I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don’t like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.
I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I’m waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m not really welcome in that group anymore and I’m ok with that.
There are no trans people in this group. I’m not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It’s stupid. It’s tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren’t asshats about it.
Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.
While I do agree that unity is the way to go in the fight for rights, I can understand why one would want to separate the T from the LGB. It’s an issue of consistency - L, G, and B all describe sexuality, while T describes gender. The two are related, but ultimately separate concepts - one does not inform the other, and grouping them can hypothetically lead ignorant people to think that they are directly related, which could hypothetically lead to non-straight cisfolk experiencing more oppression than they would have otherwise experienced due to the perceived association with transfolk, as non-conforming sexuality is more generally accepted today than non-conforming gender.
That being said, it’s all hypothetical, and what matters is the reality that people from all spectra of nonconformity are regularly oppressed, and in many places, the oppressors treat anyone LGBT+ with the same disdain. So grouping them is vital for the sake of the most oppressed.
I mean, you could similarly reason that bisexuals aren’t welcome (both gays and lesbians are solely attracted to the same sex, after all), or that asexuals aren’t welcome (you can be asexual and heteroromantic, after all), and so on. I think, ultimately, that unity between us is important, and allowing the umbrella to protect all members of gender, romantic, and sexual minorities strengthens the overall cause rather than weakening it.
If it were supposed to be pronounced “jif” it would have been spelled that way.
The creator of the format is documented as having confirmed the pronunciation is “jif”, but I don’t care. Once he created it and put it into the world, he relinquished his control.
This is a jem of a response, but by jeneralizing pronunciations of acronyms only by the way they are spelt, you are opening a jigantic can of worms on etymology and linguistics.
The jist of it is that English is a weird language, jenerally descriptive, and there can be many correct answers to the same pronunciation problem.
As for me? I’m a choosy developer, and I choose jif.
Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and yet we all pronounce it “lay-Zer” not “lay-Ser”
GIF is an acronym. Giraffe is not. The Giraffe response has been debunked for decades.
Graphical is a hard G.
Debunked? Its a counterpoint to the fact that it’s pronounced that way because it’s spelled with a g. If that poor argument wasn’t used, the giraffe one wouldn’t have to come up. It’s not evidence of anything other than that letters can be pronounced in more than one way.
For the graphical thing, imagine pronouncing NASA wrong because of the way aeronautical is pronounce. Or underwater in scuba. World in WHO? The I in AIDS isn’t pronounced anything like immunodeficiency.
Your argument doesn’t work either.
How do you pronounce github? GIMP? GNU? GPU? Javascript?
Oh Geremy, it’s time to jo to the jocery store! We need some jrape gelly.
If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.
Pedophiles aren’t the problem.
Rapists are the problem.
Saying that my favorite cli editor is nano
In a discussion about whether liking trans women is gay or not I said that they are all missing the point. Even if it was the gayest thing on earth, being gay should never be this big of a deal. And it just shows how hard it is for some to overcome the stigma of being gay, even if they are super tolerant in general.
That started a group discussion with a lot of different opinions on that matter.
