There's a reason the Weimar Republic fell so fast. As we walk towards "Weimerica", I believe we are experiencing the similar things we studied about the fall of the Weimar Republic.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
How do you deal with the arbitary actions of authority figures against you for being different? Get a piece of paper from a different authority figure that says actually this is fine.
There is a field in state IDs and US passport files for previous names. It is ostensibly there for maiden names or fraudsters. Countless times it has outed me as a transsexual, and causes me to face harassment from cops or ICE agents.
I'm curious, what are you doing that cops are looking up your information so often? Is this from being pulled over for traffic violations? I'm struggling to think of the last time I had any interaction with someone who wanted to see an ID from me. Maybe I just don't get out often enough ;-)
Bullshit. The comment started with "I'm curious..." I am curious as well, because as I try to be empathetic, it is difficult because I cannot create a scenario in my mind where a cop asks about my gender. So instead of just blowing it off as "$DISPARAGING_WORD_FOR_TRANS's had it coming" or whatever an unsympathetic phrasing would be, I'd rather be sympathetic by asking, "help me out here, how do the difficulties that you face (that I apparently don't) play out?"
But you call that "victim blaming". It's one of the reasons we don't get nice things.
There are a lot of people who want to be the heroes of transsexuals because we are the topic of the moment. They twist words around or exaggerate, like this undue accusation of violence when I described comments/questions/looks and nothing physical. Those people do not speak for me.
That said, there are other people in my situation who have suffered actual violence, not just harsh looks and words.
Actually, it was only once with a cop in recent memory, and yes it was for a traffic violation.
I am a frequent international traveller as well.
In neither circumstance should what the computer has about my previous genitals come into play. I write that I am a transsexual here for simplicity, but I am not "trans". That is not who I am. I am a woman, not a woman with an asterisk.
I think the information the asterisk conveys is important. For example, I don't think trans women should be allowed to compete against cis women in sports on even terms since it is physiologically unfair.
Sounds like moving goalposts, however: If you're talking about a pre-operative trans woman, whose body is still riddled with testosterone, I would agree with you.
It's really only important in the long term for medical reasons. There some some diseases which have genetic factors which your doctor needs to be aware of. Similar to knowing that an adopted child is not natural born from the parents. An inaccurate or incomplete genetic history of a patient can result in misdiagnosis.
You probably don't. Arizona had their version of "papers, please" until it struck down and NYC has/had stop or frisk. Then there's the Constitution free zone around the borders which covers the majority of the country population. You may not be from the US, in which case I can understand the incredulity. In the US however you are at whims of local law enforcement for if your day is going to get fucked/life ended. The only protections against them are _after_ the fact and in recent times only if you are rich or your situation gets viral support from the nation
On the flip side, it would be much easier to change identities if you didn't have to list previous names which would be heavily abused by criminals, etc.
You are both right. If there was a transsexual exception to this field, I just KNOW that some criminals would abuse it, to the detriment of those of us who actually need this protection.
It says under what to not submit:
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Note this is obvious political banter bait - hence I'd argue it falls under the ideological / political battle point.
Thanks, I still can't see the phrase "anything not related to development is off topic" though. If you could highlight where it says that I would be most grateful.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
This isn't related to being a good hacker, but rather it's literally an off topic article that is basically just opening up a bunch of political debate points.
Thanks again, but I still cannot see it. If you could please highlight the section that explicitly states that content must be about development, as per your original comment, that would be fantastic. I'm sure it's right under my nose and I'm just missing it
Maybe you're right and this story can't be discussed civilly here, but if that's the case it would be our own failure and not because the article itself was comprised of ideological or political talking points, which it isn't.
Other commenters: can we try to avoid a pile-on in cases like these? There are some personal barbs here that aren't part of good community behavior.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points.
There's some overlap between hackers and people interested in the history of gender politics and sociology, but I'd say that something like this is closer to an "ideological or political battle or talking point".
I read and enjoyed the article, voted up the submission, etc, but I think that the argument that it's technically off-topic has merit.
Thanks - I read the article and I'm getting downvoted to hell for pointing out the blatantly increasing amount of political articles here.
But seriously, these posts are better suited to reddit than here. I'm not even arguing that this is a bad article or anything, but it's pretty much the definition of off topic imo.
When I say "technically off-topic", I do mean "literally off-topic". I think that based on a reasonable reading of the topic guidelines, the post is off-topic.
Specifically, I think it plays easily into an ideological talking point.
> the implication that articles have to be related to development in some way is false.
I agree. I wasn't trying to imply that something needs to be development-related to be on-topic. "Good hackers" often find things besides development interesting, and I'm not arguing that point.
Arguably this subject is just as interesting as other things (for example timekeeping in calendars) where attempts at computer (or pre-computer) recordkeeeping intersect with human realities.
I mean if you don't think that talking about trans people in the Weimar Republic and how their life was affected by the rise of Nazism is opening yourself up for a political battle or talking point I don't know what is.
Unlike the linked article, your comment actually IS explicitly against the site guidelines, so I maintain my view that you did NOT read them before posting, and are now just trying to come up with an argument retroactively.
> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it."
Second, I think the argument you have come up with is laughable. No, I don't think historical details about the Weimar Republic are actually just talking points for current political fights. If you do, I think that says more about you than about the article.
So if someone were to link an article about how "prostitution and single motherhood rates went way up during the Weimar Republic before the Nazis cracked down on degenerate behavior" that would just be an interesting "historical detail" and would not be off-topic? Or is it only off topic to say things that discredit progressive politics.
It's clear you care about what content appears on HN. HN members help curate the submissions by submitting and upvoting pieces they think are interesting and by flagging those they believe are off-topic. As for the guidelines, they also mention:
> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it."
> "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
> "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users need an identity that others can relate to."
If you think the life experiences of gay/trans people in 1930s Europe aren't remotely related to development then you might want to read a little bit about the life of Alan Turing. While it's a little over-dramatised, the recent movie "the Imitation Game" is a good starting point.
I don't think there's a strong case for an agenda here. This is what the guidelines say:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It seems easy to make an argument that this article might gratify one's intellectual curiosity.
I created an account to comment here on the topicalness of this.
Given many of us on HN work in the field of online identity, this is supremely relevant topic.
As someone who has had acquaintances who transitioned, (one operation, one "asterixed" as another commenter described) and worked with a more than a few non-binary people, identity as experienced, and how it gets implemented by bureaucracies, companies, and the state, is an area where engineering runs up against basic philosophical problems.
One example was a mental health intake assessment that needed to handle patients who would present at different service providers as male or female separately. Given they may or may not provide govt ID that specified a gender, and different drugs and protocols for serving them would apply based on both their eligibility, history and the identity they were last treated under, providing identity to people with dynamic identities is requires non-trivial solutions, with life altering impacts.
Prior art from pre-digital culture for handling dynamic identities is a really big deal. Even as someone of a decidedly unsympathetic political stripe, one would be missing a lot of facts to believe what we now call non-binary gender identities are merely a modern thing.
The association of a changed identity with criminality is more a peculiarity of very recent mentalities than trans identities. I have worked on a variety state identity schemes and candidates for them, mainly steering them away from being used as a way to oppress people.
In non-health environments, the trans case was not a significant use case because we worked on the credentials, treating the legitimacy of identity as something for the customer to decide, but the trans identity use case would actually serve as a useful limit on how deterministic an identity credential or document is.
I get that there is a lot of political stuff around this topic, and talking about it is difficult because of the political consequences for wrongthink, but HN is probably one of the most relevant places to talk about the significance of dynamic identity.
I do not want to make political noise. I have nothing to do with non-binary identities. I do not have much sympathy for those who oscillate between genders. Doing that in the context of medication seems like asking for trouble. Doing that in everyday life is disrespectful to regular people who are just trying their best. My F marker on my ID matches my genitals. I just want to live my quiet life, after being successfully treated for a serious disorder, but those damn old records keep coming up.
One of the things I fought (using PIAs) was automated warrantless police access to certain records because the data would get shared with foreign border agencies as part of data agreements, causing the very headaches you imply.
I got shared role accounts banned across a sector, and per-user database lookup transaction logs added to a solution so that at least the breadcrumbs would exist. It cost a lot, including my own renewal on the contract, but a couple years later it caught some pretty bad actors.
The challenge is that the bad stuff happens to the square pegs first, and tech creates a lot of square pegs. If nobody resists, they apply it generally. Nobody is obligated to be a poster child, and that sucks you have to put up with it.
It can be really hard to get credit/background checks under the new name to work for a couple years after getting a name change. And you sometimes get stuck with having to use new name and old name for the same thing for different reasons with no resolution.
Credit checks would come back as "suspected fraud".
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] thread"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
This relates to this article because it talks about how trans people were intentionally "kept safe".
Now pray tell, why do you think bringing up comparisons between two persecuting nations is so wrong?
The US is not the most oppressive one to sexual minorities.
And there have been thousands of countries throughout history and most of them have persecuted minorities. So out of them why do we pick Weimar?
To me it seems to be a case of cherry picking to support a desired conclusion.
The article is very literally about policies of the Weimar Republic.
But you call that "victim blaming". It's one of the reasons we don't get nice things.
That said, there are other people in my situation who have suffered actual violence, not just harsh looks and words.
Thank you for a more charitable view of the comment to which I replied.
I am a frequent international traveller as well.
In neither circumstance should what the computer has about my previous genitals come into play. I write that I am a transsexual here for simplicity, but I am not "trans". That is not who I am. I am a woman, not a woman with an asterisk.
I think the information the asterisk conveys is important. For example, I don't think trans women should be allowed to compete against cis women in sports on even terms since it is physiologically unfair.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/26/560210230/...
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/golf/emily-nash-golf-tour...
> US teenage girl wins golf tournament but is denied trophy because she's not a boy
More of us handle gender via bureaucracy than handle canine rocket science.
Note this is obvious political banter bait - hence I'd argue it falls under the ideological / political battle point.
This isn't related to being a good hacker, but rather it's literally an off topic article that is basically just opening up a bunch of political debate points.
If you didn't find it interesting, then maybe you're not a good enough hacker?
(Tongue in cheek, but only partially.)
Other commenters: can we try to avoid a pile-on in cases like these? There are some personal barbs here that aren't part of good community behavior.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points.
There's some overlap between hackers and people interested in the history of gender politics and sociology, but I'd say that something like this is closer to an "ideological or political battle or talking point".
I read and enjoyed the article, voted up the submission, etc, but I think that the argument that it's technically off-topic has merit.
But seriously, these posts are better suited to reddit than here. I'm not even arguing that this is a bad article or anything, but it's pretty much the definition of off topic imo.
Specifically, I think it plays easily into an ideological talking point.
> the implication that articles have to be related to development in some way is false.
I agree. I wasn't trying to imply that something needs to be development-related to be on-topic. "Good hackers" often find things besides development interesting, and I'm not arguing that point.
You literally didn't read the site guidelines, did you?
> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it."
Second, I think the argument you have come up with is laughable. No, I don't think historical details about the Weimar Republic are actually just talking points for current political fights. If you do, I think that says more about you than about the article.
> "Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it."
> "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
> "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create them routinely. On HN, users need an identity that others can relate to."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Be a part of the HN community: post constructively, submit good articles, and please under your primary account.
Edit: fixed copy-paste from guidelines
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It seems easy to make an argument that this article might gratify one's intellectual curiosity.
Given many of us on HN work in the field of online identity, this is supremely relevant topic.
As someone who has had acquaintances who transitioned, (one operation, one "asterixed" as another commenter described) and worked with a more than a few non-binary people, identity as experienced, and how it gets implemented by bureaucracies, companies, and the state, is an area where engineering runs up against basic philosophical problems.
One example was a mental health intake assessment that needed to handle patients who would present at different service providers as male or female separately. Given they may or may not provide govt ID that specified a gender, and different drugs and protocols for serving them would apply based on both their eligibility, history and the identity they were last treated under, providing identity to people with dynamic identities is requires non-trivial solutions, with life altering impacts.
Prior art from pre-digital culture for handling dynamic identities is a really big deal. Even as someone of a decidedly unsympathetic political stripe, one would be missing a lot of facts to believe what we now call non-binary gender identities are merely a modern thing.
The association of a changed identity with criminality is more a peculiarity of very recent mentalities than trans identities. I have worked on a variety state identity schemes and candidates for them, mainly steering them away from being used as a way to oppress people.
In non-health environments, the trans case was not a significant use case because we worked on the credentials, treating the legitimacy of identity as something for the customer to decide, but the trans identity use case would actually serve as a useful limit on how deterministic an identity credential or document is.
I get that there is a lot of political stuff around this topic, and talking about it is difficult because of the political consequences for wrongthink, but HN is probably one of the most relevant places to talk about the significance of dynamic identity.
I got shared role accounts banned across a sector, and per-user database lookup transaction logs added to a solution so that at least the breadcrumbs would exist. It cost a lot, including my own renewal on the contract, but a couple years later it caught some pretty bad actors.
The challenge is that the bad stuff happens to the square pegs first, and tech creates a lot of square pegs. If nobody resists, they apply it generally. Nobody is obligated to be a poster child, and that sucks you have to put up with it.
Credit checks would come back as "suspected fraud".