29 Jan
2025
29 Jan
'25
7:36 a.m.
Hi Arc
I appreciate your thoughtful response.
On 2025/01/29 15:02, Arc Riley wrote:
On Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 11:01 PM JC Brand <lists(a)opkode.com> wrote:
Also, it's not only LGBT people who get assaulted. I've been
assaulted, more than once. So why should we delve ever more deeply
into ever expanding categories of marginalization instead of just
saying we won't tolerate behaviour X (e.g. "physical harm")?
I feel this is a worn out point so I dislike having to share it, but
this is the difference between a personal assault and a hate crime;
If somebody you got into conflict at a bar assaults you for something
you did or said, it's horrible but it's just between you two. Somebody
watching the fight is unlikely to fear being assaulted themselves.
When I as an LGBT person (and I agree about alphabet soup) learn about
another LGBT person being assaulted because they are LGBT I fear that
I or somebody I love will be assaulted. This is why we call these
"hate crimes".
There are many areas in my country where I cannot safely go to due to
heightened risk of being attacked due to my ethnicity. We have high
profile politicians and civil servants calling for people like me to be
tortured and killed.
But then we have people here calling this false claims of
"reverse-racism" and therefore invalid. So the fact that I'm at
heightened risk of being attacked or killed because of my ethnicity is
irrelevant to them.
This demonstrates a narrow American and European-centric view of the
world. The world is much bigger than that.
If a person on a group chat calls another person a f**
they are not
insulting that other person only, regardless to if that other person
is LGBT, they are stating to the entire group that their group does
not include LGBT. The word itself is used this way by enough people to
include this meaning by its utterance.
This is why I post YouTube videos with LGBT people doing tough work on
my land, it shows LGBT people being tough which is essentially the
opposite of hate crimes. These silly little 15 second shorts are
watched on repeat by thousands of people who need to see other LGBT
people being strong. And that is why I hobble down to record and post
these moments despite needing a walking stick and often help walking.
This is why I founded the world's first transgender rugby club and
posted all the videos of transmen playing rugby, people tell me these
videos helped them.
That is who I am. I just ask you to not be indifferent to these
issues. It's not just about punishing people who write unkind words in
group chat, it's about the marginalized people who read our CoC.
I'm not indifferent. I have gay family members and one of my best
friends of almost 30 years is gay. I would be horrified if they were
attacked for their sexual orientation.
I am however wary of the risk of creating special categories of people
that may not be criticized and the potential for this to be abused by
machiavelian and manipulative people to make themselves beyond reproach.
What textual change do you propose in the CoC?