To put the current transgender moral panic in perspective, the Nazis persecuted Hirschfeld in the 30s for doing with surgical technology what we can do with hormones and puberty blockers (and better surgery) today.
Kinda crazy to read this in current context, with the wave of anti-trans and anti-LGBT legislations. We made such a big step forward, and yet...
Early 20th century Berlin sounds like a fun place. And what time to be. Around that time Otto Weininger wrote his Sex and Character, defying sex/gender as a spectrum.
Ah yes, the moral Judeo-Christian values majority, known for their (checks notes) repeated protection of sexual assault perpetrators, particularly against children. Tell me more about the "decadent society" that queer people are causing by daring to exist in public
That's an extremely inaccurate description of HN. When I see those, I always feel like someone needs to respond.
HN is a large public forum. Any such site gets a long tail of comments—every slot on the spectrum gets represented—but absolutely not to the same degree. A minuscule minority of egregious comments does not characterize the community. Not at all.
Perceptions like this are strongly affected by cognitive biases. For example, people are far more likely to notice and remember painful data points than pleasurable ones. Therefore, a handful of (in this case) homophobic comments will make orders of magnitude more of an impression than tons of moderate, favorable, or loving ones. This is the way we're all wired [1], but it unfortunately leads people to highly distorted impressions of the community [2].
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 50.0 ms ] threadNew to me, thanks.
Early 20th century Berlin sounds like a fun place. And what time to be. Around that time Otto Weininger wrote his Sex and Character, defying sex/gender as a spectrum.
HN is a large public forum. Any such site gets a long tail of comments—every slot on the spectrum gets represented—but absolutely not to the same degree. A minuscule minority of egregious comments does not characterize the community. Not at all.
Perceptions like this are strongly affected by cognitive biases. For example, people are far more likely to notice and remember painful data points than pleasurable ones. Therefore, a handful of (in this case) homophobic comments will make orders of magnitude more of an impression than tons of moderate, favorable, or loving ones. This is the way we're all wired [1], but it unfortunately leads people to highly distorted impressions of the community [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
It runs until beginning of September and covers the second part of the 1920s in Berlin.