If you want a diverse community, you have to stand up for marginalized members

On Monday, The Perl Conference’s Standards of Conduct Committee published an incident report. In a talk at the conference, a speaker deadnamed and misgendered a member of the community. As a result, they took down the YouTube video of that talk.

The speaker in question happens to be a keynote speaker at PerlCon. The PerlCon organizers wrote a pretty awful post (that they have since edited) that essentially dismissed the concerns of the transgender members of the Perl community. They went on to mock the pain that deadnaming causes.

I did not think to save their post in the Wayback Machine before they edited it down to a brief and meaningless statement. “We are preparing a great conference and do not want to break the festival and trash our year-long hard work we did for preparing the confernece, the program and the entertainment program.”

What they don’t say is “we value the marginalized members of our community.” And they make that very clear. Editing out the insulting part of their post does not ,mean much, as VM Brasseur pointed out.

https://twitter.com/vmbrasseur/status/1148674272350494720

If you value an inclusive community, you have to stand up for the marginalized members when they are excluded. If you don’t, you make it very clear that you’re only giving lip service to the idea. As it is, the PerlCon organizers don’t even apologize. They’re more concerned about the bad publicity than the bad effect on the community.

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