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Top-level
The CC was primarily adapted from the policy documents of the Geek Feminism wiki, which itself was a project of the Ada Initiative. Those policy docs were written by a dyadic trans man from the Bay Area named Tim Chevalier (aka Monadic, aka fatneckbeardguy on Twitter). Chevalier designed these policy documents to not just enable, but to actively sanction the use of these policies to suppress his political opposition. 1/24 23 comments
If you hunt around on Twitter, you may be able to find Coraline's side of their conversation discussing how the intention of the GF policy, the CC, and the use of the language in them is intended to enable the enforcing of their specific political aims by way of protecting certain classes of people. You won't be able to see Chevalier's side of that chat, he locked his accounts after being fired from Google in 2018. 3/24 There are a number of classes of people that Chevalier wanted to be able to act againt with impunity, but I will limit my comments to the specific prejudice of his which I have direct experience of and which I can explain the full implications of. Strap in, this gets nasty. 4/24 Tim Chevalier is a massive, raging #interphobe. The protected classes of people were specifically devised to prevent #intersex people being protected on account of our intersex variations; which are all physical, genetic variations. The only way for us to be protected is if we accept his position that intersex is under the trans umbrella or that it is a disability. Both of these are wrong. 5/24 The view of intersex-led human rights orgs is that issues of both #trans and #intersex rights fundamentally boil down to matters of #BodilyAutonomy and #SelfDetermination. So intersex people should be free of non-consensual medical interventions, while everyone should be free to choose whatever medical treatment is right for them, including trans people. Chevalier does not share this view. 6/24 Chevalier's position is that everything centres around access to medical treatments. These procedures are either available or they're not; and he views the fight for #intersex human rights as a potential threat to #trans healthcare. Especially the campaigns to end #IntersexGenitalMutilation (#IGM) and other sterilising procedures. 7/24 The GF policies, the CC, and all derivative policies have been intentionally crafted to enforce these prejudices within all the projects and orgs which adopt them or any policy derived from them. As this thread already shows, that includes some quite large projects; such as entire programming languages, like #GoLang and #Python. It also includes #FreeBSD (hi @benno) and the #LinuxKernel. 8/24 My own adverse encounters with this stemmed from direct conflict with Chevalier in the middle of 2016 by way of the Geek Feminism wiki. In that case he used the policy documents he devised to silence my attempt to correct his definition of what #intersex is on that site (which states, amongst other things, that intersex is "under the trans umbrella"). 9/24 One of the tactics used by Chevalier in this conflict, and which Coraline Ehmke has also used in some of her online discussions, is to redefine "biological essentialism" to cover all discussion of physical sex characteristics and thus all discussion of intersex variations. Real biological essentialism is stating things like "men are XY and women are XX" and that example is interphobic because there are intersex variations that fall outside that. 10/24 Chevalier and Ehmke redefine it to cover discussion of any biological trait. In doing so they enable classifying intersex people discussing intersex variations as the same thing. So any discussion of the genetic causes of an intersex variation (bear in mind that many of them are named for the nature of that genetic variation), is now reclassified as biological essentialism and thus transphobic. 11/24 Thus they are both able to twist the actual meaning of biological essentialism to use it as a means to explicitly silence intersex people, whom they see as a threat to trans rights. Mainly as a result of an unfounded fear of the consequences of intersex people obtaining human rights and banning non-consensual medical interventions. 12/24 To use myself as an example, this is a non-exhaustive list of how I am in automatic breach of the GF wiki policies, the CC and all policies derived from them: 1) I am intersex and neither trans nor cis. 13/24 4) My intersex variation is a naturally occurring (cause = pure random chance, BTW, and that's true random, not pseudo-random like in computing) physical, genetic variation. 14/24 6) I do NOT believe that intersex people are inherently transphobic just for existing. https://ihra.org.au/darlington-statement/ 15/24 8) Support for the Darlington Statement is mutually exclusive from the GF wiki policies, the #ContributorCovenant and ALL policies and CoCs derived from them. 16/24 10) I believe that opposing the rights of #intersex people to #BodilyAutonomy is inherently #interphobic. 17/24 12) To reiterate the previous point; I believe that intersex people are deserving of human rights and should not be used as experiments for the benefit of others. 18/24 Every project and organisation, whether commercial or not, which adopts any version of these policies in any capacity has the interphobia baked in. No ifs, buts, or maybes. As a consequence they are all interphobic. Google is particularly egregious with this; having hired both Chevalier and #AdaInitiave co-founder, Mary Gardiner. They've made interphobia part of their culture. 19/24 That said, certain other projects have added worse things. #Drupal added a carefully crafted "Diversity Statement" to complement the CC which makes it impossible to have any contact with the project at all without agreeing to inherently interphobic policies. Thus insulating the project from anyone automatically excluded by the CC. This has also been adopted by the #PythonSoftwareFoundation. 20/24 It's not like no one at the #PSF knew this either. I raised it with @nedbat on IRC a few years ago. He even raised it as an issue in the CC issue tracker on #GitHub at that time. Coraline Ehmke closed the ticket citing, IIRC, "biological essentialism" as the reason for doing so. Still, that didn't stop the PSF adopting the CC with the #Drupal Diversity Statement mod, so they're just as complicit. 22/24 Finally, before circling back, this last part is not directed at anyone explicitly tagged anywhere in this thread, but to people who come across it later (which is likely with all the hashtags used and the thread should be seen and boosted): I have a hard line, zero tolerance for interphobia. I will block and report interphobes and I will refute interphobic bullshit (at least sometimes). Though if you read this far, that should be obvious. 23/24 So, to get back to your interpretation of these policies; no, it is not and never was a tool for furthering human rights. It is, and always has been, a means of enforcing a very narrow and specific view of human diversity which enables protections for some while explicitly targeting others for discrimination. It is objectively harmful and readily weaponised because it was always intended to be weaponised. 24/24 |
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The CC was directly adapted from these policy documents by Coraline Ehmke, who is a friend of Chevalier's. That's why the GF wiki is referenced in the footer of it.
The other thing referenced in the footer was the first attempt to turn the GF policies into a CoC.
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