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I have not really wanted to bother about this, especially since some of you know me from in person years ago and it's quite natural to talk about me how you've always talked about me. But I don't think that I can be silent anymore. I don't want to go into personal detail in this public forum, but you can ask me privately if you're a friend.
I would like to be referred to in gender-neutral terms, including gender-neutral pronouns. The best choice in English seems to be singular ‘they’, but if you prefer Spivak pronouns or the like, I don't mind. (Definitely don't use any language that you consider to refer to my physiological sex, as opposed to my social gender, because your speculations about that are nobody's business.)
What is a Spivak pronoun? (Is it referring to David, or Michael?)
Edit: oh, here it is. Refers to Michael, then.
Yes, that's them. Michael Spivak gives them a nice mathematical heritage. There are many other ‘or the like’ choices in the long last section of the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_languages_with_gendered_third-person_pronouns#Table_of_standard_and_non-standard_third-person_singular_pronouns (besides singular ‘they’, which appears in the first part).
Thanks, Emily. It's usually pretty easy for me to be out online, and in other forums I have been for 20 years; but in person is harder (because presentation is harder), and since the nForum grew out of the nLab, which grew out of the n-Category Cafe, where I came because I knew John Baez IRL, it was easier just to let everybody treat me how people saw me face to face. But this is all online now! After the stuff with the HoTT book, I decided that I was just being lazy not to say anything here.
@BenWalsh:
Be prepared for discourse, as the kids call it: https://github.com/HoTT/book/pull/1101
I thought kids called it a woke mob these days?
I originally thought this posting was odd; why is it anyone’s business here whether or not you’re nonbinary? But I don’t know the context and you mentioned correcting people who knew you IRL so I figured “whatever” and put it out of my mind.
It’s somewhat disturbing to know the context that this is directly following up that event at the HoTT github. Should I take this as signaling that xenophobic[1] culture is being invited in?
Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic, but maybe now’s the time to get out of the nLab. I’d rather not wait until things actually start getting bad.
[1]: foreign here meant more regarding culture than nationality.
Just a quick note that I have no idea about any of the context of this discussion, and this is the first time I’ve ever needed to moderate an nForum discussion, but I will have to ask people to refrain from commenting further here, as it is not the place for it.
I am not sure how best to act, as behaving as a moderator is not something I am interested in doing, and nor do I wish to offend anybody, whether Toby, Hurkyl, or anybody else. Maybe I should delete some or all of the thread, but for now I think I will leave it, but ask please for no more comments, no matter how tempting it may be. If any more comments come, I give advance warning here that I will likely delete the thread, and that in that eventuality, such deletion should not be interpreted as any form of commentary or opinion of my own.
If I may suggest any course of action, it would just be to respectfully read Toby’s request in the second paragraph of #1; that this request remains is the main reason that I am refraining from deleting the thread.
The thread is clearly off-topic for the nForum, and it’s not as innocent as it may seem (the “stuff” in #5 is cancellation of an esteemed nLab regular here).
With personal pages on the nLab we already do offer everyone a place to describe themselves to readers who care to look it up.
With the nLab down for almost 4 months straight and counting we are going through the greatest crisis this little community has experienced in its 14 years of existence, and it’s not clear to me that we will manage to emerge out of it, as a community. But if we keep the intended use of the nForum switched off while allowing dubious off-topic activity to remain visible then I feel certain that we won’t.
OK, repeating that I don’t know anything about it and am not following the links, I’m happy to do whatever is thought best to avoid a conflict around this. I think we can assume that regulars will have seen Toby’s original message by now, and thus I’ll delete the thread when I have a chance, probably this evening European time.
Richard, when one deletes an entire thread because of comments, this is the heckler’s veto. It would mean that people cannot make posts like mine, which will naturally lead to us being accidentally misgendered whenever somebody mentions us two times in a row. Or when we make the post, we have to be very careful about what we say about why, to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention.
It didn't use to be this way. As I said in #5, I've been out in other online forums for 20 years now, and this is the first time that people have called for removing my saying so. But now this has become a political issue, with trans people's right to exist as ourselves up for public debate (instead of being quietly ignored by those who don't like us). I would have preferred to edit the page about me on the nLab and announce the change here, like Franka Waaldijk did in 2020 to very little notice, although this still would have produced a post here. (It just occurs to me that I can edit pages on my personal web, which I didn't think of before! I'll do that now.)
Urs, the “stuff” that I was referring to in #5 is what I linked to in #7. I didn't know about what you linked to in #10. I'm sorry to see that, and my initial reaction is to agree with Martín Escardó's first comment there. But there may have been more going on behind the scenes; there are trans people involved with homotopy type theory, and this may have affected them. I hope that this talk will be given on another occasion.
Discussion about politics is off topic, but discussion about mathematicians is on topic. Not a lot of detail about our personal lives, but what to call us is pretty basic. A public discussion somewhere led me to make a public post about myself here, where I thought I would be welcome. If this community is to survive, then it can't push people away.
Do people have to be approving of the stuff you linked to #7 for you to feel welcome? Because I find that to be a rather unwelcoming and hostile culture. I did not know about #10, but that is precisely the kind of thing I expect from that culture when things go down the way they did as linked to in #7.
I did not mean #8 as any sort of grandstanding; I genuinely intend to just move on if that is the kind of culture the nLab wants here. I would have just left silently, but “if you see something you should say something”, y’know? If nobody who gets pushed away speaks up, then nobody would know they’re pushing people away. And maybe I’d learn that nLab doesn’t want that kind of culture here after all and would prefer something where we actually can all get along.
I feel in a somewhat impossible position here; to underline for the third time, I am not following links in this discussion, do not know and do not wish to know anything about any context, and do not wish for any actions or words of mine to be interpreted in any way as for or against any particular point of view. Nor do I wish to offend anybody.
I discovered that the nForum has the functionality to close a thread rather than delete it; I am reluctant to take the sledgehammer approach of deleting it, so the best compromise I can think of is to close the thread, which I will do after posting this comment.
Feel free to ignore this, but my feeling would be that it is best not to try characterise the nLab as being for or against anything. There are many users of the nLab, most of whom have not appeared in this thread, and I am sure every point of view under the sun could be found on more or less any issue. If we all remain positive in our attitudes towards the nLab, that will probably go a long way to solving most things :-). If I may offer an example, I take heart from people like Tim Porter (one of the few regulars here who I have met in person), who has been here since the beginning, but is cheerfully still following along as he ever was; we have several other long-timers still going strong, as well as plenty of healthy ’young blood’, and for my own sake I see no reason not to be optimistic about the future. Whilst painful now, some months without editing is nothing in the great span of time (and of course the pages have been viewable (and still getting a lot of hits), so that the nLab has still been doing a significant service to the mathematical community during these months).
@Hurkyl: No, you don’t have to approve of everything that was said in the link at #7 for me to be welcome. When I called it ‘discourse’, that was not a compliment! I was grateful for some of the comments made there, upset by others (and I mean including some that were arguing for the edit that I agreed with), etc. To welcome me, you mostly just need to call me what I want to be called (as I would do for you), and not make comments that disparage me or groups that I belong to. (Since you don't know what all of those are, it's best not to make comments that disparage any group, of course. Besides, we want to be welcoming to nearly everybody, and any exceptions should be for individual reasons.)
I initially found your comments in #8 rather hyperbolic. I'm not asking you to leave. And outside of this thread, I can't recall any reason why I would be suspicious of you, feel made unwelcome by you, or want to make you unwelcome. (To be honest, I don't have much association with your name at all, only that I've seen you around here before.) There's an important difference between accepting people with unusual personal characteristics, and accepting people with unusual (or common) bigoted opinions who don't accept people with unusual personal characteristics. Sometimes the second group of people claim that they're the oppressed minority, and your comments about xenophobia in #8 made me suspicious of that, which is why I didn't respond to you at all in #12. But there's also an important difference between people with bigoted opinions and people who accidentally say something that sounds bigoted to someone else. The latter might need to apologize, depending on what they said, but they don't need to leave.
I'm not sure that that's very well explained. But I'm sorry if by linking to the stuff that I linked to in #7, I made you feel unwelcome.
@Richard (and everyone, really): It would be nice if the nLab was for including people from marginalized groups. That doesn't mean being for or against any particular political opinion (you can, for example, believe that something is good and also believe that the government shouldn't enforce it, and that goes for a lot of things). Many academic institutions have statements of this kind, including governmental ones that are required to be neutral in partisan politics (although admittedly there is more to politics than that). But this can wait until the nLab is functioning again.
I'm fine with closing this thread to replies, as long as it remains visible and people can see it in the topic list. (Then if they read the headline, they'll know most of what they need to know, and the rest is in my main comment.) I hope that I'm not abusing some vestigial administrative powers by commenting here now (it doesn't look closed yet to me, but the deleted threads in The Cave don't look invisible to me either, yet I know that most people can't see them).
By the way, Richard, I haven't been following the thread on the troubles with migration, which is too much for me, but if there's anything that we're supposed to be doing to help out, please let me know (here or privately). I can see that it's been hard, and I don't want to add to your burdens.
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