[[[ Sorry about the butchered formatting on the last post. At least, it looks butchered in the web archive. Here's a copy with hopefully better formatting if the first was really received with that terrible formatting by other clients. ]]]
This list sadly seems to be used for little more than the occasional troll post every now and then nowadays, but I have an actually serious article to share. It is, nevertheless, about controversial topics that are a favorite of some trolls. Free Software and the New Sexism or Why Codes of Conduct are a total failure in addressing misogyny https://blogs.feministwiki.org/taylan/2023/08/26/free-software-and-the-new-sexism/ No, this is not a: - Cliche-filled "political correctness gone too far" rant - Conspiracy theory about Evil Feminists doing "misandry" - A call for free speech absolutism - etc. (Sorry to disappoint if you expected something along those lines!) I genuinely care about sexism. The commonly recognized kind, that targets women. For nearly 10 years now I've also been following very closely the conflict between feminists and the transgender movement, mostly siding with the feminists. Free Software is, as we all know, very male and white. Sometimes this apparently led to communities becoming less-than-ideal in climate for people who are not male and/or white. In recent years, some have tried to curb bad behavior in various communities by deploying "Code of Conduct" documents with good intentions at heart. These codes of conduct, too, were written by people who are male and white for the most part. And it really shows itself in the way they're written and enforced. The most popular CoC, now adopted even by Linux (the kernel), is written by a male person who identifies as a woman. They have correspondingly strong opinions on the aforementioned conflict between feminist and transgender views. Further, many free software projects are so extremely male-dominant that you actually have more active contributors who are transwomen than who are women as in born female. (I don't have actual statistics to prove this, but I'm pretty sure it's accurate.) This leads to a situation where certain feminist positions are immediately branded as "transphobic" and censored. (It doesn't help that many women, as in female humans, join in on the knee-jerk reaction, and say that any feminism not 100% supportive of the transgender movement must be "fake," when in fact some of the most renowned life- long feminist activists like Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, or Alice Schwarzer to name only a few, agree with these criticisms of the transgender movement.) As an example of such knee-jerk reactions and consequent censorship, please look into the Guix mailing list archives from 2022 February and March and make up your own mind on whether I deserved to be hounded out of that community after I've suggested the CoC should include the word "sex" (as in whether a person is female or male) in the long list of characteristics based on which a person could be facing discrimination. It's quite astonishing to me that this was omitted in the first place. I've also just been suspended from the Fosstodon fediverse server for sharing this article. I also posted it on HackerNews, where it was soon "flagged." (I'm not a regular there and don't know what exactly this "flagging" entails.) I suspect I will be chased off from many more places where I share this, because of this illogical conflation of ideological criticism with "hateful" views. As a result of all this, I cannot in good faith recommend Free Software to most people anymore, especially if they're feminists and don't limit their views to a narrow interpretation of feminism that's pre-approved by liberal men. They'll be chased off the moment a male member of the community (whether trans or considering themselves a "trans ally") brands them as "transphobic" for caring about women's rights in a world that mistreats people solely for being born with a female body. When I say "recommend Free Software" (capitalized), I mean actually getting involved in the communities, instead of just using the software like a consumer product. That may still be better than using proprietary software, but it's gravely limiting and, in my opinion, not what Free Software should strive to be. It's quite tragic, and I'm not very optimistic anymore. I guess this is a final attempt to pledge for more common sense before I completely give up on most Free Software projects and just confine myself to my own hobby projects (that will, of course, still be free software). -- Taylan
