I've watched the situation unfold over the last few weeks at /r/GirlsGoneWired. I'm male, but stay subscribed to try to get a wider perspective on gender issues in tech. I find it illuminating to...
I've watched the situation unfold over the last few weeks at /r/GirlsGoneWired. I'm male, but stay subscribed to try to get a wider perspective on gender issues in tech. I find it illuminating to see just how often women feel overshadowed at work, ignored by peers, and in some cases, even have their work passed off as someone else's.
On this issue though... I feel some of the outrage is misplaced. I get that it sucks that job opportunities intended for women are being offered to men instead, and I'd support changes to help ensure that doesn't happen, but this conference was open to all genders. Men aren't breaking any rules or "crashing the party" by attending. I'm not saying they are right to do so, but some of the vitriol and calls for public shaming I've seen do seem over the top.
If you'd asked me a month ago if I wanted to attend the conference to learn more about gender issues in tech, I'd have jumped at the chance. Now, not so much. It seems my face would have been plastered all over Tick Tock.
While the event was open to all genders and men were welcome to attend, they overstepped the line of allyship into one of crowding-out the group intended to be elevated. From what I've garnered...
Men aren't breaking any rules or "crashing the party" by attending. I'm not saying they are right to do so, but some of the vitriol and calls for public shaming I've seen do seem over the top.
While the event was open to all genders and men were welcome to attend, they overstepped the line of allyship into one of crowding-out the group intended to be elevated. From what I've garnered from the article and the few discussions I saw on the subreddit, this event was meant to highlight women and non-binary individuals. Groups that have been historically overlooked when it comes to recognition and promotion in tech. While there have been strides in these industries to be more inclusive, there is still more work to be done.
As a woman in tech and other dabblings in STEM here's some things I've had to deal with in the past 5 years:
Asked about what I'll do about my significant other if I took an internship far from home.
Got locked in an office by an all-male tech team after completing design work for them and essentially begging for help while they laughed at my struggle.
Had a male dev ask for another male dev to perform knowledge transfer on a development package despite being the only one on the team actively working with it.
Been actively talked over by male developers while attempting to discuss development work and witness other female devs experience the same.
Simply being ignored by male devs when I reached out for help or questions and sometimes having to "buddy" with a more supportive male dev to propose my question.
While I don't agree with some of the more extreme vitriol, there is some validity in women and non-binary folks being simply fed-up. This crowding-out and dismissal plagues us from childhood into college and continues in professional settings. When you experience this literally everywhere in your career and you pay good money to attend an event intended to highlight people like you only to see it overwhelmed by those who potentially act this way, I would be angry too.
Women and non-binary folks are actively loosing their rights in this country on top of facing an economic downturn with massive tech lay offs (the article calls out women have been disproportionately affected by these). Education and strong earning degrees like those in tech have been a boon for women escaping the past of being dependent on men. When you see multiple things that look like an attack on that ability, including being crowding-out in a space intended for them, it makes sense that some will call it out. While allyship with men is necessary and we do need to keep the door open, it is incredibly frustrating to see it abused more often than not. The fact that this has been a perpetual issue with women's spaces (see r/2x getting brigaded or always having to say "not all men" to avoid attacks) just adds more salt to the wound that these men don't want allyship.
Thanks for your sharing your perspective. Your experiences match a lot of what I've read on that subreddit, and I absolutely believe you. I do understand the frustration that many attendees felt...
Thanks for your sharing your perspective. Your experiences match a lot of what I've read on that subreddit, and I absolutely believe you.
I do understand the frustration that many attendees felt crowded out. Their frustration is valid, because as you said, many did pay for tickets specifically in the hopes of finding new opportunities that were intended for women. I've also read a number of comments that some women felt unsafe because the demographics were closer to 50/50 compared to previous years.
I do want to say one thing, which is that even though their frustrations are valid, it doesn't mean they should be taken out on other attendees. Particularly the calls I've seen to "name and shame", and to try to get attending men blacklisted from future events. I think that's a point we both agree on, but I wanted to clarify that was the main drive of my original comment.
It feels like what happened this year was mostly a failing of process. I think it would be appropriate to make changes to the registration steps in future years to ensure that more women are able to participate, particularly in the recruiter signups. I have no problem with limiting the latter to those who identify as women and non-binary, as that is a major feature of the conference.
I also hope there continues to be a place for men in informational sessions, especially because of the kinds of problematic behaviour you describe which should be better understood. I don't know how to best to handle these demographics to maintain a healthy mix, but I think even just improving the messaging of the intent of the conference would help quite a bit.
This is a bit of a blurred line for me. I get naming and shaming isn't exactly kind, but there is an element that I would not want to work with men who abused the registration system to get into...
I do want to say one thing, which is that even though their frustrations are valid, it doesn't mean they should be taken out on other attendees. Particularly the calls I've seen to "name and shame", and to try to get attending men blacklisted from future events.
This is a bit of a blurred line for me. I get naming and shaming isn't exactly kind, but there is an element that I would not want to work with men who abused the registration system to get into the event. Another comment of mine in this thread notes some of the frustrating behavior exhibited by these men that included harassment and shoving.
I absolutely would not tolorate working with someone who did this and should they find themselves in a tech role working with women, they would certainly cause problems for women on their teams. The negative experiences I've had with men with tech is because they've never been held accountable for their actions priorly. In fact, being able to get away with invading a women's event like GHC would only embolden them. I find myself leaning towards the perspective that they should not be rewarded with a job opportunity due to their abhorrent behavior.
It's no hidden secret that there is a lack of women in leadership within tech and this is partly due to them being driven out of the industry as they progress. At a certain point in your career you start encountering men who have been rewarded for this type of behavior and are unwilling to change. I'm personally dealing with this now and repeatedly asking myself why have these men never been held accountable? I can't help but feel that if this type of behavior was addressed way earlier in their professional careers that we wouldn't see such a steep trend of lack of women in leadership.
That’s naming or shaming assholes. Go for it. If you just see someone who “looks” like a man at the event, how exactly do you know they’re “pretending” in some way, and not actually in the target...
I get naming and shaming isn't exactly kind, but there is an element that I would not want to work with men who abused the registration system to get into the event. Another comment of mine in this thread notes some of the frustrating behavior exhibited by these men that included harassment and shoving.
That’s naming or shaming assholes. Go for it. If you just see someone who “looks” like a man at the event, how exactly do you know they’re “pretending” in some way, and not actually in the target demographic?
This type of language was being used by TERFs and far-right talking heads to invalidate the experiences expressed by women and non-binary individuals at GHC. It has been used as a "gotcha" to...
If you just see someone who “looks” like a man at the event, how exactly do you know they’re “pretending” in some way, and not actually in the target demographic?
This type of language was being used by TERFs and far-right talking heads to invalidate the experiences expressed by women and non-binary individuals at GHC. It has been used as a "gotcha" to diminish the need of these spaces and their efforts to be inclusive. There were men who abused the registration system to come into the event; they were welcomed to by allies and not crowd-out those intended to be elevated, but this was not the case. The behavior exhibited by those who potentially abused the system is not behavior that would be expected by someone who was genuinely there.
I think this is wishful thinking. There were some men who flaunted the fact that they were subverting the rules, but the main reason people come in for economic advantage. Sure, you can crack down...
The behavior exhibited by those who potentially abused the system is not behavior that would be expected by someone who was genuinely there.
I think this is wishful thinking. There were some men who flaunted the fact that they were subverting the rules, but the main reason people come in for economic advantage. Sure, you can crack down on the people flaunting it, but that will be of limited affect.
Like you seem to admit, if you are there for the economic advantage, there is no functional way to distinguish between good and bad actors. So there’s nothing you can do about it. And I don’t think, over than to enforce civility rules, which would remove those who are being obnoxious about it, there should be anything done.
I feel really lucky for where I work. I've done a career change into software development, moving within the same company after starting here about 2 years ago and this is the first company I've...
I feel really lucky for where I work.
I've done a career change into software development, moving within the same company after starting here about 2 years ago and this is the first company I've ever worked for (at 38) where I feel equal to the men, though the gender imbalance is similar as I've always worked in very male dominated workplaces (in manufacturing and engineering).
I can't properly articulate what the difference is, but I feel like I'm treated differently. Not just the lack of expectation to do traditional female roles (or clean up after the men and make them coffee even when I didn't drink it myself), but the way I'm spoken to, listened to and involved in discussions, my opinion is given at least as much weight as everyone else, when I have specific expertise it's recognised (instead of considered lower than an inexpert but male opinion). I am never dismissed, and I feel respected in a way I haven't before.
I didn't recognise a lot of the minor everyday sexism prevalent in my old workplaces until I worked somewhere with it apparently absent. It sounds bizarre when you consider how overt it was in some of my previous jobs (I've had two jobs where it was considered acceptable to address me by nicknames relating to my breasts, but in the mid 00's that was considered normal and acceptable office behaviour).
It was student led engineering design team at the University I went too. So no firings or.major repercussions sadly. There's a big push for students to join these design clubs in a way to help...
It was student led engineering design team at the University I went too. So no firings or.major repercussions sadly. There's a big push for students to join these design clubs in a way to help boost your resume for internships and I had a genuine interest in this one. I had previous CAD and 3D modeling experience and offered to help with those roles. I was the only woman on that team, but assumed there shouldn't be any issues because I thought the level of professionalism needed for them would weed out any issues. Boy was I wrong. The office I was working in one evening had a door that would get stuck and essentially locked you in without help from the other side. This wasn't communicated to me and despite being in view of the team, they watched and laughed as I struggled with the door. I had to message the team lead for help and was stuck waiting for him to assist as he drove to campus, despite the rest of the team being there watching this happen. I eventually wedged the door in a certain way where I was able to get out on my own, but decided to leave the team due to the overall feeling of being unwelcomed after that incident.
That atrocious, that makes me so mad you were treated that way. There's like this invisible world out where stuff like this just doesn't happen to me, but I hear it from friends and acquaintances.
That atrocious, that makes me so mad you were treated that way. There's like this invisible world out where stuff like this just doesn't happen to me, but I hear it from friends and acquaintances.
I think you'd still be welcome, just not at the job fair portion. The men didn't crowd the panels or stuff like that, only the part of the event where you could hand your resume to recruiters....
I think you'd still be welcome, just not at the job fair portion. The men didn't crowd the panels or stuff like that, only the part of the event where you could hand your resume to recruiters. They didn't really come to learn or socialize so it stood out they were just using the conference as a chance to get facetime with recruiters from certain companies.
Maybe I'd consider too as a male. But it sounds like we're both coming there with an intent to learn, not to find a job. There's benefits to being an ally that are symbiotic to the cause, but it...
If you'd asked me a month ago if I wanted to attend the conference to learn more about gender issues in tech, I'd have jumped at the chance.
Maybe I'd consider too as a male. But it sounds like we're both coming there with an intent to learn, not to find a job. There's benefits to being an ally that are symbiotic to the cause, but it looks like many here were simply competition.
Dang, this comment section is the most fraught I've seen on here. It seems like a lot of people are talking past each other. There is always this tension I feel around groups intended to highlight...
Exemplary
Dang, this comment section is the most fraught I've seen on here. It seems like a lot of people are talking past each other.
There is always this tension I feel around groups intended to highlight underrepresented groups. I am 100% supportive and want to understand the lived experiences of these groups so that I can advocate and be a better ally. But I know my presence, despite good intentions, could potentially dilute or mute the voices I am present to hear. Especially if there are too many of "me" in the room. Unfortunately my tact has been to just show up inconsistently or rarely and hope that reading and listening to conversations will educate me enough.
My reading of this event I see three distinct groups:
Target demo (D): Women and Non-binary participants
Allies (A): well intentioned men
Antagonists/opportunists (AO): men showing up for self-interested personal advancement and assholes.
The organizers are posed a very difficult task of providing a space for D, accommodating A, and identifying and removing AO. In a perfect world they could force a distribution 0.75 D, 0.25 A. I'm not sure this is feasible due to their federal funding and is confounded by AO's disinterest in playing by the rules.
Now we have a situation where AO and A are over-represented, and people can't distinguish between AO and A. AO needs to be named and shamed. But we cannot distinguish a member of A or D from AO, we can only identify AO membership by outward behavior. These outwardly antagonistic AO should be ousted and named.
Perhaps some sort of invite/nomination/referral scheme would work? Open registration, a trusted participant could provide others with a referral code that would automatically clear for self-identified members of D. Registrants identifying in A would need either a referral or list a trusted participant who could "vouch." Any AO would be declined and any registration using a known AO would be added to the list of known AO. It's complicated but so is the problem of identifying individuals with ulterior motives.
Edit: another thought, I'm not sure on the whole layout, but is there an ability to attend for workshops/seminars but not the job fair aspect? I expect many in group A would be more interested in just attending the former and less inclined to attend the latter.
I think this is likely to be a recurring problem in STEM fields as time goes on and women and LGBTQ movements gain majority support. Women and LGBTQ people are still in the minority in STEM...
I think this is likely to be a recurring problem in STEM fields as time goes on and women and LGBTQ movements gain majority support. Women and LGBTQ people are still in the minority in STEM fields. If say 25% are the demographic aimed to be recognized, and 100% of people in the industry support the recognition and are willing to attend events that accomplish that, then of course 75% of attendees of the event aren't going to be in the targeted demographic.
It's a tricky problem to handle on the other side. Gender is a protected class. You can't exclude men just for being men, especially when they are trying to be allies.
My friends and I ran into a similar issue at college when we formed a chapter of the Women in Engineering subgroup of IEEE. As soon as the greater IEEE section heard about it, men started wanting to join our group. The primary reasons seemed to be: 1) the main IEEE clubroom was too crowded and 2) they wanted a girlfriend. We even had one guy running for president of the club because he thought it would be funny to have a male president in a women's org. (In a shock to nobody, he didn't win). During my time in the group, none of the men who joined lasted long, and they eventually just stopped showing up, which is kind of sad in its own way.
In the years since we graduated, apparently there have been a handful of men join and stick around for the right reasons. I think it's a trend in the right direction and I'm hopeful that the culture shift of being more accepting and supportive continues.
People can make of this what they will, but I have a very similar example from work. I work in IT and my company has a Women at [Company] initiative, and as part of it, they introduced a book club...
People can make of this what they will, but I have a very similar example from work. I work in IT and my company has a Women at [Company] initiative, and as part of it, they introduced a book club that was supposed to focus on female authors and books centred on women.
Cue complaints from the male employees that they want to participate too. They raised enough of a stink that the book club was renamed and the focus was shifted away from women. It's been two years, and not a single male employee has come to join us at any point. I don't think they were being malicious, they just hated the idea of not being able to do something, even though they weren't interested in doing it at all in the first place.
How are the books chosen? If no men are turning up, can't the club just choose books by female authors and focusing on women like the original concept?
How are the books chosen? If no men are turning up, can't the club just choose books by female authors and focusing on women like the original concept?
The Grace Hopper Celebration aims to help women and nonbinary tech workers advance their careers. This year, it was dominated by self-identified men looking for jobs. This is pretty sad. Events...
The Grace Hopper Celebration aims to help women and nonbinary tech workers advance their careers. This year, it was dominated by self-identified men looking for jobs.
This is pretty sad. Events like this aim to solve the pipeline problem--have better balance in the applicant pool with respect to gender. That, to my mind, is a better solution than requiring a balance of hires. (If the applicant pools are balanced and hiring is STILL heavily skewed, then of course that's a problem.)
I'm not entirely sure how to solve the problem of men dominating this space. One possibility would be to make the conference specifically only for women and non-binary individuals. While I'm not entirely comfortable with job events that aim to be exclusionary--the response to "old boy networks" shouldn't be to create an "old queer network" but to make hiring decisions more transparent--we haven't found a great way to do that, so until then focused events like this seem on the up and up.
If they made it exclusionary, they would still have a problem with enforcing the exclusion due to the confounding issue of defining non-binaryness. If gender is a spectrum, then we're all on that spectrum somewhere. And no one is going to be the perfect exemplar of the masculine gender stereotype. So, we're all nonbinary. (Same with "non-conforming.") Meaning that men could still truly claim to be non-binary and game the event. If gender is a binary then then we all get lumped on one pole or the other. And if you go with "gender identity" instead of gender, then whatever someone claims about themselves has to be considered true and you get the situation here--a bunch of dudes who identify as not-dudes when advantageous.
Edited this post to make it clearer that I am not asserting the conference was already exclusionary.
I'm sorry but I can't just let this kind of transphobic rhetoric slide by -- it's the exact same logic used to exclude trans women from using women's restrooms. I did not expect to see this kind...
Exemplary
And if you go with "gender identity" instead of gender, then whatever someone claims about themselves has to be considered true and you get the situation here--a bunch of dudes who identify as not-dudes when advantageous.
I'm sorry but I can't just let this kind of transphobic rhetoric slide by -- it's the exact same logic used to exclude trans women from using women's restrooms. I did not expect to see this kind of rhetoric on Tildes and I don't think it's okay not to call it out. This is fundamentally an argument against ALL transgender identities, and I for one am deeply uncomfortable seeing someone post "gender identity is destroying women's spaces" BS here. Who's the ultimate arbiter of when someone's "really" trans and when someone's one of the "dudes who identify as not-dudes when advantageous"? Do you think there's some objective test that perfectly separates out cis men pretending to be trans from the rest of us?
It's honestly pretty baffling to see the phrase "if you go with 'gender identity' instead of gender" -- what exactly is gender outside of gender identity? Are we talking about the gender listed on someone's ID -- something that's quite difficult for binary trans people to change legally and has no category for nonbinary people at all? Are we talking about how closely someone's presentation adheres to stereotypical gendered expression -- no butches allowed? Obviously neither of those makes sense for this gathering as defined. There is no alternative to "gender identity" here -- there's not some magical invisible thing called "gender" that each attendee possesses that's external to their subjective internal experience of gender.
Also, what this portion of your comment is saying is also just not an accurate reflection of "the situation here" -- the event was "taken over" by "an increase in participation of self-identifying males" (emphasis mine). While the article says some of the attendees lied on their application forms, this article makes it clear that the event doesn't exclude men from the conference, due to a belief that male allies are necessary and federal law prohibiting discrimination due to gender.
Ignoring the federal law portion, I'm not sure what alternative there even would be from a conference like this. Exclude all trans people and check birth certificates at the door? Exclude anyone who looks too butch? There's not really a sensible way to exclude men from this conference OTHER than self-reported gender identity that wouldn't also fuck over a ton of cis women and pretty much every trans woman or nonbinary person.
The nonbinary part of the conference also makes their goal difficult. If gender is a spectrum, then we're all on that spectrum somewhere. And no one is going to be the perfect exemplar of the masculine gender stereotype. So, we're all nonbinary. (Same with "non-conforming.") If gender is a binary then then we all get lumped on one pole or the other.
This is not what "nonbinary" or "gender non-conforming" mean or how those terms are used, even outside the nonbinary community, and I can't tell if you're genuinely inexperienced and uninformed about the topic or if you're being deliberately ignorant here. Being generous and assuming the former, I recommend reading this article from the National Center for Transgender Equality, which explains the basics of the concept.
The concept of gender as a spectrum doesn't entail that to qualify as a man one must be "the perfect exemplar of the masculine gender stereotype". Firstly, how well one conforms to the traditional stereotypes and roles for your gender is orthogonal to one's gender identity. Butch women exist. Drag queens are most often cis men. One's gender identity and one's performance of gender roles can coincide, but they don't have to. Gender non-conforming is often used to describe people (cis or trans) who deliberately reject the traditional gender roles to a more extreme extent than is typical of cis folk with the same gender identity. For example, stone butches or he/him lesbians are gender non-conforming, whether they consider themselves cis or not.
Secondly, gender can be conceived of as a bimodal distribution. Most people (even most trans people) fall in one of the two "peaks", which we call "man" and "woman". This is what we mean when we use the term "the gender binary". The label nonbinary describes people whose gender identity falls outside those two peaks -- all the idea of nonbinary entails is that people whose gender falls outside of those two peaks exist. It doesn't define some hypothetical ideal of each binary gender that you have to fit in order to not be nonbinary the way you suggest in your comment.
I'm not sure of your intentions here. I've tried to be charitable in providing an explanation for you in case you're genuinely just not familiar with queer issues like this. But the way this comment is worded feels very close to a deliberate attempt to take disbelief in the existence and validity of nonbinary gender identities and launder it to Tildes participants under the guise of discussion about this news post. If that's not what you intended, I think it's worth looking at what you wrote and considering why it comes off that way.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I'm very sorry if my post made you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. That was far from my intention. I was definitely unclear in my original post and did make...
I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I'm very sorry if my post made you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. That was far from my intention. I was definitely unclear in my original post and did make some edits, but I'd like to address some specific points you make:
First, re: nonbinary people in women's spaces:
I do not think "gender identity is destroying women's spaces".
I also do not think "there's some objective test that perfectly separates out cis men pretending to be trans from the rest of us"
I do think there is tension between those very two claims: If you want to promote a space for women and nonbinary people, and there is no way to keep cis-men from gaming the system, you invite the sort of problem seen at this conference.
Second, re: gender vs gender-identity:
I follow roughly in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and think that the concept of gender picks out a societal role based on roughly-binary sex distinctions. I think gender identity is a personal political stance based on either dysmorphia or a desire to attack the gender binary--both of which are completely valid. (I put this into a little more detail in another reply above.) I think that conflating gender and gender-identity leads to a lot of confusion and inconsistency, so I try to be careful and distinguish them. The philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper wrote a great piece in Aeon a few years ago that nicely captures some of the tension here.
The upshot is that I very much believe in non-binary identities. But I do want to be very careful about distinguishing those from gender, as I am poltically a gender-eliminativist--I think gender roles are harmful and we should move past them as a society.
My purpose in bringing this up at all in a discussion of this article was to highlight the practical difficulty in delineating a space for women and nonbinary individuals, a goal which I very much think is worthy.
I also believe that gender roles are harmful and we should move past them as a society. I am also non-binary. The article you link by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper is pretty explicitly opposed to the...
The upshot is that I very much believe in non-binary identities. But I do want to be very careful about distinguishing those from gender, as I am poltically a gender-eliminativist--I think gender roles are harmful and we should move past them as a society.
I also believe that gender roles are harmful and we should move past them as a society. I am also non-binary.
The article you link by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper is pretty explicitly opposed to the validity of nonbinary identity. She uses many of the same arguments you made in your initial post about and which I've already responded to as fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of "nonbinary" (and also the concept of what a spectrum is). She pretty much literally says she thinks nonbinary people identify as such just to feel special:
They are for people who aren’t sure what they identify as, but know that they aren’t cisgender. Presumably because they are far too interesting and revolutionary and transgressive for something as ordinary and conventional as cis.
and she parrots the usual TERF bullshit about how afab people are only trans because they want to escape gender roles and how that's actually anti-feminist blablabla:
This desire not to be cis is rational and makes perfect sense, especially if you are female. I too believe my thoughts, feelings, aptitudes and dispositions are far too interesting, well-rounded and complex to simply be a ‘cis woman’. I, too, would like to transcend socially constructed stereotypes about my female body and the assumptions others make about me as a result of it. I, too, would like to be seen as more than just a mother/domestic servant/object of sexual gratification. I, too, would like to be viewed as a human being, a person with a rich and deep inner life of my own, with the potential to be more than what our society currently views as possible for women.
The solution to that, however, is not to call myself agender, to try to slip through the bars of the cage while leaving the rest of the cage intact, and the rest of womankind trapped within it. This is especially so given that you can’t slip through the bars. No amount of calling myself ‘agender’ will stop the world seeing me as a woman, and treating me accordingly. I can introduce myself as agender and insist upon my own set of neo-pronouns when I apply for a job, but it won’t stop the interviewer seeing a potential baby-maker, and giving the position to the less qualified but less encumbered by reproduction male candidate.
This article and the definition it uses for "gender" is very explicitly sex-essentialist. While it doesn't go so far as to explicitly invalidate trans people who experience dysphoria (she's seemingly completely unaware that nonbinary people can also experience dysphoria), it is otherwise saying the exact same bullshit you hear from TERFs who do. Consider this passage:
It’s not a spectrum, because it’s not an innate, internal essence or property. Gender is not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential, and then build our social institutions around that fact. Gender is socially constructed all the way through, an externally imposed hierarchy, with two classes, occupying two value positions: male over female, man over woman, masculinity over femininity.
The truth of the spectrum analogy lies in the fact that conformity to one’s place in the hierarchy, and to the roles it assigns to people, will vary from person to person. Some people will find it relatively easier and more painless to conform to the gender norms associated with their sex, while others find the gender roles associated with their sex so oppressive and limiting that they cannot tolerably live under them, and choose to transition to live in accordance with the opposite gender role.
Is this definition of gender really all that trans-inclusive, even for binary trans people who experience dysphoria? Defining gender as being solely socially constructed and externally imposed does not allow for us to categorize trans women as women or trans men as men, regardless of whether they experience dysphoria. Under this definition, trans men must be viewed as women who find the gender roles associated with womanhood so oppressive and limiting that they cannot live under them. Assuming we avoid dipping into actual TERF rhetoric, vice-versa for trans women. Eliminating any internal component to gender forces us to reject dysphoric binary trans people's experience of gender even under the most trans-inclusive perspective, and of course we've seen plenty of examples of less trans-inclusive ways to view them under such a definition.
Reilly-Cooper constantly frames nonbinary identity the same way TERFs treat all afab trans people -- infantilizing us throughout and talking about us like we're idiotic little girls who jumped on the queer bandwagon to feel special. I suspect that if you asked her what she thinks about amab people who identify is nonbinary that she would say the exact same things that TERFs say about trans women, that they're fakers using the label to deceive people, because she's viewing queerness and gender through the exact same lens as them -- a sex-essentialist perspective that refuses any escape from the categories assigned at birth based on our genitals. I don't believe this is a truly inclusive view of the trans experience. The fact that she includes a little asterisk in there for the "real" trans people who experience dysphoria doesn't change that for me.
Tying into that previous point, this article is also extremely demeaning towards nonbinary people throughout. Certainly far more than it needs to be in order to make its point. She uses the classic silly "tumblr genders" as examples throughout and treats them as though represent the bulk of nonbinary identities. She claims that nonbinary people should not "insist that these cis people have structural advantage and political privilege over you, because they are socially read as the conformist binary people, while nobody really understands just how complex and luminous and multifaceted and unique your gender identity is". Even ignoring my disagreements with her philosophical points, the consistently demeaning tone throughout is at odds with any affirmation of nonbinary identities.
I simply don't see how one could agree with this article and still claim to believe in non-binary identities. Belief that non-binary identities are affectations based on a desire to feel special at worst or a political stance at best isn't belief in what nonbinary people actually believe about themselves and their identities -- it's an explicit rejection thereof.
I don't think you're being charitable to Reilly-Cooper here. Non-binary identities can be inherently political while still being real and valid. Real in this sense: Roughly, to have X as a...
Exemplary
I don't think you're being charitable to Reilly-Cooper here. Non-binary identities can be inherently political while still being real and valid. Real in this sense: Roughly, to have X as a political identity is to believe and assert that X exists and you are X, where X is a product of relations between humans. Race is a classic example--there are no real races of people outside of our social dynamics. But race is still real in a social sense, and we can trace its effects throughout the world. Valid in this sense: the political identity is genuine and not the product of a spurious whim, but something sincerely and deeply felt by the person asserting it.
Defining gender as being solely socially constructed and externally imposed does not allow for us to categorize trans women as women or trans men as men,
That is true, but maybe just a linguistic artifact. For ages, we've used the word 'woman' to mean what we might more precisely call 'cis-woman'. A lot of the discussion around this topic has brought up that there is another politically useful meaning of 'woman' that means 'cis-woman or trans-woman'. So, if we get precise with our terms, the upshot is that it is incorrect to categorize trans-women as cis-women, which seems uncontroversial. The rub is that both sides of this debate want to appropriate the word 'woman' for their preferred definition. Stodgy TERFs should just get on board and use the newer more inclusive meaning, and be precise with 'cis-' and 'trans-' in the few cases where that distinction matters.
I simply don't see how one could agree with this article and still claim to believe in non-binary identities
If one believes that non-binary identities are a valid political identity, then you can have it both ways.
This actually cleared things up a lot for me -- it does seem that a lot of this is indeed down to a difference in semantics between us rather than a practical difference in our beliefs. I don't...
Non-binary identities can be inherently political while still being real and valid. Real in this sense: Roughly, to have X as a political identity is to believe and assert that X exists and you are X, where X is a product of relations between humans. Race is a classic example--there are no real races of people outside of our social dynamics. But race is still real in a social sense, and we can trace its effects throughout the world. Valid in this sense: the political identity is genuine and not the product of a spurious whim, but something sincerely and deeply felt by the person asserting it.
This actually cleared things up a lot for me -- it does seem that a lot of this is indeed down to a difference in semantics between us rather than a practical difference in our beliefs. I don't think I'm being uncharitable to Reilly-Cooper, since I think some of her specific claims and perspective are more fundamentally at odds with my beliefs (and because of the general tone of the piece). But with just our conversation in the picture, I do think that definition of "political identity" makes it clear that our beliefs are much closer together than I previously thought.
I interpreted "political" there in the more narrow way it's used in common parlance and assumed you were equating a non-binary identity with a less fundamental consciously-held political identity, such as a label like "communist". The definition you're using feels like "political" is referring more broadly to the fact that it's regarding a social construct (particularly given your example of race), which is a lot closer to what I believe about gender than I thought.
So, if we get precise with our terms, the upshot is that it is incorrect to categorize trans-women as cis-women, which seems uncontroversial.
Yeah, I understand this to an extent. I think the principle issue here is that use of the vocabulary "woman" and "man" for those more exclusive definitions isn't neutral with regards to trans-inclusivity. Use of "cis" and "trans" as qualifiers has a symmetry to it -- they're both adjectives, entailing membership in a larger category. "A cis woman went to the bathroom" and "A trans woman went to the bathroom" entail "A woman went to the bathroom", much in the same way "A beagle was at the park" and "A husky was at the park" both entail "A dog went to the bathroom". In defining "woman" as synonymous with "cis woman", the implication is that trans women are something totally separate from and unlike women, which is understandably pretty invalidating. After all, the exclusive definition of "woman" straight-up lacks a term that encompasses both cis women and trans women. I think that this makes the more inclusive definition more than just politically useful, but absolutely necessary for trans-inclusive discussion.
I think defining "gender" as solely being societal gender roles based on sex has a similar problem to a lesser degree. By using the broadest possible term, "gender", for only the societally-constructed roles and stereotypes associated with gender. While I think these roles are important, I think there are a number of other valid and interesting concepts associated with gender that are not captured by this definition, and I think using the term "gender" solely for those societally-constructed roles robs us of our ability to talk about how these other concepts interrelate with those roles. By contrast, I think "gender roles" places these roles on equal footing with other parts of human experience that relate to gender, including gender identity, without subordinating those other things to gender roles. I think this use of language is more important outside of philosophical discussions, however, simply because "Their gender identity doesn't change their gender" is not going to be interpreted as "Their gender identity doesn't change the gender roles assigned to them by society" by the vast majority of people, but rather as a repudiation of their gender identity's validity.
Anyway, I do think we still disagree on a fair few details here, but a lot less than I initially thought :D
That isn't how gender labels work though. People identify as man, woman, nonbinary, etc. The existence of non-binary as one of the options doesn't invalidate the identity of binary folks just as...
If gender is a spectrum, then we're all on that spectrum somewhere. And no one is going to be the perfect exemplar of the masculine gender stereotype. So, we're all nonbinary. (Same with "non-conforming.") If gender is a binary then then we all get lumped on one pole or the other. And if you go with "gender identity" instead of gender, then whatever someone claims about themselves has to be considered true and you get the situation here--a bunch of dudes who identify as not-dudes when advantageous.
That isn't how gender labels work though. People identify as man, woman, nonbinary, etc. The existence of non-binary as one of the options doesn't invalidate the identity of binary folks just as the existence of man and woman as categories doesn't eliminate non-binary folks. There are just more boxes.
Also not all of the cis men appear to have lied about their gender. Men were allowed at the conference. Some lied but not all of them.
Also I'm not sure what distracting you're making between "Gender" and "Gender Identity". Those usually mean the same thing.
I'm saying that almost anyone could truly represent themselves as non-binary on a gender label, frustrating the aim of targeting a particular group of people. I don't think so. My understanding of...
I'm saying that almost anyone could truly represent themselves as non-binary on a gender label, frustrating the aim of targeting a particular group of people.
Also I'm not sure what distracting you're making between "Gender" and "Gender Identity". Those usually mean the same thing.
I don't think so. My understanding of gender is something like this:
There is biological sex, which is roughly binary and has something to do with (expected) sex-characteristics post-puberty
There is gender, which is hard binary, and is social expectations based off of sex--biological males are placed in the 'men' gender, putting certain expectations on them. Biological females are placed in the 'women' gender with other roles. Intersex people get crammed uncomfortably into one or the other.
There is gender identity which is a political statement about how you view yourself viz. either sex or gender. There are roughly two camps: (a) People with body dysmorphia who view their bodies' sexual characteristics as "wrong" (similar to anorexic people, or people who believe one of their limbs isn't their own). Such people 'identify' as a different gender as a proxy to get society to treat them as if their sex were different (and thus they were assigned a different gender). (b) People who, for many different reasons, are taking a stance against the gender binary and demanding that society not view them a certain way based on their sex--that is, get rid of gender and let people be people.
This is not how "gender" is typically used as a term, at least not in the modern day. This description is more similar to the concept of "gender roles". The distinction you're making between...
There is gender, which is hard binary, and is social expectations based off of sex--biological males are placed in the 'men' gender, putting certain expectations on them. Biological females are placed in the 'women' gender with other roles. Intersex people get crammed uncomfortably into one or the other.
This is not how "gender" is typically used as a term, at least not in the modern day. This description is more similar to the concept of "gender roles". The distinction you're making between "gender" and "gender identity" is not one that I've really seen made in almost any other discussion on the topic -- I have only seen your definition used among those who deny the existence of "gender identity" at all.
It's also not even the case that gender is strictly binary under this definition, however. It is in modern Western culture, but there are plenty of other cultures who have had a third gender that includes the social expectations and stereotypes that you include in this definition of "gender".
(a) People who are, for many very reasons, are taking a stance against the gender binary and demanding that society not view them a certain way based on their sex--that is, get rid of gender and let people be people
You appear to be conflating three different concepts here -- sociopolitical opposition to the idea of gender roles, sociopolitical opposition to the idea of categorizing people by their gender, and being nonbinary. These are not the same thing, and there are big differences worth noting between them:
Opposition to gender roles, aka "demanding that society not view them a certain way based on their sex" does not equate to rejection of gender categories. Almost all modern feminists would be nonbinary under this definition. Desiring that society not view you in a certain way based on your sex doesn't mean you don't associate yourself with a particular gender, be that the one you assigned at birth or not.
Opposition to categorization by gender at all is a thing, particularly in feminist circles. This point of view is called "gender abolitionism". You will frequently see the phrase "abolish gender" used in queer spaces, so I can understand thinking that gender abolitionism is the same as being nonbinary or gender non-conforming if you're not familiar with queer issues, but it is not the same thing. Gender abolitionism does have some currency in certain queer circles, but it has also been popular among radical feminists, including TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists). TERF gender abolitionists and their anti-trans rhetoric show that one certainly can be a gender abolitionist and still not only not be nonbinary, but be openly hostile to the existence of nonbinary people.
Nonbinary people don't identify as such exclusively because they're "taking a stance against the gender binary". It appears to me like you've reversed the order of causation here. Most nonbinary people do take a stance against the gender binary, but this is a result of their gender identity -- an identity that more often than not is based on subjective internal experiences rather than on their sociopolitical goals with regards to gender roles. Nonbinary is an umbrella term that covers a myriad of different experiences, with the connecting factor being that they fall outside of the traditional categories of "man" and "woman" -- it does not equate to a rejection of gender categories as a concept. There are agender people, who don't feel connected to either binary gender at all and feel they have "no gender", but even they may still well recognize gender as a useful thing for others. There are also plenty of nonbinary people who have gendered experiences. There are also bigender people, genderfluid people, and nonbinary people who feel more aligned with one binary gender than the other. None of these make sense as merely a stance against binary gender roles. It's simply not accurate to frame nonbinary identity as exclusively some conscious act of political activism. To define it that way rejects pretty much every aspect of what nonbinary people claim about themselves and honestly only serves to undermine the validity of nonbinary as a category whatsoever. The only arguments I can see for such a view of nonbinary identity is if you come to the problem with sex-essentialist premises and reject what nonbinary people themselves say on that basis.
Also, I didn't talk about the first of your "two camps" that much, but suffice it to say that nonbinary people can experience dysphoria and get the same HRT and surgeries binary trans people get (my wife and I both fall into this category). Since this often leads to possessing a body that (deliberately) does not conform to either male or female biological sex, I don't think your "two camps" picture accounts for that. It also doesn't seem to account for binary trans people who don't want such treatment or feel the need to physically align their body with the "opposite sex".
Yes, on my usage gender = gender roles. The naked term "gender" is highly conflated, so I would be happy saying there is a distinction between sex, gender roles, and gender identity. My gloss on...
Yes, on my usage gender = gender roles. The naked term "gender" is highly conflated, so I would be happy saying there is a distinction between sex, gender roles, and gender identity.
My gloss on the relation between nonbinaryness and gender abolition isn't too uncommon. I tried to capture the sentiment from people like philosopher Robin Dembroff, who writes:
I consider nonbinary identity to be an unabashedly political identity. It is for anyone who wishes to wield self-understanding in service of dismantling a mandatory, self-reproducing gender system that strictly controls what we can do and be.
To identify as nonbinary is to, among other things, reject gender roles: To say that despite your body's appearance, you do not wish to be lumped into one of these stereotypical groups of societal expectations. Everything you wrote here seems to accord with that view.
You also write:
Nonbinary is an umbrella term that covers a myriad of different experiences, with the connecting factor being that they fall outside of the traditional categories of "man" and "woman"
My point is that the traditional categories of "man" and "woman" are constraining for everyone, and NO ONE falls nicely into those stereotypical roles. Everyone is layered and nuanced. So based off this broad reading of nonbinary, we're all nonbinary.
I am, cards on the table, a gender abolitionist. I really hope I'm not in any way trans-exclusionary. Again, I believe in gender identities, and think they're valid. I suppose in some scifi future where gender roles were eliminated--there were no societal expectations on behavior or appearance based on sex--that would eliminate a lot of the political need for gender identities. But even then there'd still be people with dysphoria (sorry for the constant autocorrect to 'dysmorphia' on that, btw) who would fit that bill.
Anyone can identify as any gender at all. Being non-binary, like I am, means not cleanly feeling like our gender fits into binary boxes. While plenty of other people do. It doesn't just mean...
Exemplary
I'm saying that almost anyone could truly represent themselves as non-binary on a gender label, frustrating the aim of targeting a particular group of people.
Anyone can identify as any gender at all. Being non-binary, like I am, means not cleanly feeling like our gender fits into binary boxes. While plenty of other people do. It doesn't just mean "non-conforming to gender norms in any way." It is self-defined with societal influence.
I don't think so. My understanding of gender is something like this:
There is biological sex, which is roughly binary and has something to do with (expected) sex-characteristics post-puberty
Very roughly binary
There's both chromosomal sex and physical sex which don't have to line up. And there are definitely more than two categories of both. Intersex fits here as well.
>There is gender, which is hard binary, and is social expectations based off of sex--biological males are placed in the 'men' gender, putting certain expectations on them. Biological females are placed in the 'women' gender with other roles. Intersex people get crammed uncomfortably into one or the other.
You're sort of describing "gender assigned at birth" here which is what doctors and society assume is someone's gender based on their perceived physical sex. Many people feel comfortable about their "assigned" gender identity, even if they don't love the gendered expectations on them. A gender identity isn't political, it's just your innate sense of your gender. Everyone has one, including folks who identify as not having one (in that agender is a perfectly valid identity)
>There is gender identity which is a political statement about how you view yourself viz. either sex or gender. There are roughly two camps: (a) People with body dysmorphia who view their bodies' sexual characteristics as "wrong" (similar to anorexic people, or people who believe one of their limbs isn't their own). Such people 'identify' as a different gender as a proxy to get society to treat them as if their sex were different (and thus they were assigned a different gender).
Gender dysphoria is not the same as body dysmorphia. It isn't limited to physical bodies and not everyone who is trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming experiences it. (there's also gender euphoria which is how good it feels to have your gender affirmed, and these aren't only experiences of minority genders)
It's not considered the same clinically as the dysmorphia you're describing and that's why the treatment isn't the same.
(b) People who, for many different reasons, are taking a stance against the gender binary and demanding that society not view them a certain way based on their sex--that is, get rid of gender and let people be people
Many cisgender women don't like being put in a stereotypical gender box, despite being women. Many cisgender men object to societal expectations of manhood. This isn't gender identity, though there may be aspects of gender expression involved. Gender Abolition is not something all folks share.
As someone else noted, I don't know if there's a translation issue at all here but here's a useful set of definitions.
Understanding gender as gender role, I have a hard time understanding this. A gender role doesn't have a feeling. I can wish society viewed me differently--that certain norms and expectations...
Being non-binary, like I am, means not cleanly feeling like our gender fits into binary boxes. While plenty of other people do. It doesn't just mean "non-conforming to gender norms in any way." It is self-defined with societal influence.
Understanding gender as gender role, I have a hard time understanding this. A gender role doesn't have a feeling. I can wish society viewed me differently--that certain norms and expectations weren't placed on me as a result of my sex--and I can feel uncomfortable that this is not happening. Put this way, I think almost anybody when confronted with this definition will, on reflection, identify as nonbinary.
Understanding gender as gender-identity, then this is more along the lines of demanding recognition of existing in a political (qua inter-personal relationship) space that is overlooked. Which, again, I think on reflection most people would want.
These are responses to problems stemming from the gender role binary, which I would love to see abolished. And both of these I view as valid responses attaching to socially-real categories.
But you say:
A gender identity isn't political, it's just your innate sense of your gender
What, then, is gender such that it can be sensed (and yet still be sui generis distinct from body image, which you deny based on your comments about dysmorphia)? And how is it related to the concept we all used to call gender--gender roles? The definitions you linked to are of no help here. That site says that gender identity is:
One’s internal sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or other gender
What are male and female denoting? If it's physical stuff, then nonbinary identity is the same as dysmorphia, which you deny. If it's a gender role, then it is very much a political identity.
And then where do the "other genders" come from, such that one could identify as those? I would have understood those as gender-identities. But we can't do that here because that would be a circular definition: a gender identity is the the gender identity you identify as.
I'm happy to give up the naked term 'gender'. I've identified two conflated ideas that I think it could pick out: gender roles, and gender identity. It seems like you're saying there's a third possible meaning of it, but I don't understand what that is, or how it relates to the other concepts in this category (sex, gender roles, gender identity).
It may be that @mattgif is from some country that has only one word for both "sex" and "gender" and just use one phrase when translating to english (speaking the nativelanguage just translated to...
It may be that @mattgif is from some country that has only one word for both "sex" and "gender" and just use one phrase when translating to english (speaking the nativelanguage just translated to english, if you know what I mean).
I'm also from a country where sex and gender falls under just one word.
I appreciate the thought, but I am a native English speaker. I just have a particular philosophical framework for thinking about sex and gender that informs how I talk about them.
I appreciate the thought, but I am a native English speaker. I just have a particular philosophical framework for thinking about sex and gender that informs how I talk about them.
I've read your other posts here, unfortunately I was working on my reply and thus didn't see the follow ups, but I do think that the issue is that the definitions you're using don't align with the...
I've read your other posts here, unfortunately I was working on my reply and thus didn't see the follow ups, but I do think that the issue is that the definitions you're using don't align with the ones typically used so we have an issue of undefined terms.
Well, typically used by whom? The population at large? Gender activists? Social theorists? Is there some conformity between these groups? My use is informed by philosophical feminist theory in the...
Well, typically used by whom? The population at large? Gender activists? Social theorists? Is there some conformity between these groups?
My use is informed by philosophical feminist theory in the analytic tradition. I find this to be a fairly precise way of denoting concepts. But I'm flexible. If we want to stipulate other meanings of words, fine by me. I just want the underlying concepts to be clear so we can separate linguistic disputes from genuine disagreements.
I don’t think anyone needed to identify as a woman at all to go? The FAQ is offline now, but language about how “all are welcome” seems pretty typical at events like this? Conference organizers...
I don’t think anyone needed to identify as a woman at all to go? The FAQ is offline now, but language about how “all are welcome” seems pretty typical at events like this? Conference organizers take substantial financial risk that the event will fail if not enough people go, so it wouldn’t be in their interest to try to discourage anyone unless they’re sure they’ll sell out.
It sounds like anyone could buy a ticket and a lot of men thought it would be a good idea to go this year. Maybe someone should have interviewed some of them to find out why that happened?
But unless it was coordinated somehow, I doubt anyone going thought that the demographics would turn out like they did. How would they know who else is going? This reminds me of the pile-ons that can happen online when you can’t see who else replied.
I think this shows why sometimes events need to be organized more carefully if you want to get a certain demographic. Apparently, just being advertised as a women’s conference was enough before. Next year maybe they’ll do something different. Maybe have an application process for discount tickets?
Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply that this was exclusionary. I was trying to think through a solution to the problem. The problem is that (1) this conference has the legitimate goal of promoting...
Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply that this was exclusionary. I was trying to think through a solution to the problem. The problem is that (1) this conference has the legitimate goal of promoting specifically women (and some other underrepresented groups), and (2) this goal was frustrated by the overwhelming number of men that showed up.
So, I was wondering how they might solve that problem. One thought would be to change it to be exclusionary. I then presented some of my discomfort with that and a potential problem with enforcing the rules. I definitely could have been clearer here. I wasn't trying to assert they were already excluding people or presenting some attack on gender dynamics.
From my understanding of the article, men were allowed, they just took over and some lied to give themselves more opportunity to show up. (And likely some AMAB non-binary folks got swept up in...
From my understanding of the article, men were allowed, they just took over and some lied to give themselves more opportunity to show up. (And likely some AMAB non-binary folks got swept up in assumptions because they're often ignored.) It seems that the face time with recruiters aspect is what makes this particularly difficult - attending a conference not meant for you is fine in theory but when your presence explicitly takes away opportunities from the target audience this feelsike it crosses from oblivious to deliberately harmful.
It depends on the event and whether the fee is intended to be paid by a company or an individual. I've been to conferences that were about $50 per day, and I've been to ones that were $300 per day.
It depends on the event and whether the fee is intended to be paid by a company or an individual. I've been to conferences that were about $50 per day, and I've been to ones that were $300 per day.
That is a lot. I've been to other tech events with tickets in that ballpark, but they were the types of events that your employer would typically pay for you to attend. I don't know if this would...
That is a lot. I've been to other tech events with tickets in that ballpark, but they were the types of events that your employer would typically pay for you to attend. I don't know if this would fall into that category.
How did they decided that someone is lying about gender identity?
Some of the attendees had lied about their gender identity on their conference registrations, said Cullen White, the chief impact officer with AnitaB.org, the nonprofit that organizes the conference.
How did they decided that someone is lying about gender identity?
From what I have been able to find on the commentary from women and non-binary folks who attended, cis-men gamed the system by selecting they were non-binary and choosing he/him pronouns....
From what I have been able to find on the commentary from women and non-binary folks who attended, cis-men gamed the system by selecting they were non-binary and choosing he/him pronouns. Attendees had lanyards with their preferred pronouns and some of behavior from those with he/him lanyards include:
people with he/him on their lanyards shoving/pushing people
people with he/him on their lanyards throwing resumes at recruiters
people with he/him on their lanyards harassing women. One woman reported an attendee that she identified as a "man" attempting to take a photo of a (woman) recruiter's legs/skirt area
people with he/him on their lanyards making derogatory remarks about the way women at the conference looked.
This was something I caught from the GirlsGoneWired subreddit, but these types of behaviors seem atypical of someone who was genuinely there as non-binary.
You're very question of:
How did they decided that someone is lying about gender identity?
Is actively being used by TERFS and far-right talking heads to invalidate the experiences by those who were genuinely there and the need to call out men who abuse it. Not saying you are actively doing this, but I think it's fair to say this type of "asking questions" is actively used by nefarious actors to wedge their points in.
Women and non-binary folks were the demographics intended to be elevated at this conference and men abused the framework put in place for registration to invalidate that space.
I'm not going to deny that there were cis men attendees who did this (though it seems pretty pointless imo, given that cis men were not excluded from this conference in any way). But the...
cis-men gamed the system by selecting they were non-binary and choosing he/him pronoun
I'm not going to deny that there were cis men attendees who did this (though it seems pretty pointless imo, given that cis men were not excluded from this conference in any way). But the assumption here seems to be that all amab people who claim to be nonbinary and use he/him pronouns are liars.
these types of behaviors seem atypical of someone who was genuinely there as non-binary
I agree that these types of behaviors are unacceptable at such a conference. But this type of behavior would be unacceptable regardless of the person's gender identity. We don't need to interrogate someone's gender identity to kick them out for bad behavior.
Is actively being used by TERFS and far-right talking heads to invalidate the experiences by those who were genuinely there and the need to call out men who abuse it.
I find it interesting that you bring up TERFs here -- it seems strange to me that you think TERFs would want to invalidate these experiences. TERFs have long been saying that all amab people who claim to be trans or nonbinary are just gross men lying to harass women. This plays right into their narrative. They love to call out men for doing exactly what you're claiming they're doing. Asking how you determine whether these people were lying about their gender identity isn't playing into TERF talking points -- if anything it's pointing out that the narrative that cis men are lying about being trans or nonbinary to get into women's spaces IS a TERF talking point.
men abused the framework put in place for registration to invalidate that space.
I agree that it's a shame what happened at this conference. But what exactly is the alternate framework for registration that would have averted this? Cis men were already allowed at this conference anyway. There's no way to "prove" you're nonbinary, so it's not like there was some way of weeding out men who claimed to be nonbinary from real nonbinary people -- plenty of nonbinary people use he/him pronouns regardless of their assigned gender at birth.
I'm not sure how to solve the problem of cis men overwhelming inclusive spaces with numbers in places like tech. That is a much more complex problem. But when it comes to the specific types of bad behavior mentioned in your comment, it seems far more sensible to regulate that behavior regardless of the person's gender. Bad actors are easier to exclude for bad acts.
If you have a group of people who believe very strongly that gender should not be assumed, people will call it out when it appears like this same group is assuming gender. This article says...
You're very question of:
How did they decided that someone is lying about gender identity?
Is actively being used by TERFS and far-right talking heads to invalidate the experiences by those who were genuinely there and the need to call out men who abuse it. Not saying you are actively doing this, but I think it's fair to say this type of "asking questions" is actively used by nefarious actors to wedge their points in.
If you have a group of people who believe very strongly that gender should not be assumed, people will call it out when it appears like this same group is assuming gender. This article says nothing about lanyards.
Edit, because I was thinking about this a bit more: Not all non-binary people use they/them pronouns right? Rebecca Sugar identifies as a queer non-binary person who uses she/her pronouns, who is married to a cis man.
Can you understand why it isn't immediately clear to others why the self identifying non-binary attendees with he/him pronouns are so obviously exploiting a system not intended for them?
I've been told that trans people are actually everywhere and you can't tell who is/isn't trans by their appearance, but somehow simultaneously we can tell that obviously the males at this event were pretending or something?
Would love to hear the common-sense heuristic being applied here because it doesn't sound all that different to what some people consider bigotry.
That’s really a different story, though. Those are the more bro-y types who may be angry that the event exists at all and are thus being dicks to people, but it’s not a difficult issue to kick...
That’s really a different story, though. Those are the more bro-y types who may be angry that the event exists at all and are thus being dicks to people, but it’s not a difficult issue to kick people out for being assholes, regardless of whether or not they’re “pretending” to be nonbinary.
But in the end, CS careers events can be very high stakes because of how potentially lucrative they are. What can you do about people who do not identify as nonbinary, or a woman, who does so for the event, and is razor focused on career optimality - that is, they’re not being dicks to people, they keep up the “act”.
I would say: nothing. There’s nothing that you can do about it that isn’t making a different, worse issue. There’s going to be a lot of people who do not identify as an underrepresented group at grace hopper, they’re going to diminish how much the event is benefiting underrepresented groups, and it is what it is.
There is a solution, expecting men to do better and be more respectful of women and non-binary individuals. Hold them to the accountability that not following through on this will result in them...
I would say: nothing. There’s nothing that you can do about it that isn’t making a different, worse issue.
There is a solution, expecting men to do better and be more respectful of women and non-binary individuals. Hold them to the accountability that not following through on this will result in them not getting a position or being elevated to positions of leadership.
Perpetually giving up is how they get elevated to positions of influence and continue the issues women and non-binary folks face as being the minority in the room. By taking a zero-tolerance approach to this type of behavior you effectively prevent these men from being rewarded for acting in such a way.
That’s not a solution, because it’s not actionable. In terms of personal shame, the reality is that when the reward is a $250k+ job as a newgrad, there’s going to be a lot of people for whom the...
That’s not a solution, because it’s not actionable. In terms of personal shame, the reality is that when the reward is a $250k+ job as a newgrad, there’s going to be a lot of people for whom the benefits just far outweigh their internal shame.
In terms of enforcement, how exactly can you tell who should and shouldn’t be there? Do you have a gender detector? Can you somehow detect if someone is nonbinary, or trans, with nothing but a look? Yes, if they make it blatant it’s blatant, but they’re not going to make it blatant if you start kicking out the bros.
When I experienced a man in one job who continually talked over I and other women during technical discussions, I brought it up to my manager who was also a man. Instead of holding the male dev...
When I experienced a man in one job who continually talked over I and other women during technical discussions, I brought it up to my manager who was also a man. Instead of holding the male dev who was continually doing this accountable, I was Instead asked to make concessions for his behavior and be more understanding. Nothing changed, the problem got worse, and I eventually left the job because it got to be too much. This was a matter of lack of respect and instead of the acting party being held accountable, he continued to be promoted.
I've posted in another comment above in this chain that you responded to listing some of behaviors exhibited by those who abused the registration system. There is an identifiable action that can be connected to the effect of not rewarding them with a job or interview for acting in such a way.
I feel like we’re just talking in circles at this point, so I’ll leave it at this if nothing new comes up, but again, that’s merely eliminating a subset of the issue. Yes, by all means kick out...
I've posted in another comment above in this chain that you responded to listing some of behaviors exhibited by those who abused the registration system. There is an identifiable action that can be connected to the effect of not rewarding them with a job or interview for acting in such a way
I feel like we’re just talking in circles at this point, so I’ll leave it at this if nothing new comes up, but again, that’s merely eliminating a subset of the issue. Yes, by all means kick out the assholes.
You’re not going to stop people who do not normally identify with underrepresented groups attending the event and taking up the finite resources. You cannot stop them, for practical and legal reasons.
Most of the “men” at grace hopper are not there to be protestors or disrupters. They’re there for the cold hard economic benefits it brings.
I'm coming from the perspective that these problems have been tolorated for so long that it leads to them perpetuating in the professional world and driving women away from positions of leadership...
I'm coming from the perspective that these problems have been tolorated for so long that it leads to them perpetuating in the professional world and driving women away from positions of leadership in tech. That if we took a firmer stance against this behavior earlier on in men's careers, that they would never make it to a position where it has a greater blast radius. You're language comes across as if there is nothing we can do to prevent this when in reality if there are ways to hold them accountable. Yes, it's not an easy task and must be carefully thought out, but it is doable. The lack of desire to take on this challenging task signals that women and non-binary individuals are not worth the effort.
Most of the “men” at grace hopper are not there to be protestors or disrupters. They’re there for the cold hard economic benefits it brings.
If this was the truth then there wouldn't be so much of an outcry from those who were meant to be elevated. The event has been held in the past without issue, but this year was a significant change. Women and non-binary folks were also there for the same economic benefits and this event was intended for them to be at the forefront. If these men were really there out of allyship, then they would be aware of the disadvantages women have with attaining such desirable positions and allow them to have the spotlight at an event intended for such.
I mean, yeah, exactly? The reason I talked about being there for economic reasons is that if you’re a bad actor for economic reasons, you’re not going to make a stink and go around yelling about...
Women and non-binary folks were also there for the same economic benefits and this event was intended for them to be at the forefront. If these men were really there out of allyship, then they would be aware of the disadvantages women have with attaining such desirable positions and allow them to have the spotlight at an event intended for such.
I mean, yeah, exactly? The reason I talked about being there for economic reasons is that if you’re a bad actor for economic reasons, you’re not going to make a stink and go around yelling about how you identify as an attack helicopter. You will quietly take up the finite resources that were not intended for you. This is the bigger, and impossible to fix, issue.
To get to brass tacks, consider these hypotheticals.
Person A. They identified as a man their entire life. They are not particularly outspoken as an ally of underrepresented groups. They list themselves as nonbinary on the application. They will quietly attend the event and talk to recruiters and do interviews.
Did they do anything wrong, and is there a way to stop them? I think yes for the first and no for the second. They are taking up limited and finite resources but did not suffer the kind of discrimination that they would have. Also, lying is bad. But there’s nothing that can be done to stop them.
Person B. Chad McChad. They identify as a man their entire life and listed themselves as nonbinary. They attend the event and go around harassing people for entertainment.
Yes, and yes you can stop them, because even besides the claim of being nonbinary they are breaking the rules by being rude to other attendees and hosts.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that person B should be removed and their behavior discouraged.
Do you think person A did something wrong, and do you think there is an actionable way to stop them?
Women and Nonbinary often reads like "women and other people we consider to still be women". It always feels like they're missing the point when they say that.
Women and Nonbinary often reads like "women and other people we consider to still be women". It always feels like they're missing the point when they say that.
I think the sentiment is more "people who don't identify as male". A lot of industries are male-dominated, so it can be challenging for anyone who isn't male to get a foot in the door or find...
I think the sentiment is more "people who don't identify as male". A lot of industries are male-dominated, so it can be challenging for anyone who isn't male to get a foot in the door or find respect. The specific struggles of women and NB folk with this are different, but they're still ultimately dealing with not being part of the "boys' club" so I can get why they'd have shared events for both groups.
This doesn't have anything to do with the actual situation in the article where the people who signed up registered themselves as male in their tickets, that phrase just always brings out the...
This doesn't have anything to do with the actual situation in the article where the people who signed up registered themselves as male in their tickets, that phrase just always brings out the pedantic in me.
I think that may well be the intention, but the insistence that people who registered as nonbinary with he/him pronouns were all for sure cis men faking by certain people associated with the...
I think that may well be the intention, but the insistence that people who registered as nonbinary with he/him pronouns were all for sure cis men faking by certain people associated with the groups (and others in this thread) make me think there was likely not an acceptance on nonbinary people who didn't look sufficiently femme or androgynous at the event.
"which took place in Orlando, Fla." Surprised no one in the intended demographic showed up for the conference held in one of the "safest enviroments" for women and nonbinary folk.
"which took place in Orlando, Fla."
Surprised no one in the intended demographic showed up for the conference held in one of the "safest enviroments" for women and nonbinary folk.
There was a definite question of whether or not this locale would be safe among some potential attendees I know this year, people who went previously but declined this time.
There was a definite question of whether or not this locale would be safe among some potential attendees I know this year, people who went previously but declined this time.
I've watched the situation unfold over the last few weeks at /r/GirlsGoneWired. I'm male, but stay subscribed to try to get a wider perspective on gender issues in tech. I find it illuminating to see just how often women feel overshadowed at work, ignored by peers, and in some cases, even have their work passed off as someone else's.
On this issue though... I feel some of the outrage is misplaced. I get that it sucks that job opportunities intended for women are being offered to men instead, and I'd support changes to help ensure that doesn't happen, but this conference was open to all genders. Men aren't breaking any rules or "crashing the party" by attending. I'm not saying they are right to do so, but some of the vitriol and calls for public shaming I've seen do seem over the top.
If you'd asked me a month ago if I wanted to attend the conference to learn more about gender issues in tech, I'd have jumped at the chance. Now, not so much. It seems my face would have been plastered all over Tick Tock.
While the event was open to all genders and men were welcome to attend, they overstepped the line of allyship into one of crowding-out the group intended to be elevated. From what I've garnered from the article and the few discussions I saw on the subreddit, this event was meant to highlight women and non-binary individuals. Groups that have been historically overlooked when it comes to recognition and promotion in tech. While there have been strides in these industries to be more inclusive, there is still more work to be done.
As a woman in tech and other dabblings in STEM here's some things I've had to deal with in the past 5 years:
While I don't agree with some of the more extreme vitriol, there is some validity in women and non-binary folks being simply fed-up. This crowding-out and dismissal plagues us from childhood into college and continues in professional settings. When you experience this literally everywhere in your career and you pay good money to attend an event intended to highlight people like you only to see it overwhelmed by those who potentially act this way, I would be angry too.
Women and non-binary folks are actively loosing their rights in this country on top of facing an economic downturn with massive tech lay offs (the article calls out women have been disproportionately affected by these). Education and strong earning degrees like those in tech have been a boon for women escaping the past of being dependent on men. When you see multiple things that look like an attack on that ability, including being crowding-out in a space intended for them, it makes sense that some will call it out. While allyship with men is necessary and we do need to keep the door open, it is incredibly frustrating to see it abused more often than not. The fact that this has been a perpetual issue with women's spaces (see r/2x getting brigaded or always having to say "not all men" to avoid attacks) just adds more salt to the wound that these men don't want allyship.
Thanks for your sharing your perspective. Your experiences match a lot of what I've read on that subreddit, and I absolutely believe you.
I do understand the frustration that many attendees felt crowded out. Their frustration is valid, because as you said, many did pay for tickets specifically in the hopes of finding new opportunities that were intended for women. I've also read a number of comments that some women felt unsafe because the demographics were closer to 50/50 compared to previous years.
I do want to say one thing, which is that even though their frustrations are valid, it doesn't mean they should be taken out on other attendees. Particularly the calls I've seen to "name and shame", and to try to get attending men blacklisted from future events. I think that's a point we both agree on, but I wanted to clarify that was the main drive of my original comment.
It feels like what happened this year was mostly a failing of process. I think it would be appropriate to make changes to the registration steps in future years to ensure that more women are able to participate, particularly in the recruiter signups. I have no problem with limiting the latter to those who identify as women and non-binary, as that is a major feature of the conference.
I also hope there continues to be a place for men in informational sessions, especially because of the kinds of problematic behaviour you describe which should be better understood. I don't know how to best to handle these demographics to maintain a healthy mix, but I think even just improving the messaging of the intent of the conference would help quite a bit.
This is a bit of a blurred line for me. I get naming and shaming isn't exactly kind, but there is an element that I would not want to work with men who abused the registration system to get into the event. Another comment of mine in this thread notes some of the frustrating behavior exhibited by these men that included harassment and shoving.
I absolutely would not tolorate working with someone who did this and should they find themselves in a tech role working with women, they would certainly cause problems for women on their teams. The negative experiences I've had with men with tech is because they've never been held accountable for their actions priorly. In fact, being able to get away with invading a women's event like GHC would only embolden them. I find myself leaning towards the perspective that they should not be rewarded with a job opportunity due to their abhorrent behavior.
It's no hidden secret that there is a lack of women in leadership within tech and this is partly due to them being driven out of the industry as they progress. At a certain point in your career you start encountering men who have been rewarded for this type of behavior and are unwilling to change. I'm personally dealing with this now and repeatedly asking myself why have these men never been held accountable? I can't help but feel that if this type of behavior was addressed way earlier in their professional careers that we wouldn't see such a steep trend of lack of women in leadership.
That’s naming or shaming assholes. Go for it. If you just see someone who “looks” like a man at the event, how exactly do you know they’re “pretending” in some way, and not actually in the target demographic?
This type of language was being used by TERFs and far-right talking heads to invalidate the experiences expressed by women and non-binary individuals at GHC. It has been used as a "gotcha" to diminish the need of these spaces and their efforts to be inclusive. There were men who abused the registration system to come into the event; they were welcomed to by allies and not crowd-out those intended to be elevated, but this was not the case. The behavior exhibited by those who potentially abused the system is not behavior that would be expected by someone who was genuinely there.
I think this is wishful thinking. There were some men who flaunted the fact that they were subverting the rules, but the main reason people come in for economic advantage. Sure, you can crack down on the people flaunting it, but that will be of limited affect.
Like you seem to admit, if you are there for the economic advantage, there is no functional way to distinguish between good and bad actors. So there’s nothing you can do about it. And I don’t think, over than to enforce civility rules, which would remove those who are being obnoxious about it, there should be anything done.
I feel really lucky for where I work.
I've done a career change into software development, moving within the same company after starting here about 2 years ago and this is the first company I've ever worked for (at 38) where I feel equal to the men, though the gender imbalance is similar as I've always worked in very male dominated workplaces (in manufacturing and engineering).
I can't properly articulate what the difference is, but I feel like I'm treated differently. Not just the lack of expectation to do traditional female roles (or clean up after the men and make them coffee even when I didn't drink it myself), but the way I'm spoken to, listened to and involved in discussions, my opinion is given at least as much weight as everyone else, when I have specific expertise it's recognised (instead of considered lower than an inexpert but male opinion). I am never dismissed, and I feel respected in a way I haven't before.
I didn't recognise a lot of the minor everyday sexism prevalent in my old workplaces until I worked somewhere with it apparently absent. It sounds bizarre when you consider how overt it was in some of my previous jobs (I've had two jobs where it was considered acceptable to address me by nicknames relating to my breasts, but in the mid 00's that was considered normal and acceptable office behaviour).
Hold up. You were held captive as some kind of “prank”? Were these people immediately fired?
It was student led engineering design team at the University I went too. So no firings or.major repercussions sadly. There's a big push for students to join these design clubs in a way to help boost your resume for internships and I had a genuine interest in this one. I had previous CAD and 3D modeling experience and offered to help with those roles. I was the only woman on that team, but assumed there shouldn't be any issues because I thought the level of professionalism needed for them would weed out any issues. Boy was I wrong. The office I was working in one evening had a door that would get stuck and essentially locked you in without help from the other side. This wasn't communicated to me and despite being in view of the team, they watched and laughed as I struggled with the door. I had to message the team lead for help and was stuck waiting for him to assist as he drove to campus, despite the rest of the team being there watching this happen. I eventually wedged the door in a certain way where I was able to get out on my own, but decided to leave the team due to the overall feeling of being unwelcomed after that incident.
That atrocious, that makes me so mad you were treated that way. There's like this invisible world out where stuff like this just doesn't happen to me, but I hear it from friends and acquaintances.
I think you'd still be welcome, just not at the job fair portion. The men didn't crowd the panels or stuff like that, only the part of the event where you could hand your resume to recruiters. They didn't really come to learn or socialize so it stood out they were just using the conference as a chance to get facetime with recruiters from certain companies.
Maybe I'd consider too as a male. But it sounds like we're both coming there with an intent to learn, not to find a job. There's benefits to being an ally that are symbiotic to the cause, but it looks like many here were simply competition.
Dang, this comment section is the most fraught I've seen on here. It seems like a lot of people are talking past each other.
There is always this tension I feel around groups intended to highlight underrepresented groups. I am 100% supportive and want to understand the lived experiences of these groups so that I can advocate and be a better ally. But I know my presence, despite good intentions, could potentially dilute or mute the voices I am present to hear. Especially if there are too many of "me" in the room. Unfortunately my tact has been to just show up inconsistently or rarely and hope that reading and listening to conversations will educate me enough.
My reading of this event I see three distinct groups:
The organizers are posed a very difficult task of providing a space for D, accommodating A, and identifying and removing AO. In a perfect world they could force a distribution 0.75 D, 0.25 A. I'm not sure this is feasible due to their federal funding and is confounded by AO's disinterest in playing by the rules.
Now we have a situation where AO and A are over-represented, and people can't distinguish between AO and A. AO needs to be named and shamed. But we cannot distinguish a member of A or D from AO, we can only identify AO membership by outward behavior. These outwardly antagonistic AO should be ousted and named.
Perhaps some sort of invite/nomination/referral scheme would work? Open registration, a trusted participant could provide others with a referral code that would automatically clear for self-identified members of D. Registrants identifying in A would need either a referral or list a trusted participant who could "vouch." Any AO would be declined and any registration using a known AO would be added to the list of known AO. It's complicated but so is the problem of identifying individuals with ulterior motives.
Edit: another thought, I'm not sure on the whole layout, but is there an ability to attend for workshops/seminars but not the job fair aspect? I expect many in group A would be more interested in just attending the former and less inclined to attend the latter.
I think this is likely to be a recurring problem in STEM fields as time goes on and women and LGBTQ movements gain majority support. Women and LGBTQ people are still in the minority in STEM fields. If say 25% are the demographic aimed to be recognized, and 100% of people in the industry support the recognition and are willing to attend events that accomplish that, then of course 75% of attendees of the event aren't going to be in the targeted demographic.
It's a tricky problem to handle on the other side. Gender is a protected class. You can't exclude men just for being men, especially when they are trying to be allies.
My friends and I ran into a similar issue at college when we formed a chapter of the Women in Engineering subgroup of IEEE. As soon as the greater IEEE section heard about it, men started wanting to join our group. The primary reasons seemed to be: 1) the main IEEE clubroom was too crowded and 2) they wanted a girlfriend. We even had one guy running for president of the club because he thought it would be funny to have a male president in a women's org. (In a shock to nobody, he didn't win). During my time in the group, none of the men who joined lasted long, and they eventually just stopped showing up, which is kind of sad in its own way.
In the years since we graduated, apparently there have been a handful of men join and stick around for the right reasons. I think it's a trend in the right direction and I'm hopeful that the culture shift of being more accepting and supportive continues.
People can make of this what they will, but I have a very similar example from work. I work in IT and my company has a Women at [Company] initiative, and as part of it, they introduced a book club that was supposed to focus on female authors and books centred on women.
Cue complaints from the male employees that they want to participate too. They raised enough of a stink that the book club was renamed and the focus was shifted away from women. It's been two years, and not a single male employee has come to join us at any point. I don't think they were being malicious, they just hated the idea of not being able to do something, even though they weren't interested in doing it at all in the first place.
How are the books chosen? If no men are turning up, can't the club just choose books by female authors and focusing on women like the original concept?
The Grace Hopper Celebration aims to help women and nonbinary tech workers advance their careers. This year, it was dominated by self-identified men looking for jobs.
This is pretty sad. Events like this aim to solve the pipeline problem--have better balance in the applicant pool with respect to gender. That, to my mind, is a better solution than requiring a balance of hires. (If the applicant pools are balanced and hiring is STILL heavily skewed, then of course that's a problem.)
I'm not entirely sure how to solve the problem of men dominating this space. One possibility would be to make the conference specifically only for women and non-binary individuals. While I'm not entirely comfortable with job events that aim to be exclusionary--the response to "old boy networks" shouldn't be to create an "old queer network" but to make hiring decisions more transparent--we haven't found a great way to do that, so until then focused events like this seem on the up and up.
If they made it exclusionary, they would still have a problem with enforcing the exclusion due to the confounding issue of defining non-binaryness. If gender is a spectrum, then we're all on that spectrum somewhere. And no one is going to be the perfect exemplar of the masculine gender stereotype. So, we're all nonbinary. (Same with "non-conforming.") Meaning that men could still truly claim to be non-binary and game the event. If gender is a binary then then we all get lumped on one pole or the other. And if you go with "gender identity" instead of gender, then whatever someone claims about themselves has to be considered true and you get the situation here--a bunch of dudes who identify as not-dudes when advantageous.
Edited this post to make it clearer that I am not asserting the conference was already exclusionary.
I'm sorry but I can't just let this kind of transphobic rhetoric slide by -- it's the exact same logic used to exclude trans women from using women's restrooms. I did not expect to see this kind of rhetoric on Tildes and I don't think it's okay not to call it out. This is fundamentally an argument against ALL transgender identities, and I for one am deeply uncomfortable seeing someone post "gender identity is destroying women's spaces" BS here. Who's the ultimate arbiter of when someone's "really" trans and when someone's one of the "dudes who identify as not-dudes when advantageous"? Do you think there's some objective test that perfectly separates out cis men pretending to be trans from the rest of us?
It's honestly pretty baffling to see the phrase "if you go with 'gender identity' instead of gender" -- what exactly is gender outside of gender identity? Are we talking about the gender listed on someone's ID -- something that's quite difficult for binary trans people to change legally and has no category for nonbinary people at all? Are we talking about how closely someone's presentation adheres to stereotypical gendered expression -- no butches allowed? Obviously neither of those makes sense for this gathering as defined. There is no alternative to "gender identity" here -- there's not some magical invisible thing called "gender" that each attendee possesses that's external to their subjective internal experience of gender.
Also, what this portion of your comment is saying is also just not an accurate reflection of "the situation here" -- the event was "taken over" by "an increase in participation of self-identifying males" (emphasis mine). While the article says some of the attendees lied on their application forms, this article makes it clear that the event doesn't exclude men from the conference, due to a belief that male allies are necessary and federal law prohibiting discrimination due to gender.
Ignoring the federal law portion, I'm not sure what alternative there even would be from a conference like this. Exclude all trans people and check birth certificates at the door? Exclude anyone who looks too butch? There's not really a sensible way to exclude men from this conference OTHER than self-reported gender identity that wouldn't also fuck over a ton of cis women and pretty much every trans woman or nonbinary person.
This is not what "nonbinary" or "gender non-conforming" mean or how those terms are used, even outside the nonbinary community, and I can't tell if you're genuinely inexperienced and uninformed about the topic or if you're being deliberately ignorant here. Being generous and assuming the former, I recommend reading this article from the National Center for Transgender Equality, which explains the basics of the concept.
The concept of gender as a spectrum doesn't entail that to qualify as a man one must be "the perfect exemplar of the masculine gender stereotype". Firstly, how well one conforms to the traditional stereotypes and roles for your gender is orthogonal to one's gender identity. Butch women exist. Drag queens are most often cis men. One's gender identity and one's performance of gender roles can coincide, but they don't have to. Gender non-conforming is often used to describe people (cis or trans) who deliberately reject the traditional gender roles to a more extreme extent than is typical of cis folk with the same gender identity. For example, stone butches or he/him lesbians are gender non-conforming, whether they consider themselves cis or not.
Secondly, gender can be conceived of as a bimodal distribution. Most people (even most trans people) fall in one of the two "peaks", which we call "man" and "woman". This is what we mean when we use the term "the gender binary". The label nonbinary describes people whose gender identity falls outside those two peaks -- all the idea of nonbinary entails is that people whose gender falls outside of those two peaks exist. It doesn't define some hypothetical ideal of each binary gender that you have to fit in order to not be nonbinary the way you suggest in your comment.
I'm not sure of your intentions here. I've tried to be charitable in providing an explanation for you in case you're genuinely just not familiar with queer issues like this. But the way this comment is worded feels very close to a deliberate attempt to take disbelief in the existence and validity of nonbinary gender identities and launder it to Tildes participants under the guise of discussion about this news post. If that's not what you intended, I think it's worth looking at what you wrote and considering why it comes off that way.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply, and I'm very sorry if my post made you feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. That was far from my intention. I was definitely unclear in my original post and did make some edits, but I'd like to address some specific points you make:
First, re: nonbinary people in women's spaces:
Second, re: gender vs gender-identity:
I follow roughly in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and think that the concept of gender picks out a societal role based on roughly-binary sex distinctions. I think gender identity is a personal political stance based on either dysmorphia or a desire to attack the gender binary--both of which are completely valid. (I put this into a little more detail in another reply above.) I think that conflating gender and gender-identity leads to a lot of confusion and inconsistency, so I try to be careful and distinguish them. The philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper wrote a great piece in Aeon a few years ago that nicely captures some of the tension here.
The upshot is that I very much believe in non-binary identities. But I do want to be very careful about distinguishing those from gender, as I am poltically a gender-eliminativist--I think gender roles are harmful and we should move past them as a society.
My purpose in bringing this up at all in a discussion of this article was to highlight the practical difficulty in delineating a space for women and nonbinary individuals, a goal which I very much think is worthy.
I also believe that gender roles are harmful and we should move past them as a society. I am also non-binary.
The article you link by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper is pretty explicitly opposed to the validity of nonbinary identity. She uses many of the same arguments you made in your initial post about and which I've already responded to as fundamentally misunderstanding the concept of "nonbinary" (and also the concept of what a spectrum is). She pretty much literally says she thinks nonbinary people identify as such just to feel special:
and she parrots the usual TERF bullshit about how afab people are only trans because they want to escape gender roles and how that's actually anti-feminist blablabla:
This article and the definition it uses for "gender" is very explicitly sex-essentialist. While it doesn't go so far as to explicitly invalidate trans people who experience dysphoria (she's seemingly completely unaware that nonbinary people can also experience dysphoria), it is otherwise saying the exact same bullshit you hear from TERFs who do. Consider this passage:
Is this definition of gender really all that trans-inclusive, even for binary trans people who experience dysphoria? Defining gender as being solely socially constructed and externally imposed does not allow for us to categorize trans women as women or trans men as men, regardless of whether they experience dysphoria. Under this definition, trans men must be viewed as women who find the gender roles associated with womanhood so oppressive and limiting that they cannot live under them. Assuming we avoid dipping into actual TERF rhetoric, vice-versa for trans women. Eliminating any internal component to gender forces us to reject dysphoric binary trans people's experience of gender even under the most trans-inclusive perspective, and of course we've seen plenty of examples of less trans-inclusive ways to view them under such a definition.
Reilly-Cooper constantly frames nonbinary identity the same way TERFs treat all afab trans people -- infantilizing us throughout and talking about us like we're idiotic little girls who jumped on the queer bandwagon to feel special. I suspect that if you asked her what she thinks about amab people who identify is nonbinary that she would say the exact same things that TERFs say about trans women, that they're fakers using the label to deceive people, because she's viewing queerness and gender through the exact same lens as them -- a sex-essentialist perspective that refuses any escape from the categories assigned at birth based on our genitals. I don't believe this is a truly inclusive view of the trans experience. The fact that she includes a little asterisk in there for the "real" trans people who experience dysphoria doesn't change that for me.
Tying into that previous point, this article is also extremely demeaning towards nonbinary people throughout. Certainly far more than it needs to be in order to make its point. She uses the classic silly "tumblr genders" as examples throughout and treats them as though represent the bulk of nonbinary identities. She claims that nonbinary people should not "insist that these cis people have structural advantage and political privilege over you, because they are socially read as the conformist binary people, while nobody really understands just how complex and luminous and multifaceted and unique your gender identity is". Even ignoring my disagreements with her philosophical points, the consistently demeaning tone throughout is at odds with any affirmation of nonbinary identities.
I simply don't see how one could agree with this article and still claim to believe in non-binary identities. Belief that non-binary identities are affectations based on a desire to feel special at worst or a political stance at best isn't belief in what nonbinary people actually believe about themselves and their identities -- it's an explicit rejection thereof.
I don't think you're being charitable to Reilly-Cooper here. Non-binary identities can be inherently political while still being real and valid. Real in this sense: Roughly, to have X as a political identity is to believe and assert that X exists and you are X, where X is a product of relations between humans. Race is a classic example--there are no real races of people outside of our social dynamics. But race is still real in a social sense, and we can trace its effects throughout the world. Valid in this sense: the political identity is genuine and not the product of a spurious whim, but something sincerely and deeply felt by the person asserting it.
That is true, but maybe just a linguistic artifact. For ages, we've used the word 'woman' to mean what we might more precisely call 'cis-woman'. A lot of the discussion around this topic has brought up that there is another politically useful meaning of 'woman' that means 'cis-woman or trans-woman'. So, if we get precise with our terms, the upshot is that it is incorrect to categorize trans-women as cis-women, which seems uncontroversial. The rub is that both sides of this debate want to appropriate the word 'woman' for their preferred definition. Stodgy TERFs should just get on board and use the newer more inclusive meaning, and be precise with 'cis-' and 'trans-' in the few cases where that distinction matters.
If one believes that non-binary identities are a valid political identity, then you can have it both ways.
This actually cleared things up a lot for me -- it does seem that a lot of this is indeed down to a difference in semantics between us rather than a practical difference in our beliefs. I don't think I'm being uncharitable to Reilly-Cooper, since I think some of her specific claims and perspective are more fundamentally at odds with my beliefs (and because of the general tone of the piece). But with just our conversation in the picture, I do think that definition of "political identity" makes it clear that our beliefs are much closer together than I previously thought.
I interpreted "political" there in the more narrow way it's used in common parlance and assumed you were equating a non-binary identity with a less fundamental consciously-held political identity, such as a label like "communist". The definition you're using feels like "political" is referring more broadly to the fact that it's regarding a social construct (particularly given your example of race), which is a lot closer to what I believe about gender than I thought.
Yeah, I understand this to an extent. I think the principle issue here is that use of the vocabulary "woman" and "man" for those more exclusive definitions isn't neutral with regards to trans-inclusivity. Use of "cis" and "trans" as qualifiers has a symmetry to it -- they're both adjectives, entailing membership in a larger category. "A cis woman went to the bathroom" and "A trans woman went to the bathroom" entail "A woman went to the bathroom", much in the same way "A beagle was at the park" and "A husky was at the park" both entail "A dog went to the bathroom". In defining "woman" as synonymous with "cis woman", the implication is that trans women are something totally separate from and unlike women, which is understandably pretty invalidating. After all, the exclusive definition of "woman" straight-up lacks a term that encompasses both cis women and trans women. I think that this makes the more inclusive definition more than just politically useful, but absolutely necessary for trans-inclusive discussion.
I think defining "gender" as solely being societal gender roles based on sex has a similar problem to a lesser degree. By using the broadest possible term, "gender", for only the societally-constructed roles and stereotypes associated with gender. While I think these roles are important, I think there are a number of other valid and interesting concepts associated with gender that are not captured by this definition, and I think using the term "gender" solely for those societally-constructed roles robs us of our ability to talk about how these other concepts interrelate with those roles. By contrast, I think "gender roles" places these roles on equal footing with other parts of human experience that relate to gender, including gender identity, without subordinating those other things to gender roles. I think this use of language is more important outside of philosophical discussions, however, simply because "Their gender identity doesn't change their gender" is not going to be interpreted as "Their gender identity doesn't change the gender roles assigned to them by society" by the vast majority of people, but rather as a repudiation of their gender identity's validity.
Anyway, I do think we still disagree on a fair few details here, but a lot less than I initially thought :D
That isn't how gender labels work though. People identify as man, woman, nonbinary, etc. The existence of non-binary as one of the options doesn't invalidate the identity of binary folks just as the existence of man and woman as categories doesn't eliminate non-binary folks. There are just more boxes.
Also not all of the cis men appear to have lied about their gender. Men were allowed at the conference. Some lied but not all of them.
Also I'm not sure what distracting you're making between "Gender" and "Gender Identity". Those usually mean the same thing.
I'm saying that almost anyone could truly represent themselves as non-binary on a gender label, frustrating the aim of targeting a particular group of people.
I don't think so. My understanding of gender is something like this:
This is not how "gender" is typically used as a term, at least not in the modern day. This description is more similar to the concept of "gender roles". The distinction you're making between "gender" and "gender identity" is not one that I've really seen made in almost any other discussion on the topic -- I have only seen your definition used among those who deny the existence of "gender identity" at all.
It's also not even the case that gender is strictly binary under this definition, however. It is in modern Western culture, but there are plenty of other cultures who have had a third gender that includes the social expectations and stereotypes that you include in this definition of "gender".
You appear to be conflating three different concepts here -- sociopolitical opposition to the idea of gender roles, sociopolitical opposition to the idea of categorizing people by their gender, and being nonbinary. These are not the same thing, and there are big differences worth noting between them:
Also, I didn't talk about the first of your "two camps" that much, but suffice it to say that nonbinary people can experience dysphoria and get the same HRT and surgeries binary trans people get (my wife and I both fall into this category). Since this often leads to possessing a body that (deliberately) does not conform to either male or female biological sex, I don't think your "two camps" picture accounts for that. It also doesn't seem to account for binary trans people who don't want such treatment or feel the need to physically align their body with the "opposite sex".
Yes, on my usage gender = gender roles. The naked term "gender" is highly conflated, so I would be happy saying there is a distinction between sex, gender roles, and gender identity.
My gloss on the relation between nonbinaryness and gender abolition isn't too uncommon. I tried to capture the sentiment from people like philosopher Robin Dembroff, who writes:
To identify as nonbinary is to, among other things, reject gender roles: To say that despite your body's appearance, you do not wish to be lumped into one of these stereotypical groups of societal expectations. Everything you wrote here seems to accord with that view.
You also write:
My point is that the traditional categories of "man" and "woman" are constraining for everyone, and NO ONE falls nicely into those stereotypical roles. Everyone is layered and nuanced. So based off this broad reading of nonbinary, we're all nonbinary.
I am, cards on the table, a gender abolitionist. I really hope I'm not in any way trans-exclusionary. Again, I believe in gender identities, and think they're valid. I suppose in some scifi future where gender roles were eliminated--there were no societal expectations on behavior or appearance based on sex--that would eliminate a lot of the political need for gender identities. But even then there'd still be people with dysphoria (sorry for the constant autocorrect to 'dysmorphia' on that, btw) who would fit that bill.
Anyone can identify as any gender at all. Being non-binary, like I am, means not cleanly feeling like our gender fits into binary boxes. While plenty of other people do. It doesn't just mean "non-conforming to gender norms in any way." It is self-defined with societal influence.
Very roughly binary
There's both chromosomal sex and physical sex which don't have to line up. And there are definitely more than two categories of both. Intersex fits here as well.
You're sort of describing "gender assigned at birth" here which is what doctors and society assume is someone's gender based on their perceived physical sex. Many people feel comfortable about their "assigned" gender identity, even if they don't love the gendered expectations on them. A gender identity isn't political, it's just your innate sense of your gender. Everyone has one, including folks who identify as not having one (in that agender is a perfectly valid identity)
Gender dysphoria is not the same as body dysmorphia. It isn't limited to physical bodies and not everyone who is trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming experiences it. (there's also gender euphoria which is how good it feels to have your gender affirmed, and these aren't only experiences of minority genders)
It's not considered the same clinically as the dysmorphia you're describing and that's why the treatment isn't the same.
Many cisgender women don't like being put in a stereotypical gender box, despite being women. Many cisgender men object to societal expectations of manhood. This isn't gender identity, though there may be aspects of gender expression involved. Gender Abolition is not something all folks share.
As someone else noted, I don't know if there's a translation issue at all here but here's a useful set of definitions.
https://transstudent.org/about/definitions/
Understanding gender as gender role, I have a hard time understanding this. A gender role doesn't have a feeling. I can wish society viewed me differently--that certain norms and expectations weren't placed on me as a result of my sex--and I can feel uncomfortable that this is not happening. Put this way, I think almost anybody when confronted with this definition will, on reflection, identify as nonbinary.
Understanding gender as gender-identity, then this is more along the lines of demanding recognition of existing in a political (qua inter-personal relationship) space that is overlooked. Which, again, I think on reflection most people would want.
These are responses to problems stemming from the gender role binary, which I would love to see abolished. And both of these I view as valid responses attaching to socially-real categories.
But you say:
What, then, is gender such that it can be sensed (and yet still be sui generis distinct from body image, which you deny based on your comments about dysmorphia)? And how is it related to the concept we all used to call gender--gender roles? The definitions you linked to are of no help here. That site says that gender identity is:
What are male and female denoting? If it's physical stuff, then nonbinary identity is the same as dysmorphia, which you deny. If it's a gender role, then it is very much a political identity.
And then where do the "other genders" come from, such that one could identify as those? I would have understood those as gender-identities. But we can't do that here because that would be a circular definition: a gender identity is the the gender identity you identify as.
I'm happy to give up the naked term 'gender'. I've identified two conflated ideas that I think it could pick out: gender roles, and gender identity. It seems like you're saying there's a third possible meaning of it, but I don't understand what that is, or how it relates to the other concepts in this category (sex, gender roles, gender identity).
It may be that @mattgif is from some country that has only one word for both "sex" and "gender" and just use one phrase when translating to english (speaking the nativelanguage just translated to english, if you know what I mean).
I'm also from a country where sex and gender falls under just one word.
I appreciate the thought, but I am a native English speaker. I just have a particular philosophical framework for thinking about sex and gender that informs how I talk about them.
I've read your other posts here, unfortunately I was working on my reply and thus didn't see the follow ups, but I do think that the issue is that the definitions you're using don't align with the ones typically used so we have an issue of undefined terms.
Well, typically used by whom? The population at large? Gender activists? Social theorists? Is there some conformity between these groups?
My use is informed by philosophical feminist theory in the analytic tradition. I find this to be a fairly precise way of denoting concepts. But I'm flexible. If we want to stipulate other meanings of words, fine by me. I just want the underlying concepts to be clear so we can separate linguistic disputes from genuine disagreements.
I don’t think anyone needed to identify as a woman at all to go? The FAQ is offline now, but language about how “all are welcome” seems pretty typical at events like this? Conference organizers take substantial financial risk that the event will fail if not enough people go, so it wouldn’t be in their interest to try to discourage anyone unless they’re sure they’ll sell out.
It sounds like anyone could buy a ticket and a lot of men thought it would be a good idea to go this year. Maybe someone should have interviewed some of them to find out why that happened?
But unless it was coordinated somehow, I doubt anyone going thought that the demographics would turn out like they did. How would they know who else is going? This reminds me of the pile-ons that can happen online when you can’t see who else replied.
I think this shows why sometimes events need to be organized more carefully if you want to get a certain demographic. Apparently, just being advertised as a women’s conference was enough before. Next year maybe they’ll do something different. Maybe have an application process for discount tickets?
Absolutely, I didn't mean to imply that this was exclusionary. I was trying to think through a solution to the problem. The problem is that (1) this conference has the legitimate goal of promoting specifically women (and some other underrepresented groups), and (2) this goal was frustrated by the overwhelming number of men that showed up.
So, I was wondering how they might solve that problem. One thought would be to change it to be exclusionary. I then presented some of my discomfort with that and a potential problem with enforcing the rules. I definitely could have been clearer here. I wasn't trying to assert they were already excluding people or presenting some attack on gender dynamics.
From my understanding of the article, men were allowed, they just took over and some lied to give themselves more opportunity to show up. (And likely some AMAB non-binary folks got swept up in assumptions because they're often ignored.) It seems that the face time with recruiters aspect is what makes this particularly difficult - attending a conference not meant for you is fine in theory but when your presence explicitly takes away opportunities from the target audience this feelsike it crosses from oblivious to deliberately harmful.
Whew! I looked on the website and its $200 for a virtual ticket too. I don't know much about these kind of tech events - is this in the ballpark?
It depends on the event and whether the fee is intended to be paid by a company or an individual. I've been to conferences that were about $50 per day, and I've been to ones that were $300 per day.
That is a lot. I've been to other tech events with tickets in that ballpark, but they were the types of events that your employer would typically pay for you to attend. I don't know if this would fall into that category.
Well, this is for students mainly. But most attendees are sponsored or have their ticket prices waived for one reason or another.
Ah, makes sense. Higher prices like this are pretty normal when most attendees are sponsored, ime.
How did they decided that someone is lying about gender identity?
From what I have been able to find on the commentary from women and non-binary folks who attended, cis-men gamed the system by selecting they were non-binary and choosing he/him pronouns. Attendees had lanyards with their preferred pronouns and some of behavior from those with he/him lanyards include:
This was something I caught from the GirlsGoneWired subreddit, but these types of behaviors seem atypical of someone who was genuinely there as non-binary.
You're very question of:
Is actively being used by TERFS and far-right talking heads to invalidate the experiences by those who were genuinely there and the need to call out men who abuse it. Not saying you are actively doing this, but I think it's fair to say this type of "asking questions" is actively used by nefarious actors to wedge their points in.
Women and non-binary folks were the demographics intended to be elevated at this conference and men abused the framework put in place for registration to invalidate that space.
I'm not going to deny that there were cis men attendees who did this (though it seems pretty pointless imo, given that cis men were not excluded from this conference in any way). But the assumption here seems to be that all amab people who claim to be nonbinary and use he/him pronouns are liars.
I agree that these types of behaviors are unacceptable at such a conference. But this type of behavior would be unacceptable regardless of the person's gender identity. We don't need to interrogate someone's gender identity to kick them out for bad behavior.
I find it interesting that you bring up TERFs here -- it seems strange to me that you think TERFs would want to invalidate these experiences. TERFs have long been saying that all amab people who claim to be trans or nonbinary are just gross men lying to harass women. This plays right into their narrative. They love to call out men for doing exactly what you're claiming they're doing. Asking how you determine whether these people were lying about their gender identity isn't playing into TERF talking points -- if anything it's pointing out that the narrative that cis men are lying about being trans or nonbinary to get into women's spaces IS a TERF talking point.
I agree that it's a shame what happened at this conference. But what exactly is the alternate framework for registration that would have averted this? Cis men were already allowed at this conference anyway. There's no way to "prove" you're nonbinary, so it's not like there was some way of weeding out men who claimed to be nonbinary from real nonbinary people -- plenty of nonbinary people use he/him pronouns regardless of their assigned gender at birth.
I'm not sure how to solve the problem of cis men overwhelming inclusive spaces with numbers in places like tech. That is a much more complex problem. But when it comes to the specific types of bad behavior mentioned in your comment, it seems far more sensible to regulate that behavior regardless of the person's gender. Bad actors are easier to exclude for bad acts.
If you have a group of people who believe very strongly that gender should not be assumed, people will call it out when it appears like this same group is assuming gender. This article says nothing about lanyards.
Edit, because I was thinking about this a bit more: Not all non-binary people use they/them pronouns right? Rebecca Sugar identifies as a queer non-binary person who uses she/her pronouns, who is married to a cis man.
Can you understand why it isn't immediately clear to others why the self identifying non-binary attendees with he/him pronouns are so obviously exploiting a system not intended for them?
I've been told that trans people are actually everywhere and you can't tell who is/isn't trans by their appearance, but somehow simultaneously we can tell that obviously the males at this event were pretending or something?
Would love to hear the common-sense heuristic being applied here because it doesn't sound all that different to what some people consider bigotry.
That’s really a different story, though. Those are the more bro-y types who may be angry that the event exists at all and are thus being dicks to people, but it’s not a difficult issue to kick people out for being assholes, regardless of whether or not they’re “pretending” to be nonbinary.
But in the end, CS careers events can be very high stakes because of how potentially lucrative they are. What can you do about people who do not identify as nonbinary, or a woman, who does so for the event, and is razor focused on career optimality - that is, they’re not being dicks to people, they keep up the “act”.
I would say: nothing. There’s nothing that you can do about it that isn’t making a different, worse issue. There’s going to be a lot of people who do not identify as an underrepresented group at grace hopper, they’re going to diminish how much the event is benefiting underrepresented groups, and it is what it is.
There is a solution, expecting men to do better and be more respectful of women and non-binary individuals. Hold them to the accountability that not following through on this will result in them not getting a position or being elevated to positions of leadership.
Perpetually giving up is how they get elevated to positions of influence and continue the issues women and non-binary folks face as being the minority in the room. By taking a zero-tolerance approach to this type of behavior you effectively prevent these men from being rewarded for acting in such a way.
That’s not a solution, because it’s not actionable. In terms of personal shame, the reality is that when the reward is a $250k+ job as a newgrad, there’s going to be a lot of people for whom the benefits just far outweigh their internal shame.
In terms of enforcement, how exactly can you tell who should and shouldn’t be there? Do you have a gender detector? Can you somehow detect if someone is nonbinary, or trans, with nothing but a look? Yes, if they make it blatant it’s blatant, but they’re not going to make it blatant if you start kicking out the bros.
What is an actionable way to prevent this?
When I experienced a man in one job who continually talked over I and other women during technical discussions, I brought it up to my manager who was also a man. Instead of holding the male dev who was continually doing this accountable, I was Instead asked to make concessions for his behavior and be more understanding. Nothing changed, the problem got worse, and I eventually left the job because it got to be too much. This was a matter of lack of respect and instead of the acting party being held accountable, he continued to be promoted.
I've posted in another comment above in this chain that you responded to listing some of behaviors exhibited by those who abused the registration system. There is an identifiable action that can be connected to the effect of not rewarding them with a job or interview for acting in such a way.
I feel like we’re just talking in circles at this point, so I’ll leave it at this if nothing new comes up, but again, that’s merely eliminating a subset of the issue. Yes, by all means kick out the assholes.
You’re not going to stop people who do not normally identify with underrepresented groups attending the event and taking up the finite resources. You cannot stop them, for practical and legal reasons.
Most of the “men” at grace hopper are not there to be protestors or disrupters. They’re there for the cold hard economic benefits it brings.
I'm coming from the perspective that these problems have been tolorated for so long that it leads to them perpetuating in the professional world and driving women away from positions of leadership in tech. That if we took a firmer stance against this behavior earlier on in men's careers, that they would never make it to a position where it has a greater blast radius. You're language comes across as if there is nothing we can do to prevent this when in reality if there are ways to hold them accountable. Yes, it's not an easy task and must be carefully thought out, but it is doable. The lack of desire to take on this challenging task signals that women and non-binary individuals are not worth the effort.
If this was the truth then there wouldn't be so much of an outcry from those who were meant to be elevated. The event has been held in the past without issue, but this year was a significant change. Women and non-binary folks were also there for the same economic benefits and this event was intended for them to be at the forefront. If these men were really there out of allyship, then they would be aware of the disadvantages women have with attaining such desirable positions and allow them to have the spotlight at an event intended for such.
I mean, yeah, exactly? The reason I talked about being there for economic reasons is that if you’re a bad actor for economic reasons, you’re not going to make a stink and go around yelling about how you identify as an attack helicopter. You will quietly take up the finite resources that were not intended for you. This is the bigger, and impossible to fix, issue.
To get to brass tacks, consider these hypotheticals.
Person A. They identified as a man their entire life. They are not particularly outspoken as an ally of underrepresented groups. They list themselves as nonbinary on the application. They will quietly attend the event and talk to recruiters and do interviews.
Did they do anything wrong, and is there a way to stop them? I think yes for the first and no for the second. They are taking up limited and finite resources but did not suffer the kind of discrimination that they would have. Also, lying is bad. But there’s nothing that can be done to stop them.
Person B. Chad McChad. They identify as a man their entire life and listed themselves as nonbinary. They attend the event and go around harassing people for entertainment.
Yes, and yes you can stop them, because even besides the claim of being nonbinary they are breaking the rules by being rude to other attendees and hosts.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that person B should be removed and their behavior discouraged.
Do you think person A did something wrong, and do you think there is an actionable way to stop them?
I agree with you on the first part, but not on the second part where you mentioned that asking questions is a kind of abusing.
Women and Nonbinary often reads like "women and other people we consider to still be women". It always feels like they're missing the point when they say that.
I think the sentiment is more "people who don't identify as male". A lot of industries are male-dominated, so it can be challenging for anyone who isn't male to get a foot in the door or find respect. The specific struggles of women and NB folk with this are different, but they're still ultimately dealing with not being part of the "boys' club" so I can get why they'd have shared events for both groups.
This doesn't have anything to do with the actual situation in the article where the people who signed up registered themselves as male in their tickets, that phrase just always brings out the pedantic in me.
I assumed there could be NB AMAB people in the pool.
I think that may well be the intention, but the insistence that people who registered as nonbinary with he/him pronouns were all for sure cis men faking by certain people associated with the groups (and others in this thread) make me think there was likely not an acceptance on nonbinary people who didn't look sufficiently femme or androgynous at the event.
"which took place in Orlando, Fla."
Surprised no one in the intended demographic showed up for the conference held in one of the "safest enviroments" for women and nonbinary folk.
There was a definite question of whether or not this locale would be safe among some potential attendees I know this year, people who went previously but declined this time.