust, customer steering, and effective market competition without falling into the trap of worrying about whether or not Apple is getting "bullied" by that discussion.

The trap that people fall into so often when talking about Apple is trying to set this up like there's a hero and a villain, like people looking at the market are somehow trying to bully Apple out of something it justly deserves. But come on; when you see market effects like this it becomes so much more obvious that if there is any bully here, it's Apple.

"You can't reasonably expect Apple to-" Nah, this market outcome is bad. This is not the outcome that most of us want from an app store market. We should do things to make that market more competitive and to curb anti-competitive app-store policies.

"Apple isn't being doing anything bad, they're just like the music industry" is a heck of an argument to make. Do you think the average person would argue that the music industry isn't exploitative?

If you're suggesting that Steam doesn't have an effective monopoly on the PC market, I have bad news for you. One of the biggest differences between Steam and Apple is that Steam does a better job of hiding the effects from users who will lash out at creators who talk about problems on the platform.

An indie creator I follow recently implored fans to buy their next game on Steam and not other platforms... because in order to be profitable they absolutely needed to get their game to be ranked on Steam above a certain review threshold, and reviews of the game would only count towards their ranking if matched with specifically a Steam purchase. And once again, I get this weird feeling. I'm struck that at the point where a creator is begging users to reinforce the most dominant PC gaming platform because if those users buy the game somewhere else that has better creator terms and fees, the platform will (in effect) punish their store listing, something might be going wrong with the market.

Sometimes Apple advocates will point at similarly bad situations in other markets and say, "what, are you going to regulate that too?"

Don't threaten me with a good time.

"a cut of that" is doing a heck of a lot of work here to handwave the amount they're asking for.

A "cut" in this case means such a high percentage of the transaction that if Patreon didn't pass the extra cost on to consumers/creators, they would make negative dollars on each iOS subscription. That really genuinely does not strike you as odd at all?

It doesn't strike you as weird or maybe like a possibly negative market effect that Patreon as a platform should be more profitable for Apple than it is for Patreon? I think most people would say that's a signal that something might be going wrong.

:shrug: It would be nice to have alternatives, like you say, it's not like Patreon is particularly good at this. I understand that payment processing is kind of hellish to deal with, but that wouldn't be a barrier to a company the size of Apple/Google.

Internet payments/subscription platforms are in desperate need of more competition, even partial competition.

I thought for a while that Youtube was experimenting with paid subscribers? But it's possible that I misunderstood or that Google just got bored and abandoned it.

Admittedly, I also wondered about this. I'm taking Patreon at their word (for now), but I would welcome Apple making some kind of statement indicating that Patreon is allowed to disable payments in the app.

And if it is true that they're not allowed to disable payments, I would also love to know what's special about Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify (other than their size) that would allow them to "get away" with the same behavior.

This gets brought up a lot in conversations about Apple.

In one sense, I agree with it. Patreon is a rent-seeking middleman who abuses network effects. 100%.

But the creators on Patreon who's income are going to be most affected by this don't care about which side of the debate is more likeable to you, and I'm kind of sick of pretending that policies that affect a huge swath of people (often people with limited options, virtually no power, and few backup resources) can be treated like popularity contests.

The video essayists, programmers, artists, authors, and indies doing weird, wonderful work supported through Patreon get their revenue squeezed even tighter, being forced to either bleed revenue or subscribers due to new fees, being forced to abandon revenue models and subscription models that Apple doesn't like.. and, I mean, honestly, "I hate both companies" just is not a valid or acceptable response to that situation.

The solution to rent-seeking middlemen is not to make more of them.

> If most apple users refuse to go outside the app store for their content, Than clearly they care more about the ease of access than the content itself.

Does Apple's refusal to allow apps to tell users about lower prices elsewhere make this claim more likely to be true or less likely to be true? If this is a free choice that consumers are making, why does Apple need to hide it from them?

I'm reminded of the same arguments that Facebook made about privacy before Apple (very much to their credit) made opt-outs a requirement for apps. And it turned out that lots of users did care about privacy when they were able to make an informed choice about it. Facebook's arguments ended up being mostly crap. Users, when educated and when given valid options, stopped making the choice that Facebook wanted them to make.

But now Apple has flipped over to Facebook's line of reasoning and is arguing the opposite.

I think your argument would have more weight if Apple didn't consistently demonstrate aggression and fear over their users being informed about the effects of app store fees. In this case, the vast majority of Patreon subscriptions for most users are going to become 30% more expensive. Apple appears to have an incredibly high vested interest in it not being explained to them why that happened.

That doesn't sound to me like Apple itself is confident that users value their app store enough to pay that fee willingly.

This is extremely well phrased.

I will say, I do have opinions about what to do ;) But parent comment is right that I'm not trying to advocate for those opinions above, someone might completely disagree with me about how to respond to the situation, and that's fine.

I'm more just pointing to the situation and saying, "this seems really weird, right? This is not the outcome that any of us would expect or want. Maybe you disagree with me about how to solve this, but this does seem like something we should try to solve."

> The problem with "fairness" is that there is no objective measure of it. Everybody evaluates fairness according to how it aligns with their own personal interests.

With respect, this sounds a little bit like you're agreeing with me?

Another way of phrasing "fairness is not a valid price discovery mechanism" might be to say that fairness as a concept "doesn't exist" in the market, only competition: ie, what people are willing to pay to acquire a service from the available options they have before them, ideally within an environment where low barrier-of-entry to the market allows prices to fall if a service can be legitimately offered cheaper elsewhere, and where regulation sets the (occasional) market cap on how exploitative businesses are able to be. Fairness as a concept is not applicable to market prices: they don't get set because they are "fair", they get set because businesses calculate the maximum amount that people are willing to pay for products before going to a competitor (assuming there is a competitor to go to).

BUT, if people on HN insist on bringing fairness into discussions about anti-competitive behavior (which very often happens in discussions about the app-store), I think that Apple's fees in this case, and the impacts they will have on small-market creators, are unlikely to line up with most people's personal evaluation of "fair".

A sibling comment phrased this in a really good way, I think this is a situation where regardless of how you feel about fairness, you can look at the market outcome and think, "wait a second, something is not right here."

Only on HN would I see someone argue that depreciating or stagnant assets are the same thing as a 30% transaction fee. This community is smart enough to be able to tell the difference between a tax on revenue and a tax on profit.

Apple is imposing a tax on revenue that is higher than the revenue that Patreon pulls in from each transaction fee.

There is no equivalent situation in a realtor market. In no world would a realtor sell your house for $500k and then tell you that they deserve a higher cut of the revenue than you do.

Or, I would argue, like if a realtor made more money off of the sale than the person selling the house made.

Another point that Patreon isn't really emphasizing here that seems relevant to any conversations about "fairness" is that Apple's fees on Patreon subscriptions in-app are now higher than Patreon's fees.

It's important to recognize any time that we're talking about the market that services charge what they can, not what is fair. The market does not have a concept of fairness, only competition. This is why there is no such thing as a benevolent monopoly that charges fair prices - because fairness does not exist in the market, only competition.

BUT... since fairness gets so often brought into conversations about Apple's fees, often with the implicit suggestion that Apple "deserves" to be compensated for all of the work they're putting into hosting and curating apps and for (in heavy quotes) "creating" a market that they supposedly also don't have duopoly control over: does anybody want to argue that Apple hosting the Patreon app on iOS provides more value to Patreon subscribers and creators than the existence of Patreon itself does?

Like, if we're going to talk about what's egregious and what's not egregious, charging higher fees per-transaction than the platforms you are hosting seems like it might be a good indicator that things have gotten out of control.

> those services are typically not the same as what you can get at Walmart.

Several things:

A) Apple doesn't sell a creator subscription service that's the same as what you can get from Patreon.

B) You can advertise inside of a box for services that Walmart does provide (yes, that includes devices).

C) Is your implication that if Walmart did open up a music streaming service that suddenly it would be improper for iOS to advertise Apple Music on devices purchased from Walmart? Because that's a wild thing to suggest.

D) Just re-stating B more directly: Apple advertises direct hardware purchases from the physical Apple store - a direct competitor to Walmart's tech hardware sales - for hardware that Walmart actively sells. And Apple advertises that hardware on devices and within packaging for devices that are bought from Walmart.

Apple's website homepage for the iPad has in big block letters halfway down the page: "Why Apple is the best place to buy iPad." Under Apple's rules, they would not be able to link to this page within an iOS app.

There is no equivalent to this in hardware land.

> Or if you can buy direct it is cheaper from Walmart.

I'm not going to drive over to Walmart to check this, but I severely doubt that Walmart is consistently offering all of its Apple hardware at a cheaper price than an Apple store.

> Walmart is a large enough customer that they won't let you sell it for less (either you don't undercut Walmart, or you will sell zero at Walmart).

Which is still egregious and anti-competitive! But amazingly, somehow less egregious than what Apple is doing. Ask yourself, how anti-competitive and abusive does a company have to be in order to be worse than Walmart? That's almost an accomplishment.

> Apple has also made clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing models or disable transactions in the iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their App Store.

Do we know whether or not iOS's subscription model supports pausing?

I guess I assume Patreon would mention if it didn't.

When was the last time you bought any large item from a physical store that didn't come with advertisements in the packaging for direct services?

If you buy a Disney DVD from Walmart, there will be advertisements inside the DVD case for direct services (heck, last time I checked there were ads on the outside of the case). If you buy a Roomba from Walmart, there will be advertisements for direct parts and addons from the manufacturer. If you buy a hecking Apple Ipad from Walmart, Apple will include advertisements for its direct services once you start using the product.

People bring up this comparison all the time and it's very simply not true. You can advertise direct services inside physical products you sell at stores. What Apple is saying is not that you can't advertise prices in the store page, Apple is saying that you can't advertise alternative platforms in the app itself.

There is no physical equivalent to this for storefronts like Walmart. Home Depot does not have a restriction on whether a physical product you buy from them can have an advertisement for direct manufacturer services inside the box or software that comes with it.

If we want to be consistent about this, Apple really should be paying Walmart a fee for any app-store purchases made on devices that were bought from Walmart. After all, the user got the device from Walmart, right? Shouldn't they get their cut of app store purchases? That's how Apple sees the world.

> Find me a list of cases

https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/03/UNITE...

Emphasis mine:

On whether platform APIs (like those in a web-browser) can be anti-competitive:

> Apple has used one or both mechanisms (control of app distribution or control of APIs) to suppress the following technologies...

[...]

On the need for neutral API access as a tool to increase competition:

> Messaging apps that work equally well across all smartphones can improve competition among smartphones [...]. Apple makes third-party messaging apps on the iPhone worse generally and relative to Apple Messages, Apple’s own messaging app, by prohibiting third-party apps from sending or receiving carrier-based messages...

[...]

On the suppression of APIs for third-party services:

> By suppressing key functions of third-party smartwatches —including the ability to respond to notifications and messages and to maintain consistent connections with the iPhone—Apple has denied users access to high performing smartwatches with preferred styling, better user interfaces and services, or better batteries, and it has harmed smartwatch developers by decreasing their ability to innovate and sell products.

[...]

On the use of privacy as an excuse restrict 3rd-party APIs that are not restricted for 1st-party services:

> In the end, Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests.

[...]

If you need it stated even more clearly:

> Apple selectively designates APIs as public or private to benefit Apple, limiting the functionality developers can offer to iPhone users even when the same functionality is available in Apple’s own apps, or even select third-party apps.

This is directly analogous to what Google is doing here. Shipping a by-default extension which takes advantage of a distribution channel (Chrome's list of default extensions) that is not available to 3rd-party developers. That extension grants Google access to a private API that benefits Google while limiting the functionality that third party sites can offer their users, and I quote: "even when the same functionality is available in [Google]'s own apps."

You do not know what you are talking about.

> Have you considered some people actually deal with anti trust on a day to day?

And I hope to God that you're not one of them.

Case in point of what I was talking about above, femoid's comment is what you're going to run into if you interact with terf spaces, and it regularly spills out to attacks on cisgender people as well. It's not uncommon for terfs to harass and attack cisgender women under the assumption that they think they might be trans (I am not joking with that, do some research into how bathroom bills have affected the harassment of butch women).

And so whenever anyone says that transgender groups are reinforcing gender norms I kind of have to shake my head, because it's difficult to find a group more obsessed with the idea of stereotypical gender norms than the supposedly "gender critical" crowd. And unsurprisingly, that leads to a lot of reinforcement of toxic gender stereotypes; both in the idea of men as an intrinsically, biologically distrustworthy group, and in the practical reality that they are constantly looking at other women and thinking, "is this person a spy, is this person a man in disguise, is this person feminine enough that I can trust them."

And it's just so omnipresent. The above is a comment by someone who looked at a thread about whether or not transgender communities reinforce gender norms, where both sides are reasonably trying to be compassionate, and they could have tried to present a picture of terfs as anything other than what I described them as above, they could have tried to dispute my characterization of gender critical communities -- but they just couldn't help themselves, they couldn't stop themselves from jumping into the conversation and claiming out of nowhere that transgender people all have "a rapist mindset."

So yeah, if you're gender non-conforming, or you don't like gender stereotypes, or you're pushing away from a socially defined set of rules for gender, unsurprisingly, the communities that accept you as you are are all going to be healthier for your development than the communities that are constantly one "she looks too muscular" take away from calling you a rapist.

And it's helpful that whenever I try to explain this to people and they seem doubtful, a terf will literally register a new account just to jump in and prove my point for me <3

Google is literally being sued right now for, in part, using browsers (both its own and others through browser deals) to privilege it's own services. No, the FTC was not created for the purpose of the Internet, but that is not a thing that anyone said, and I very genuinely believe that you are smart enough to understand that I was talking about the provably false claim that a neutral Internet that doesn't exist to privilege Google is some fantasy that only tech nerds have rather than a repeated principle in multiple current antitrust efforts by multiple governments around the world, including the US.

That being said:

> You keep moving the goal posts.

You're right, and I apologize. We weren't discussing whether or not antitrust was a natural right. That's off-topic, and that's on me. We started this out discussing, in your words:

> Anti competitive behavior is generally perceived to be about doing things that put the company in question in a better position without improving the product.

Which I hope at this point we've established is just straight-up wong, that's just not an accurate evaluation of antitrust. Then of course you went on to say there was no effect, and that if there was an effect it didn't matter because "result = immaterial" (which is also absurd, even the most conservative, limited perspective on antitrust in the government does not say that the results of a company action aren't relevant to antitrust). And then you went on to imply that having a neutral platform on the web isn't something anyone should expect anyway, which... yeah, okay, absurdities aside you're correct that now we're starting to get off topic.

The on-topic response to this as far as I can tell is: I don't think you understand what antitrust is, how it works, or why we have it, and everything you're saying here is absurd.

But it's very easy to get caught up in minute rhetorical debates: part of what's been wild about this conversation has been watching you make even more indefensible claims that you never had to make, just to avoid the appearance of one contradiction. And it's worth resisting that impulse, taking a step back from this and looking at the original questions: was anyone harmed? Is this anticompetitive behavior?

You say no, but you also say that no one should have any expectation of an Internet that exists independently of a single company's monopoly hold over its standards and APIs. So you're not really in a position to know if anyone was harmed because where competition on the Internet is concerned, you appear to reject an entire category of commonly understood harm.

So just taking a step back and looking at these ideas: are people overreacting over Google? Does this cause harm? Was the purpose of this to make people's lives better, or was it to privilege Google's services over competitors? If you believe absurd things about antitrust, competition, corporate intentions, and the Internet itself -- it doesn't really mean much when you say that Google's intentions are good and everyone is over-concerned.

If you tell people not to be concerned about the loss of a neutral, independent Internet, and it turns out you don't believe in a neutral, independent Internet, then... surprise, people aren't going to listen to you.

> How can you consolidate the facts that "man" and "woman" mean absolutely nothing, they don't describe how you act, express or present, but at the same time you can feel like a "man"

We could have a long conversation about this, but the actual useful short answer here is, I don't. I don't call it. Anything.

Because it's not my job to decide for you your gender.

I want to keep on circling back to this point. You are still trying to come up with the rules about who is and isn't a man; what the criteria is that they have to meet. I reject those rules. If, as you are saying, gender impacts nothing and you have no concept of it, then there is no reason not to treat transgender people with respect, to gender them correctly.

If you're arguing that the word "man" and "woman" means nothing, then why are you out here saying that someone is mistakenly calling themselves a man or a woman? (note that if you are arguing that the words man and woman mean genitals or chromosomes and everything else must extend from there, I am going to call that out as biological essentialism, literally hundreds if not thousands of years of feminism exist that talk about the problems with that kind of reduction of male and female experience).

I do have theories about what gender is and how it works and what its limitations as a concept are. They might be right, they might be wrong. But what I really reject is the sexist notion that it is my job to determine for everyone else the limitations and rules of gender, pronouns, presentation, and especially identity.

----

> My language has no word for "gender" even. I don't understand what it means to feel a certain gender.

And I want to keep hammering this point -- then why are you misgendering people? You have no concept of gender... but you're calling men women against their wishes.

I reject the notion that gender needs to be a prescriptive, socially-assigned identity. Not because I don't have my own opinions, but because I reject the sexist notion that this is my decision to make for other people.

I think that wrapped up in the need to understand why a transgender man or a transgender woman knows they are a man or a woman, is this instinct that has been hammered into all of us by society that people have to prove their gender to you. But they don't. It can be really interesting to talk about the why, and if you go into trans spaces where people feel really safe, they do talk about the why.

But the "why" is academic. The practical side is, "I don't have to prove to you that I am who I am. You are not in charge of my identity."

----

> You make it sound like the entire purpose of the trans movement is controlling what terms other people use for you

To expand on the above, the entire point of the trans movement is social and legal rights. The point of the trans movement is equality for trans people.

Trans people themselves are not a movement, they're simply people who exist who have a gender identity (like many cis people who also have a gender identity and will also be very offended if you misgender them). The transgender movement is a response to oppression of transgender people, that's all that it is. It is not a demand that you think about gender in a certain way, it is a demand that groups like the GOP stop trying to oppress transgender people, drive them out of public society, and remove their bodily and social autonomy.

It is a small thing, but people respecting you enough to use the gender that you identify as when they refer to you is, I think, a pretty straightforward ask. People act like this is really weird, but try misgendering cisgender people for a day and see how mad they get. In this comment section you're seeing people get mad about the term cisgender. So let's not act like the transgender community has all of the fragile people here.

Again, this respect boils down to: do you feel like you're in charge of everyone's gender? Do you feel like their identity is your decision to make? Do you feel like their pronouns, their appearance, how they go through social spaces is your decision based on your criteria, or do you respect their understanding of their own identity?

----

> So gender is literally just a word, a combination of letters, nothing else. Why use the terms "man" and "woman"? Why not "sdia" and "sdp[asd", seeing as all these terms are the same? There's no qualities or requirements attached to them.

Right here you're kind of close to vocalizing something very important. I would not say that gender means nothing, but I would say that (I personally believe) it is a social construct. And the question I ask is: if gender doesn't ultimately physically mean anything, if it is a set of categories that are socially defined, then why not play with it? What natural law or moral code is being violated by playing in that space, changing it up, exploring it, bending it, even rejecting it? The space is a social construct, we can do with it what we want.

And so there are transgender people who identify as agender and who are totally neutral on the concept. Some who are nonbinary. We have transgender people who are nongender who reject the notion of gender entirely (and not in the weak 'gender-critical' way where terfs are still very much embracing gender, just tying it harder to biology).

There are transgender people who go by "it". There are transgender people who use meta-pronouns. There are gender-fluid people.

And you might think that's silly, but it does have a really cool effect: if you're a self-conscious girl or boy who feels weird about gender norms and feels like society is constantly telling you that you need to act a certain way because you do or don't have a penis -- suddenly there's this community that could not give a darn about that. They aren't going to tell you that you have to act a certain way to be a man, they aren't going to tell you that you can't wear a dress, they aren't even going to tell you that you have to call yourself a man or a woman.

The cool thing about stripping away both the social rules and all of the "no, you don't understand yourself, you're just confused, let us tell you what you are" talk -- the cool thing is that when you strip that away, what you're left with is authentic, unburdened, honest expression. The kind of authenticity that doesn't require you to constantly prove your identity or perform for other people. You end up with a community that just... accepts you.

And I think that's a wildly positive thing if we're actually trying to push past gender stereotypes and to question the toxic patriarchal norms that society drills into our heads day after day about what manhood and womanhood mean. Maybe you think that agender people are silly. Or if you don't have an internal concept of gender, maybe it's the opposite and you think that agender or nongender people are the only non-silly ones! But it doesn't matter where you fall on that, these spaces are really positive grounds for people to question gender and to question their relationship with gender. Not only do I not see the harm, I see the benefits.

And then I look over at the gender-critical and the terf side and I see... bathroom bills, and people snorting about how they can "always tell", and book bannings, and denial of bodily agency even for transgender adults, and concern-trolling about fertility, and all of this toxic stuff that is so weirdly common in terf circles -- all bundled up into this general prescriptivism around manhood and womanhood that is so clearly not helping people or moving forward any kind of serious conversation about how a social construct impacts our lives and how we should react to it.

It doesn't mean anything to say that you're rejecting gender if you don't have the actions to back it up -- but the transgender community actually has the actions to back it up.

> There is no contract, except in your head.

I... what? Today I learned that the Federal Trade Commission is a figment of my imagination.

I'm sorry, your argument has devolved to the point where you're now saying that Chrome privileging Google sites isn't anticompetitive behavior because antitrust isn't a natural law? I can't believe I have to say this, but that's not the standard that the FTC or courts use.

> All you've done is swap "men must be masculine" for "anyone masculine is a man".

No, very literally the opposite of that. I'm saying if someone calls themselves a man, I believe them. I don't care if they wear dresses or slacks, I don't care if they're muscular, I care what they tell me their identity is, because it's not my job to decide other people's gender. I'm not the gender police.

This is what's great about queer communities and why they tend to be so accepting of non-gender-conforming expressions. Because their criteria for gender isn't what your chromosomes are, or how you dress, or how you act, or what your presentation is, or what stereotypes you fit into -- their criteria is asking you your gender.

And it turns out that's a really supportive environment to be in if you're a man or a woman or any other gender identity and you aren't in total alignment with social expectations of that gender. It turns out that having people ask what your gender is and just saying "okay" regardless of how you present - is pretty great and goes a long way towards removing the pressure to present in a specific way or live up to social expectations for that gender.

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> A woman calling herself a man because she feels she has masculine qualities is exactly the sort of sexist rubbish we should be challenging and rejecting.

I love the gall of repeatedly misgendering trans people against their wishes, and then acting like you're defending their gender expression by doing that. If a man calls himself a man, just hecking believe them. You deciding for someone else what their gender is is not feminism, it's sexist prescriptivism. You looking at someone who tells you they're a man and saying, "well, you just feel that way because etc etc..." is not you breaking out of gender norms, it is you putting people into a box based on your personal criteria for what makes a man or a woman. It is you denying them agency to identify outside of that box.

That's not progressive, you're not helping them. You're imposing your social criteria for gender onto them, very openly against their wishes -- it is a denial of their agency. But oh of course, they don't know what they want, right? They're just confused, right? You can't trust them to know what their gender identity is, you have to treat them like children and talk about how they're being pressured into whatever decisions they're making. /s

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> What? This has nothing at all to do with what I'm saying. Have I demanded anyone open their underwear for inspection?

I'm curious, when you say that a "woman" calls themselves a "man" -- what criteria are you using to decide for them what their gender is? I mean, you're saying they're wrong. You're saying they're not men, so you must have some kind of test or standard that you're using to determine for them what their gender is, since you're so confident that they're wrong about themselves.

Is that test perhaps... what their chromosomes are? What genitalia they were born with? What's in their pants?

You can say you don't care what's in their pants, but you obviously do or else you wouldn't be misgendering them. You have a test you're using for whether they're a man or a woman, a test that they're not measuring up to, and I can pretty confidently guess that test is biological.

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Look, in the interest of being charitable here and trying to build bridges, I want to at least take the chance that you're saying all of this because you genuinely just don't understand how transgender identity works. Earlier, you said:

> this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men. And that if a woman does that too, then she's a man.

If transgender identities worked that way, it would be toxic and sexist. Calling someone a woman because they act in a certain way or wear dresses, or calling someone a man because they like football -- all of that would be extremely sexist.

To be very, very clear, transgender communities don't do that.

Transgender communities do not impose gender on anyone, your gender expression and presentation are not your gender identity. If you are a transgender man and you are still in the closet, and you act in a traditionally feminine way to everyone around you, transgender communities will... ask you what you want them to refer to you as.

There is no imposition here or expectation that you act in a stereotypical way. Trans theory rejects the notion that other people get to decide for you what your gender is -- regardless of what you wear, how you act, or how you think. If you're saying all of this because you legitimately believed that transgender people were going around saying, "sorry, but you wear a dress, that makes you a woman", the really good news is that nobody does that. You can be a man and wear a dress and act "feminine" however society defines "feminine", and you can still use he/him pronouns and you will be welcome in trans communities as a man. Trans communities are extremely supportive of this, this is not a group of people running around saying "if you act too feminine then you're a girl now, sorry we're just deciding that for you."

The only people who are deciding for you whether you're a man or a woman based on their own criteria -- are terfs and gender-critical movements.

"Google should not use a near-monopoly position in the browser to privilege it's own sites and services" is a very simple standard, and this really is not a complex case.

It only becomes complicated if you start trying to rephrase a simple principle as: "Google shouldn't privilege their sites unless they mean well, and then the result is immaterial, but no wait actually I didn't mean immaterial, I meant minimal, and anyway it's not like Zoom isn't still popular so-"

Or... Google could also just not ship invisible extensions as part of Chromium's build process that privilege Google-owned services with extra API access in direct contradiction to the principles of an independent Internet. Because the effect of casually breaking that contract isn't minimal. It does actually matter that the web be a neutral platform. If businesses expect that Google can get away with privileging Google platforms in the core browser, that perception and allowance of interference degrades the entire Internet as a commercial platform - and of course emboldens Google to go even further in the future.

These men's internal gender identity is masculine. That's why they are calling themselves men.

This comment is actually kind of a really good example of what I was explaining up above. It's a very terf kind of thing to look at a comment saying "gender is complicated and individual and doesn't fit into a box and transgender communities understand that" and to immediately say, "gender does fit into a box, it's whether or not you have a penis, and if you don't have one then you're just 'pretending' to be a man."

And then to somehow claim that reducing and denigrating the experience of both manhood and womenhood to pure biology in this way is somehow "feminist."

The entire terf experience is looking at transgender people who are engaging with gender identity and gender expression in thoughtful, sophisticated, multi-faceted ways and saying, "haha, they're men, look they have an adams apple." Because there's nothing more feminist than critiquing people's bodies, apparently. /s

And it really just gets across why the "transgender people are the real sexists" argument is so ridiculous in the context of how these interactions play out in the real world. One group (the trans community) affirms your gender no matter how you express it, and the other group (the terf community) constantly demands to see what's in your pants and yells at anyone who looks masculine while wearing a dress. It's kind of obvious which group is reinforcing toxic gender norms.

> as this implies that men need to behave in a certain way, present in a certain way, think in a certain way to be considered men.

This gets brought up sometimes in terf talking points, but as a practical reality, it's nonsense. Every queer community I've interacted with has always been great about accepting gender non-conformity. The separation of "passing" from gender identity is an important part of recognizing that gender expression within a society is a social construct for good and for ill, and that a large part of gender presentation is play-acting in the way that society expects a man/woman to act.

"My gender is not how I act/present, it's what I am" is a common refrain in queer communities, as is the idea that you don't have to pass to be a gender, as is the idea that gender identity persists even when someone is in the closet.

In contrast, "we can always tell" is the 'gender-critical' talking point. To be very clear: it is not transgender people harassing butch lesbians for using women's bathrooms. It is the terfs doing that crap.

They phrase it as "my gender isn't whether or not I like pink" but in practice terf ideology usually ends up descending into biological essentialism and an omnipresent suspicion over whether or not women are "feminine" enough. In this very comment section, take a look at who is arguing that biological differences are sufficient to explain demographic differences and gender biases within LLMs. Hint: it's not the trans community :)