Humanity or gtfo

I'm past due to write this year's My, What A Busy Week! post, but didn't feel like doing it in August and haven't felt like doing it since. Well, it had a good long run. I'd like to mark the passage of that week in what I hope is a less flip and more thoughtful way. The only really notable occurrence in my life during the last Monday-through-Saturday in August this year is that someone in the #rust channel on IRC said "boobs or gtfo" to me. So, let's talk about that for a minute.

I don't often choose the "don't use 'guys' to refer to mixed-gender groups" battle. Over the years, 'guys' has come to grate on me, but only in certain contexts, and even then, it only grates a tiny bit. It's almost never a battle worth choosing. So, when someone showed up in #rust and said [sic] "Guys, can you recommend library for getting something from iternets via http?", I almost let it go, because it just wasn't that big of a deal. But I was emboldened by my friend Adam's recent choice of the same battle on a (private) mailing list we're both on, so I decided to say something.

I was polite, I think. All I said was, "please remember that not everyone in the IRC channel is a guy." The initial response was, "Do you have any proofs?" While I was contemplating whether I'd be the only one who would find it amusing at that point if I sent him a link to the latter forty pages of this document ("Sure! Here are some of my favorites!"), "boobs or gtfo" showed up on my screen.

I said, out loud, "Holy shit!" My officemate, sitting across the room, said, "What?" But I couldn't actually make my voice work to tell him what had just happened, because by then, adrenaline was sweeping through me. It was ten seconds before I remembered how to talk. The only other times in my life that I can remember that happening have been in response to an immediate physical threat, like when a car was about to hit my bike.

It was unexpected. I hadn't been expecting this person to actually correct themselves, of course. But I had been expecting them to respond with something like "uh, 'guys' is a gender-neutral word", in which case my reaction would have been to shrug and say something like, "Yeah, I'm sure that's how you meant it." And I would have left it at that, because, again, it wasn't that big of a deal, and all I really aim to accomplish here is encourage people to think about it a little harder, maybe choose a different word next time. But that's not what happened. What happened was that when I made a polite request, a flood of hate came rushing out at me. And now it's hard for me to continue to pretend or assume that that hate doesn't boil under the surface of our community.

Later on, various members of the full-time Rust staff (who have ops in the channel) apologized to me, and banned the user, and added several more ops from various time zones so that it would be more likely that someone with ops would be around next time (since it had been lunchtime on the west coast and no one had been around). They also added a link to the conduct policy to the channel topic, to help reduce the chances of this sort of thing happening in the future. All that was great. The Rust team is awesome. But here's the thing: every time I point out something like this in a community I'm part of, whether it's the Rust community or any other, there's a part of me that insists on first checking to see how much social capital I have to spend there. How high up am I on the contributors list? Have I contributed to the next release yet? All right, I guess it's okay for me to say something -- as though it hurts the project to speak up about a community problem! And so I have a double-entry accounting system in my head for amount of code contributed and amount of abuse reported, and it's terrible and broken that I feel that that's necessary. The only qualification that any of us should need to be treated with humanity is that we are human.

I've been contributing to Rust for a long time. #rust is my community, and it's been my community since there were only twenty-odd people in it, instead of the three hundred-some we usually have today. I shouldn't have to worry about being attacked while standing on my own ground. And, indeed, right after it happened, a friend who worked on Rust with me last year privmsg'd me to say that it seemed to him