Rhonda's Blog

Rhonda's Blog

Fri, 21 Apr 2017

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A fair amount of things happened since I last blogged something else than music. First of all we did actually hold a Debian Diversity meeting. It was quite nice, less people around than hoped for, and I account that to some extend to the trolls and haters that defaced the titanpad page for the agenda and destroyed the doodle entry for settling on a date for the meeting. They even tried to troll my blog with comments, and while I did approve controversial responses in the past, those went over the line of being acceptable and didn't carry any relevant content.

One response that I didn't approve but kept in my mailbox is even giving me strength to carry on. There is one sentence in it that speaks to me: Think you can stop us? You can't you stupid b*tch. You have ruined the Debian community for us. The rest of the message is of no further relevance, but even though I can't take credit for being responsible for that, I'm glad to be a perceived part of ruining the Debian community for intolerant and hateful people.

A lot of other things happened since too. Mostly locally here in Vienna, several queer empowering groups were founding around me, some of them existed already, some formed with the help of myself. We now have several great regular meetings for non-binary people, for queer polyamory people about which we gave an interview, a queer playfight (I might explain that concept another time), a polyamory discussion group, two bi-/pansexual groups, a queer-feminist choir, and there will be an European Lesbian* Conference in October where I help with the organization …

… and on June 21st I'll finally receive the keys to my flat in Que[e]rbau Seestadt. I'm sooo looking forward to it. It will be part of the Let me come Home experience that I'm currently in. Another part of that experience is that I started changing my name (and gender marker) officially. I had my first appointment in the corresponding bureau, and I hope that it won't last too long because I have to get my papers in time for booking my flight to Montreal, and somewhen along the process my current passport won't contain correct data anymore. So for the people who have it in their signing policy to see government IDs this might be your chance to finally sign my key then.

I plan to do a diversity BoF at debconf where we can speak more directly on where we want to head with the project. I hope I'll find the time to do an IRC meeting beforehand. I'm just uncertain how to coordinate that one to make it accessible for interested parties while keeping the destructive trolls out. I'm open for ideas here.

/personal | permanent link | Comments: 3

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Josh wrote at 2017-04-21 21:39:

Thank you so much for the work you're doing.
I have the same reaction you do to people that post the types of comments that you quoted: "good, the Debian community isn't for you, get better or get out". If people like that feel unwelcome and uncomfortable, then you're doing your job right.
Are any of the trolls in question identifiable? For instance, coming from an IP that some of the Debian folks can identify as associated with a particular developer's account? If at all possible, it'd be nice to get out ahead of that, do some naming-and-shaming, and/or eject them.

Gunnar Wolf wrote at 2017-04-22 00:54:

Big, big hugs and congratulations for what you tell us, dear and very strong friend. The work you do is surely hard, requires tons of patience and strength... And surely makes Debian, the Free Software ecosystem, and the world a better place.

Rhonda wrote at 2017-04-22 10:15:

Josh, I don't have the IP visible, and I don't think tracking them down might help much. Either they are using tor, but even if not it doesn't matter too much to me. And to some degree I doubt that they are Debian Developers or Maintainers. We have enough misogynist trolls and haters since the day Debian Women was founded, for a start.
And I'm not a fan of name'n'shame, I see it more like how Clawfinger, one of my favorite band, sang it in their song "Warfair":
"At the end of a war the survivors are none b'cos war is a loss a war can't be won"

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