For what it's worth, I appreciate this. I'm not in the right headspace for the usual circular firing squad right now.

I saw this headline and expected something very different than what I got, and I'm really glad. I think the last decade has made me really cynical about technology and the internet, for some good reasons, to the point where a story like this is almost surprising. I found myself a little caught off guard by how emotional I got while reading it. Thank you for posting this.

We've removed some of the comments in this thread for expressing the exact racist sentiments which would warrant this type of post and for arguing in bad faith. This is a perfectly salient conversation to be having in this community so we will be leaving this thread up, but as a reminder, please engage in good faith and be nice. If you don't want to have conversations about anti-racism in Technology then I suggest you unsubscribe from this community and others on Beehaw.

On a personal note: I would be absolutely thrilled to see more, better discussions of the intersections of areas like race, gender, and sexuality with technology, and fewer arguments about which Linux distro is better.

Hey Folks, Technology Mod here. We're aware of the reports that this post has gathered. I recognize that this is probably fake and that the source is suspect.

While we don't have any source requirements in the sidebar for this community, in general better sources would be preferred. However, the post has generated enough discussion that I hesitate to remove it. Unfortunately, Lemmy doesn't provide many tools for us to deal with situations like this, such as pinning comments, editing titles, or adding flair. For now, I'll be leaving the post up, but I'll continue to watch the discussion to see if other actions might need to be taken.

Thanks for your patience, folks.

I don't really mind. I created an alt on a larger lemmy instance a while back to subscribe to meme communities, and to be quite honest the comments are really bad, frequently as bad or worse than Reddit. I think Beehaw is just aiming for something different than other instances. Then again, I'm old enough to have been part of forums where the pace of discussions was much slower than most aggregator style sites are today so it doesn't really bother me.

I've noticed this as well, and I have no idea where it's coming from. If you see this on Beehaw, please report it, though, we're definitely not okay with slurs of any kind.

To quote Julia Serrano's excellent writeup on GAC for adolescents:

The “experimental” label is most regularly levied against puberty blockers, probably because the average person isn’t familiar with them. However, they’ve been used to treat precocious puberty since the 1980s (Comite et al., 1981; Mancuso et al., 1989) and to stave off unwanted endogenous puberties in trans youth since the mid-to-late-1990s (Cohen-Kettenis & van Goozen, 1998; van der Loos et al., 2023). For anyone interested in learning more about them, I’d recommend Giordano & Holm’s 2020 accessibly written scientific review “Is puberty delaying treatment ‘experimental treatment’?” as it answers the most commonly asked questions about the method, its efficacy, potential side effects, and so on.

Giordano & Holm’s review also addresses another common claim levied against gender-affirming care, namely, that there aren’t any “high quality studies.” In actuality, there are many high-quality studies: sound methodologies, significant sample sizes, published in well-respected journals, etcetera. When trans-skeptical people argue this, what they really mean is that there aren’t any randomized controlled studies — where neither the doctor nor patient know whether they’ve received the medicine in question or whether they’ve received a placebo. While this certainly is the “gold standard” for medical trials, it is not logistically possible in cases such as this, as both doctors and patients would quickly surmise which group they were assigned to based upon the changes (or lack thereof) in their bodies. The review also delves into ethical issues regarding withholding this treatment that make controlled studies impossible.

The second paragraph delves into the claim that there are no quality studies on the effects of delayed puberty. We actually have a good number of high quality studies, what we don't have are double blind, randomized controlled studies because of the practical and ethical difficulties of doing so. This, of course, gets twisted into labeling puberty blockers as having no evidence or for being "experimental".

Honestly it's kind of hard to know how to respond to this.

We recognize that "I was just joking" isn't a universal defense, otherwise people wouldn't have had an issue with minstrel shows. But as a society we've come to recognize that humor can be persuasive and can inform people's beliefs about what others are like. It's similar to how sites like 4chan that started out with cultures that were drenched in ironic racism eventually were just actually racist.

I don't know why you're trying to start drama.

The Vice article was a news article that was reporting on this leak, but it didn't name any names and didn't link to the leaked database. The post in question also wasn't a beehaw post, it was a federated post from lemmy.ml. Maybe I'm misunderstanding how federation works, but I would expect lemmy.ml's mods to handle moderating those posts.

And, frankly, I'm not sure I disagree with the screenshot you posted elsewhere in this thread. I don't think it was wrong for a person to leak the IronMarch forum database a few years ago, which exposed a bunch of Atomwaffen members in the US and neo-nazis elsewhere, and I'm not sure I think it's wrong for someone to have leaked this db either.

This isn't "it's okay to dox people you disagree with" or calling people with different political opinions nazis. These are actual nazis.

I'm sorry if it's frustrating to you to have megathreads like this. I'm not enthused about the extra effort in redirecting posts to the Megathread, either, but I'm not aware of a better way to handle topics that are flooding a community other than gathering them up in a thread like this. It annoys users (and mods) when dozens of articles about the same topic are dominating a community, so we'd like to do something to alleviate that when possible. I've seen similar concepts used in a number of different places (old-school forums, reddit alternatives like Tildes) because, as far as I've seen, there's not a better alternative for wrangling topics that might otherwise clutter the feed.

If you have any ideas about better ways to handle this type of thing in the future, I'd love to hear them (and I genuinely mean that - I think we're open to suggestions if a better way exists).

From my memory, folks were hanging out in the discord (the discord came before the website as a group of folks who wanted to start a different kind of community) and were talking about possibilities for the site. Early on there was talk of developing something from scratch (in fact, I think a working prototype was developed before it was decided to pivot to lemmy) and the admins needed something to name the github repo. As I recall somebody stuck their head in and just said the word "beehaw" and it stuck. I could be mixing things up, the timeline is a bit fuzzy and it's possible there were other discussions happening that I wasn't aware of. But as far as I remember it pretty much came out of nowhere and everybody just kinda shrugged and said, "that's the one".

Do these people have any dignity?

Hey, I don't know if you mean it that way but this is a pretty unkind thing to say. I suspect that a lot of these mods are folks that have spent a good bit of time and effort trying to build up communities that they care about.

You may think that the platform that they've chosen to do that on is working against them (and I agree), but I don't think that what they are feeling is contemptible in any way.