After I read @maxogden’s tweet I was debating whether I really wanted to respond. Especially because this cartoon about these conversations (thanks @izs for tweet) does have some truth to it.

However, I feel that there is a point that is being missed. We are all human beings first. If we create an environment where another human being feels unwelcome or uncomfortable, or worse threatened, that is a problem. For this to be a problem it does not matter one bit whether that person be female, male, cis-, trans- or whichever label you want to apply. It matters solely that a potential member of our community does not feel welcome.

One consequence of having created such an environment is the sprouting of sub-groups reserved for the sub-members that carry some sub-label or other. And that in turn is the official certificate of community failure.

So while having a girls night out with your node friends might be a valuable experience for a female noder (just as a stereotypical example), it should definitely not become a thing simply because it means that the node community has failed so badly that it has to be separated along more or less arbitrary gender lines.

To me that’s not not about discrimination against men or any such non-sense. It’s about failing to provide a community where people are respected for who they are and what they bring to the table. So rather than advocating Non-Binary-Node groups we should be working diligently on making our community one that does not need those sub-groups.

So if Max Ogden’s female friend is learning ruby rather than node because ruby has all these “women in ruby” groups, we should make the the effort of telling people, that they should learn node, because we have all those “humans in node” groups. Because that is truly being better rather than “no worse than usual”.