CIRCLE WITH A DOT

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116087634363842093

This is a great take.

Anecdote time.

I worked at a company where the engineering team was a mess. An absolute mess. The company as a whole consistently found that the engineering team would just fail to deliver anything. Releases took literally months and required massive investment, they were error prone, and features would get rolled back.

Over time we fixed it. We got it down to a 6 week release cycle that still had a lot of manual steps, but was no longer being compiled on Ye Random Senior Engineer's laptop. There was unit testing and integration testing. Engineering ran on a kanban-like system and features could be delivered at all and, while they still sometimes took a while still (six week release cycles are still painful), they very very rarely would ever see a rollback.

There was still a lot of room for improvement, but we were improving.

Then something happened.

Engineering no longer was the bottleneck.

Why? Because the company was completely unwilling to let go of customers or features and the squirrels in upper management couldn't stay focused for even a single month, let alone for the three months a full feature release would take.

Engineering, even with all of its flaws, had become increasingly reliable, but the rest of the org still held the company back.

Even when we were at our worst our bottleneck was _never_ the actual generation of code. That was always straightforward. The bottleneck was all of the _other_ stuff that went into it. Resources being undersized or hard to bring up, production toil pulling away senior engineers (in particular), customers whose idea of a modern browser was IE6 and who refused to test releases early, etc.

The company persisted in a delusion that the problem was "if we could just write code faster." That was the motto of upper management.

But the problems were never how quickly the code got generated. The problems were deeply systemic. Most ideas were terrible and even when they weren't terrible we couldn't focus on them, and engineers were constantly stressed by shifting directions, "productiontyped" code that might as well have been hallucinated given its lack of quality controls, and fundamental lack of discipline.

AI wouldn't have changed anything.

@Romankalisz Ah yes. Maybe if I were just _nicer_ to transphobes they would be less transphobic. That's definitely a well established method that has always worked with oppressors both historically and in the modern times.

You are transphobic and you have been behaving in a transphobic manner. It has nothing to do with whether you agree with me. It is because your argument is a transphobic argument and your presentation treats the trans woman you are talking to as lesser. Full stop.

I also do. not. care. what you, a random man on the internet, feel is good for "my cause." At all. Ever.

You might consider reading any of:

* Feminism is for Everybody (bell hooks)
* Men Explain Things to Me (Solnit)
* Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Manne)

If you want more of a focus on transphobia, you can start with:

* The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (Faye)
* Whipping Girl (Serano)

I'm only continuing to engage here because I'm putting off dealing with chickens. So: Consider this your free lesson in proper social etiquette in online interactions.

Strike 2.

@Romankalisz You raised an irrelevant and flat wrong point as a justification for keeping trans women out of sports. Specifically a justification that you have clearly done zero research on or you would have already known that:

1. Testosterone-based limits are widely shunned in sports science.
2. Trans women's testosterone levels are in the cis women range, and often on the _low_ end of that range.
3. The IOC _used_ to have those standards but because of (1) decided to get rid of them and allow them to be decided by sport.

So to the degree (1) is even false and (2) may not apply, there were _already limits in place_ that they decided weren't useful because of (1), and they allowed individual sports to set their own limits if they could figure out how it was useful. That limit, incidentally, was around 288 ng/dL. For reference, my current levels are 15 ng/dL, which is about standard for most trans women on ≥ 2 years on hrt.

In short: you are bringing up irrelevant facts in the name of "equality" when even if (1) weren't true (2) would still be an issue. If (1) and (2) are not at issue then (3) would still show you have no idea what you are talking about. You are doing this without doing literally any research yourself.

The most charitable interpretation I can see is that you are putting the burden of educating you on random trans women on the internet by calling for exclusion based on irrelevant criteria. Itself a form of transphobia and mansplaining.

That's at absolute best and that's _if_ you are doing this in good faith.

@deusfigendi Yep! Or more precisely in a derogatory way.

Definition (3) at Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tool

a. "one who is used or manipulated by another"
b. "a foolish or unlikable person"

@Romankalisz My testosterone levels are lower than the vast majority of cis women, and that's _extremely standard_ among women who have been on hormone therapy as long as is required to compete. Inclusive of those on monotherapy.

Meanwhile, many cis women have _significantly_ higher testosterone, and bans based on testosterone levels are _extremely_ limited (per the IOC: "However, the limitations of testosterone-based eligibility criteria are widely recognised in the sports science community. In addition to testosterone levels varying across individuals")

If you want to justify transphobia then you should start by doing literally one google search on the topic.

@cambria Yep. It also reminds me of the various men who have thought they could beat a woman who is a professional MMA fighter.

Every time that has been challenged it has gone very, very badly for them.

As I've said before. If people think this is so easy then "men" should (or women should get their favorite man to help them):

1. Undergo HRT for two years.
2. Undergo the other additional steps required to compete at this level, which for most orgs at this level requires one or more surgeries, some of which have longer than two year leadups.
3. See how well the get along wth jars by that point, let alone competing at elite levels.

"the studies weren't big enough!"

Because there were only a handful of trans athletes operating at the levels required to study it among elite athletes. Especially trans women.

If trans women had any substantive advantage we'd have like… more examples to choose from. Not a small handful who haven't medaled.

"Trans women have no advantage in women's sports, studies confirm this result"

A bunch of weird people: "nuh uh, science says otherwise!"

What do these tools think a "study" is and what do they think "science" is.