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Notes -
lighthearted cs drama
The grace hopper conference is supposed to be for women and gender minorities. Since they have recruiters there, the job market is tight, and there's no explicit policy against men showing up, men have been showing up. It looks like a lot of people are unhappy about this. The csmajors sub banned discussion of it, but there are still plenty of juicy threads up; in addition to the gender wars, a lot of the guys being international students adds a 'they're taking our jobs' flair to the fire. Since it's basically impossible to gatekeep nonbinary-ness, the challenge for the organizers, if they choose to accept it, is to weed out the men without being accused of being TERFs.
I've watched intersectionals take Liberalism apart limb from limb using its own reasoning against it. I think turnabout is fair play.
White women who don't want brown enbies at their conferences are just reactionary bigots who are on the wrong side of history. Et caetera.
The most salient contradiction in this movement has always been the unholy union between the essentialism required to believe in transsexualism and feminism and gender abolition in general. It's been successfully papered over by appealing to how expensive the signal to become transgender is combined with careful political maneuvering inside of feminist circles, but now queer theory has thoroughly walked the whole thing into a trap.
They've spent years undermining the borders of trans to wrest control of it from the medicalists, and in doing so have made any proper friend enemy distinction impossible. I didn't know what the exploitation of that weakness would look like. I guess I do now.
This breach will probably be plugged, since the exploiters are not organized. But I'm not sure how they'll do it since the only way they can do it without folding to essentialism (which they can no longer) is to require political tests which can always be faked.
This isn't as easy as it seems.
You've argued in other comments this opens up attack vectors. Sure. But with the weight behind intersectionality, as it stands today, the only legitimate attackers are still believers (at least in name). A corrupted institution being overtaken by another that's almost indistinguishable doesn't help anyone that's too low on the victimhood index, it's just boring drama and wasted energy.
There is indeed inertia that makes this particular not a useful actual target and a mere object of study. These weaknesses cannot yet be exploited but they are systematic. And someone eventually will exploit them.
I think that's coming sooner than people think, I can see thermidorian forces slowly coalescing together guided by the path of the repression of the current regime and it's growing reliance on ever harder and more obvious forms of power.
Who knows what's going to happen, but something will. This energy has to go somewhere and all the pressure release valves I can see from here are held shut.
What you're seeing is not the beginnings a Thermidorian counterrevolution but that they believe their ultimate victory is in sight; finally, the boot stomping on a human face forever, and the human face will thank the boot and demand more. That the Grace Hopper Conference is being used to practice employment discrimination and the only objection anyone can come up with is that members of the discriminated-against sex are interfering with this is demonstration that they are right.
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