• WoodScientist
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    4 hours ago

    And are they purging everyone who used such chats? Are they purging every straight person who ever mentioned a romantic partner? Are they purging every cis het guy who mentioned hooking up with someone over the weekend?

    Give me a break. People talk about their personal lives all the time at work. This isn’t Severance. What kind of company have you worked for that people never talked about their personal lives? Except, the administration has chosen to interpret completely normal discussions about personal lives and health matters and declare them obscene, simply because they involve queer lives and bodies, rather than straight ones.

    People who appeal to “the rules” are usually doing so in bad faith. If the NSA really does have such formal and strict rules, then they would likely have to fire every person there for violating them. The employees on this chat were clearly acting in a way that was considered acceptable within the culture of the agency.

    Would you freak out over a group of women discussing their health issues? What about a chat where a group of men discuss the pros/cons of a vasectomy? Everybody has issues that can sound gross and obscene if you read them in bad faith. It’s obvious that at the NSA, this kind of discussion was just acceptable. But then they chose to only fire the trans people for violating the sanctity of “the rules.”

    You are the kind of person MLK warned us about, the kind that prefers order over justice. And you should know from history that “the rules” are often applied with blatant bigotry and double standards. And that is the problem here. Appealing to “the rules” when they are clearly being applied incredibly unevenly in the service of overt bigotry shows that you do not give a damn about justice.