Notices by Daphne Preston-Kendal (dpk@chaos.social)

@vmstan @cwebber @lgsp Was there ever any year where web design was better than it was in 1999? I mean just look at this stuff. Unbeaten tbh https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/all-websites/year-1999

@cwebber Noble of you to sacrifice your own mentions as well today

For this protection, a Gender Recognition Certificate is irrelevant, since it is based on perceptions, not facts.

The court’s basis for affirming this protection was existing precedent that negative discrimination is still illegal if based on a characteristic that the discriminating party perceived the discriminated party to have, whether or not that perception is correct. (Concrete [invented] example: if someone were discriminated against on the basis of a Jewish-sounding or Muslim-sounding name, but were not actually Jewish or Muslim, they could still claim religious and racial discrimination.)

Also, the court affirmed certain protections against negative discrimination do continue to apply to trans women. There are two ways this could be read:

The first and most obvious is that trans people of gender x cannot benefit *in general* from positive discrimination in favour of gender x, but can benefit from protection against negative discrimination against gender x.

This would be the better of the two interpretations. Unfortunately …

This cause concerned positive discrimination and whether a trans woman appointed to a position with a gender quota would count as a woman. The court said no.

It might be taken to imply that a trans man appointed to a similar position also would not count as a man, but much of the reasoning in the written decision considers only trans women. Maybe a trans man would count as a man if the cause were fought again: stranger things have happened in British law.

I think both of these are wrong individually – in using the long title of the EA 2010 to ascertain its purpose, it appears to have ignored the potential effect of the word ‘reform’ in ‘harmonise and reform’ – but this is now the law.

The good news:

This case was fought by the Scottish government, which could now introduce primary legislation in Holyrood to reverse the effect of the decision in Scotland. I expect there would be another fight over this: ‘Equal opportunities’ is, with some exceptions, a Reserved Matter in the Scotland Act 1998. They may well be able to get this in under an exception.

Trans people in England and Wales and NI could not benefit from this, though.

We’ll see how the Scottish govt plays this now.

The two fundamental planks of today’s decision are:

1. the Gender Recognition Act 2004 did not change the meaning of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, although the relevant section of the GRA on its face did not contain any limitation on the application of a certificate in determining who is a ‘man’ and who a ‘woman’

2. the Equality Act 2010 inherited from the SDA 1975 this definition wholesale, since its purpose was to consolidate existing law

‘Ow, my notifications’

I should really learn not to reply to @cwebber’s toots in public

@cwebber

@cwebber From this toot I can glean two things: 1. that I have missed something, and 2. that if I were to learn what the thing I have missed is, it would very probably make me hate the ‘trans community’ more than the person the ‘trans community’ is mad at. Again.

Jean-Paul Sartre was nearly right. The truth is closer to this: Hell is other trans people.

Es heißt jetzt, dass es sehr wichtig ist, JETZT eure SPD-Abgeordnete – insbesondere den Verhandler*innen – mit einem Brief gegen das Nordische Modell anzuschreiben.

Sind dir die Rechte von trans Menschen wichtig, sollten auch dir die Rechte von Sexarbeitenden wichtig sein. Die Gegner von beiden sind die gleichen Leute. Trans Menschen sind auch überproportional in der Sexarbeit vertreten. Schreibt bitte noch HEUTE!

Bitte boostet!
https://chaos.social/@dpk/114229753928926960

@cwebber Christine it’s 4am, why are you posting

It’s done. https://codeberg.org/dpk/extensible-match

SRFI submission any day now.

@cwebber I know someone who wrote this really good and long post about the differences, hang on let me find it

Why I hate record types: a belated answer to @kitten_tech

Let’s first consider the opening paragraph of the Scheme reports. I truly believe the statement made by the first sentence: *all* programming languages should be designed by removing restrictions, rather than by feature piling.

I don’t think Scheme is unique in succeeding at following this philosophy, but I think it shares with only a few other languages the distinction of having achieved this goal.

It’s at once an honour and incredibly daunting to be responsible for writing the report that sits under these words.

Granted, Scheme hasn’t always succeeded here: undelimited continuations have stuck around far, far too long for something which composes so poorly *with itself.*

When we consider new features for R7-large, this maxim comes up often. (Like any such maxim, it’s vague enough that it can end up being wielded by multiple sides of a debate, each accusing the others of betraying it.)

I have a fun little list on the R7RS wiki of features that seem nice to have in a record system. Some of them are from R6RS, some from SRFIs, some from Scheme implementations, some from other Lisps.

The reason I made this page is *not* because I want to put them all in R7-large, nor even that I want to consider them all for R7-large, but to show how bloated record systems can become; to show why record types are a uniquely awful part of evolving a language like Scheme.

https://codeberg.org/scheme/r7rs/wiki/Record-system-features