Hi Arc

I appreciate your thoughtful response.

On Tue, Jan 28, 2025, 11:01 PM JC Brand <lists@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?