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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.
Why is that the only way they can do it? Isn't the classic obscenity test - "I know it when I see it" - good enough? Arguably, the current regime is just that with more steps designed to obfuscate it. This ties into my thoughts on your first statement:
which is cromulent enough on its face, but which doesn't account for the defenses that the "intersectionals" (first time I've encountered this term used as a noun to refer to the people - I like it) have built against this very sort of thing. After all, if you master how to exploit a vulnerability, you also often learn how to fix them. In this case, it's just rejecting the concept of "using reasoning or logic to draw conclusions" as an oppressive made-up structure, in favor of "listening to marginalized voices." Which, given the degrees of freedom in determining what a "marginalized voice" is, in the context of some conference discriminating its attendants, is just another version of "I know it when I see it."
It’s easy enough for organizers to implement “I know it when I see it.” It also opens up new attack surfaces. “Live by the sword…”
...Isn't this just reimplementing monarchy with extra steps? The liberal thing is supposed to be figuring out how to run things on rules, but the rules don't work so we get "I know it when I see it", but that just hands power to an "I"; what's the difference between "I know it when I see it" and "‘L’etat c’est moi’"?
I knew there was a reason I didn't trust NrX...
I have been to night clubs where they obviously wanted to limit the number of straight regular white men, but this is in a country where face checks are just not a thing and would really enrage people. So they put an alt black female security at the door who would have a short chat with you at the door asking questions like "what does tolerance mean to you". Unless you really believe all the bromides (or you have an autistic level of cynical knowledge of social justice thinking like me and my friends), it is very difficult to give a fake correct answer.
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