[lordCarbonFiber]

We live in a world where google exists, hell where scihub exists. It's extremely suspicious to show up in a forum "asking questions" when these resources exist. Getting told to "fuck off" in this context is basically being told to RTFM. You can look in my comment history to find just how easy it was to compile some sources to discredit the idea that trans women in sports is some unknown taboo.

If we spent just a fraction of the effort making spaces safer for marginalized groups as we do debating bad faith actors the internet would be a much better place in my opinion.

[sgillen]

I think the two questions being considered are largely a matter of public opinion. You can use something of sci hub etc to justify your opinion, or try to change someone’s mind (esp in this example with the trans athletes). But unless others have already held this discussion somewhere google won’t help you gauge what people think. (Obviously these particular topics have been done to death, but someone has to hold this discussion for the first time on a given platform).

I do actually agree that most people that most people making a fuss about these questions online are doing so in bad faith or “mostly bad faith”. But I still do think both questions are nuanced, and I think a lot of bystanders might benefit from intelligent responses to these questions from the progressive side, but maybe at some point it’s too exhausting.

[lordCarbonFiber]

The exhausting angle is real. I think there's some inheritant bad faith (even if unintentional) in asking sensitive questions to a forumn with no validations on identity or expertise. Your odds of finding someone that knows these things deeply that doesn't also have an emotional connection to them are relatively low (there aren't a lot of phds in sports medicine floating around HN for example). So instead it becomes up to someone directly effected to provide such responses and that's just a lot; save the sensitive questions for the experts or come with direct quotes from published sources.

[lawnchair_larry]

Nobody said it’s an unknown taboo. The issue is that they have an incredible biological advantage. We should absolutely not focus on making social spaces “safer” (a misnomer, because regular adult conversations simply do not jeopardize safety), we should focus more on making people anti-fragile.