5 ms·

As a non-US person i think OP story was quite interesting, including the gender transition part (because it very much adds to picturing the personality of that

by bsaul 4y ago

As a non-US person i think OP story was quite interesting, including the gender transition part (because it very much adds to picturing the personality of that steve / jessica and also reflects on a current trend in the US) and the way he told it pretty comprehensive (using other pronouns would have made it much more difficult to follow for example). Please don’t try and censor someone’s speech whose view you don’t agree with, especially when the person is simply telling a story in the chronological order.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Ah yes, this is the justification for referring to African Americans as the N word when taking about them in the past because in the past that was considered a reasonable description. You don’t use the N word just because you are taking about an African American in the 18th century and you don’t use a transitioned person’s misgendered pronouns with the excuse that it is “chronologically accurate”. This story would have been entirely as informative if the story had simply been about a woman called Jessica. So yes, I will censor bigoted views. I will censor Nazi propaganda. I will censor racism. And I will censor outing transgender persons.
- bsaul 4y ago
  i assume you are in good faith so i'm just going to ask a simple question : how do you tell the story of someone who changed their name and gender, without stating their original name and gender ?
  - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
    Let's take OPs story as an example. This is a thread in response to "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse." Here is that exact story. --- The best software engineer I ever worked with, whom I'll call Jessica, ended up working in Fortran after we parted ways. She had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Computer Science and we met at a research lab at Harvard Medical School. Interestingly, both of Jessica's parents as well as her uncle were professors of Computer Science at top schools. By the time she was 18 years old Jessica had a dozen years of programming experience under her belt. On one occasion she was on a team that was collaborating with a team from MIT that had contributed some software to the project that Jessica disapproved of. So, one weekend, Jessica entirely re-wrote the software that the MIT team had contributed. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a firing offense because she had humiliated the collaborators. (One thing to note about Jessica is that she was on the spectrum -- as smart as they come, but not good at reading social and political situations.) Jessica was not out of a job for long, however -- she was fired in the morning and by that afternoon she had accepted a job with a proprietary trading desk on Wall Street (she had a connection). Her salary at least doubled. A year after that incident Jessica called me up and asked me to come down and join her at the prop trading desk, so I did. We had a good ride until the 2008 financial crisis and then our entire division (several prop trading desks) was fired on Jan 2nd, 2009. It was difficult to get a job on Wall Street in early 2009 because everyone was laying people off and going belly up. But Jessica immediately landed a $400,000/year job with an options trading house. When we were catching up over coffee a few months later she mentioned to me that one of her projects was designing a trading system that needed to solve 500,000 differential equations per second. I just wished her luck and thanked God that I had moved into coaching the LSAT instead. Unfortunately, Jessica only lasted about 18 months at the options trading house -- she had a disagreement with another engineer about the best way to implement parallel processing for a certain situation and Jessica was not one to give an inch when she thought she was right. So she got fired. The conclusion that Jessica drew from this was that she never again wanted to work with someone who did not have a Ph.D., so she moved to a division of NASA that was doing research on how to model the melting of glaciers, and which is apparently a space that is full of people with Ph.Ds. It turns out that Fortran is the best tool for modeling glaciers, so Jessica ended up doing heavy mathematical programming in Fortran. As far as I know, this is what she is still working on. --- In removing the dead-naming and misgendering, did I reduce the usefulness of this story in any way, as a response to "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse"? No. You might ask why I didn't remove the bit about "being on the spectrum". I left this is because, as an Autistic person myself, I too suffer such discrimination in the workplace.
    - jononomo 4y ago
      I object to this version because in my view "Jessica" is and always was a man. I understand that not everyone sees it this way, but that's the way I see it. I view biological sex to be a real fact about the world and it is unambiguously binary. Also, I take the words of the Bible seriously: "Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” (KJV) During the time I knew him, Steve was married to a woman and focused on becoming a father. He himself would have described himself as a man. Finally, the fact that Steve was "on the spectrum" is central to understanding him fully, and the fact that he transitioned is telling because a surprisingly large percentage of men who transition in midlife are extremely intelligent and are on the spectrum. I believe that including the details about his personality and his transition allows a fuller picture of the man to snap more coherently into place, while also shedding light on the current cultural moment. Also, I simply don't agree that using pronouns that align with a person's biological sex is analogous to using the n-word, and I'm sorry that you feel that way. I mean no offense to anyone (although I won't go out of my way to stop people from taking offense where none is intended) and there is no engineer I have ever held in higher regard than Steve/Jessica. I saw him pull off absolutely mind-bending feats of engineering and if I had to bet then I would say that every time he put his foot down and died on a hill over an engineering disagreement that he was absolutely in the right from a technical point of view.
      - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
        > I view biological sex to be a real fact about the world and it is unambiguously binary. Then you are misinformed and out of date. >Also, I take the words of the Bible seriously You do realize that Genesis says nothing about which of them has a penis, or if a penis is required? Is it possible that God has a bigger imagination and vision than you do? >I mean no offense to anyone I have told you that your are offending an entire group of people, and your response is "I mean no offense to anyone." You do mean offense. Have the courage to say so.
        jononomo 4y ago
        People who take offense at what I have written are wrong to do so — and I’m not going to engage with you any further. Have a good day.
- jschveibinz 4y ago
  Your comments are bordering on inflammatory, and are not in the spirit of HN. The OP was not using real names, and has a right to tell their story, so no harm has been done to anyone. As far as censoring goes, we should leave that to the moderators please. Thank you.
  - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
    OPs comments are inflammatory. They provide an example of how not to treat a transgender person. Again, you don’t get to call someone an N-word just because you changed their name. They do not have a right to tell a bigoted story on a public forum. They might be permitted, but don’t confuse that with a right.

by bsaul 4y ago

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

Ah yes, this is the justification for referring to African Americans as the N word when taking about them in the past because in the past that was considered a reasonable description. You don’t use the N word just because you are taking about an African American in the 18th century and you don’t use a transitioned person’s misgendered pronouns with the excuse that it is “chronologically accurate”. This story would have been entirely as informative if the story had simply been about a woman called Jessica. So yes, I will censor bigoted views. I will censor Nazi propaganda. I will censor racism. And I will censor outing transgender persons.

bsaul 4y ago
i assume you are in good faith so i'm just going to ask a simple question : how do you tell the story of someone who changed their name and gender, without stating their original name and gender ?
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  Let's take OPs story as an example. This is a thread in response to "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse." Here is that exact story. --- The best software engineer I ever worked with, whom I'll call Jessica, ended up working in Fortran after we parted ways. She had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Computer Science and we met at a research lab at Harvard Medical School. Interestingly, both of Jessica's parents as well as her uncle were professors of Computer Science at top schools. By the time she was 18 years old Jessica had a dozen years of programming experience under her belt. On one occasion she was on a team that was collaborating with a team from MIT that had contributed some software to the project that Jessica disapproved of. So, one weekend, Jessica entirely re-wrote the software that the MIT team had contributed. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a firing offense because she had humiliated the collaborators. (One thing to note about Jessica is that she was on the spectrum -- as smart as they come, but not good at reading social and political situations.) Jessica was not out of a job for long, however -- she was fired in the morning and by that afternoon she had accepted a job with a proprietary trading desk on Wall Street (she had a connection). Her salary at least doubled. A year after that incident Jessica called me up and asked me to come down and join her at the prop trading desk, so I did. We had a good ride until the 2008 financial crisis and then our entire division (several prop trading desks) was fired on Jan 2nd, 2009. It was difficult to get a job on Wall Street in early 2009 because everyone was laying people off and going belly up. But Jessica immediately landed a $400,000/year job with an options trading house. When we were catching up over coffee a few months later she mentioned to me that one of her projects was designing a trading system that needed to solve 500,000 differential equations per second. I just wished her luck and thanked God that I had moved into coaching the LSAT instead. Unfortunately, Jessica only lasted about 18 months at the options trading house -- she had a disagreement with another engineer about the best way to implement parallel processing for a certain situation and Jessica was not one to give an inch when she thought she was right. So she got fired. The conclusion that Jessica drew from this was that she never again wanted to work with someone who did not have a Ph.D., so she moved to a division of NASA that was doing research on how to model the melting of glaciers, and which is apparently a space that is full of people with Ph.Ds. It turns out that Fortran is the best tool for modeling glaciers, so Jessica ended up doing heavy mathematical programming in Fortran. As far as I know, this is what she is still working on. --- In removing the dead-naming and misgendering, did I reduce the usefulness of this story in any way, as a response to "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse"? No. You might ask why I didn't remove the bit about "being on the spectrum". I left this is because, as an Autistic person myself, I too suffer such discrimination in the workplace.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    I object to this version because in my view "Jessica" is and always was a man. I understand that not everyone sees it this way, but that's the way I see it. I view biological sex to be a real fact about the world and it is unambiguously binary. Also, I take the words of the Bible seriously: "Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” (KJV) During the time I knew him, Steve was married to a woman and focused on becoming a father. He himself would have described himself as a man. Finally, the fact that Steve was "on the spectrum" is central to understanding him fully, and the fact that he transitioned is telling because a surprisingly large percentage of men who transition in midlife are extremely intelligent and are on the spectrum. I believe that including the details about his personality and his transition allows a fuller picture of the man to snap more coherently into place, while also shedding light on the current cultural moment. Also, I simply don't agree that using pronouns that align with a person's biological sex is analogous to using the n-word, and I'm sorry that you feel that way. I mean no offense to anyone (although I won't go out of my way to stop people from taking offense where none is intended) and there is no engineer I have ever held in higher regard than Steve/Jessica. I saw him pull off absolutely mind-bending feats of engineering and if I had to bet then I would say that every time he put his foot down and died on a hill over an engineering disagreement that he was absolutely in the right from a technical point of view.
    - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
      > I view biological sex to be a real fact about the world and it is unambiguously binary. Then you are misinformed and out of date. >Also, I take the words of the Bible seriously You do realize that Genesis says nothing about which of them has a penis, or if a penis is required? Is it possible that God has a bigger imagination and vision than you do? >I mean no offense to anyone I have told you that your are offending an entire group of people, and your response is "I mean no offense to anyone." You do mean offense. Have the courage to say so.
      - jononomo 4y ago
        People who take offense at what I have written are wrong to do so — and I’m not going to engage with you any further. Have a good day.
jschveibinz 4y ago
Your comments are bordering on inflammatory, and are not in the spirit of HN. The OP was not using real names, and has a right to tell their story, so no harm has been done to anyone. As far as censoring goes, we should leave that to the moderators please. Thank you.
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  OPs comments are inflammatory. They provide an example of how not to treat a transgender person. Again, you don’t get to call someone an N-word just because you changed their name. They do not have a right to tell a bigoted story on a public forum. They might be permitted, but don’t confuse that with a right.