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GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation:
On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 16:00 Simberto wrote:On July 04 2026 09:57 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 09:39 WombaT wrote:On July 04 2026 08:43 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
This is basically the standard "I'm a nice/good guy" combined with "Not all men" response. Right then, I’ve seen the light. We’ll just stop bothering and everything will sort itself out, seems much more sensible. Not sure why I didn’t think of that before This is the textbook tantrum that typically follows. Okay, then explain what you expect us to do. Not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic seems like a very good thing a person can do, but apparently that isn't good enough for you. So explain, instead of giving semi-toxic oneliners. What is it that you actually expect. I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy. I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic? Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively?
And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662
What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing?
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I'm not proud of my contribution to this saga or where it ended up. I (as seemingly all of us did) took the original statement (regarding paraphrased"you all don't even realize how toxic you all make these spaces" personally) and responded defensively. I don't know what the correct response is/was, but I don't think it's the level of shitting on GH we've seen.
I think it's trivial for us to collectively agree that the (women's league) should be named in accordance to the people who would be included in it. I think it stands as reasonable criticism for our part of gamer spaces and inclusivity, and while I might disagree with GH on its severity or value as evidence that we're all unaware of how toxic we make an environment, I don't think where this has ended up looks good for any of us. I'd rather we have fewer shitty and mean voices, and as much as we all enjoy a good Kwark snipe now and then I don't wish for that as the general tenor of any conversation.
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Northern Ireland27148 Posts
On July 06 2026 03:59 Fleetfeet wrote:
I'm not proud of my contribution to this saga or where it ended up. I (as seemingly all of us did) took the original statement (regarding paraphrased"you all don't even realize how toxic you all make these spaces" personally) and responded defensively. I don't know what the correct response is/was, but I don't think it's the level of shitting on GH we've seen.
I think it's trivial for us to collectively agree that the (women's league) should be named in accordance to the people who would be included in it. I think it stands as reasonable criticism for our part of gamer spaces and inclusivity, and while I might disagree with GH on its severity or value as evidence that we're all unaware of how toxic we make an environment, I don't think where this has ended up looks good for any of us. I'd rather we have fewer shitty and mean voices, and as much as we all enjoy a good Kwark snipe now and then I don't wish for that as the general tenor of any conversation.
Maybe GH should try and interact in a vaguely civil, comprehensible manner then. That might help the overall tenor.
Overall, agreed. Not a particularly edifying spectacle all round, myself included. I’ll just ignore GH’s pontificating in future.
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On July 06 2026 03:59 Fleetfeet wrote:
I'm not proud of my contribution to this saga or where it ended up. I (as seemingly all of us did) took the original statement (regarding paraphrased"you all don't even realize how toxic you all make these spaces" personally) and responded defensively. I don't know what the correct response is/was, but I don't think it's the level of shitting on GH we've seen.
I think it's trivial for us to collectively agree that the (women's league) should be named in accordance to the people who would be included in it. I think it stands as reasonable criticism for our part of gamer spaces and inclusivity, and while I might disagree with GH on its severity or value as evidence that we're all unaware of how toxic we make an environment, I don't think where this has ended up looks good for any of us. I'd rather we have fewer shitty and mean voices, and as much as we all enjoy a good Kwark snipe now and then I don't wish for that as the general tenor of any conversation.
Nah, it absolutely is. When you see someone making a genuine effort, and you have a problem with what they are doing, you don't attack them. You go like "hey nice job, but you could improve here...". You definitely don't cherry pick some minute detail and attack them over it as if what they did was irrelevant or even counterproductive. Because again, I have encountered this type of person while trying to make things actively better for my players. They NEVER made anything better, they only ever made my job harder, and rarely have they ever contributed anything themselves apart from their constant nitpicking. At least for me that was and still is where all my outrage towards him comes from. I don't expect a "well done" or pat on the back, but I expect useless little shits like him to either zip it or contribute in a way that doesn't actively hurt what they pretend their cause is. Instead the clown walks around and acts all high and mighty while still having shown 0 contribution to the issue himself, made no case for his own criticism (he basically just piggy backed on the sensible ideas that others have suggested as his intentions)... shall I continue?
He doesn't contribute to the issue he claims to be of importance, he doesn't contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way, all he does is at best provide nothing, and at worst hurt things even more.
Did my behaviour reflect badly on myself here? Probably yeah, when it comes to showing self control. I shouldn't have engaged with him in the first place. But I'll just point towards the fact that all my anger comes from the fact that I have made an effort, however flawed it may have been, but the intention was definitely there and call it overall balanced out at that point. I take the hit on self control in exchange for "fought the enemy of the cause".
Not to mention that I did not find the reactions much defensive at all. It was less "how dare you attack my honour" and more just utter confusion at what the hell he is even on about. I gave a rough idea of how a defensive action from me would have looked like.
If all your criticism boils down to "overall good, but not perfect" you deserve to be driven out of town with thorny sticks. Especially when presenting it in the way he did, which again, at best does nothing and at worst drives people away from the cause. At best he is an incompetent enemy, at worst just an enemy.
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Northern Ireland27148 Posts
On July 06 2026 04:34 Artesimo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 03:59 Fleetfeet wrote:
I'm not proud of my contribution to this saga or where it ended up. I (as seemingly all of us did) took the original statement (regarding paraphrased"you all don't even realize how toxic you all make these spaces" personally) and responded defensively. I don't know what the correct response is/was, but I don't think it's the level of shitting on GH we've seen.
I think it's trivial for us to collectively agree that the (women's league) should be named in accordance to the people who would be included in it. I think it stands as reasonable criticism for our part of gamer spaces and inclusivity, and while I might disagree with GH on its severity or value as evidence that we're all unaware of how toxic we make an environment, I don't think where this has ended up looks good for any of us. I'd rather we have fewer shitty and mean voices, and as much as we all enjoy a good Kwark snipe now and then I don't wish for that as the general tenor of any conversation. Nah, it absolutely is. When you see someone making a genuine effort, and you have a problem with what they are doing, you don't attack them. You go like "hey nice job, but you could improve here...". You definitely don't cherry pick some minute detail and attack them over it as if what they did was irrelevant or even counterproductive. Because again, I have encountered this type of person while trying to make things actively better for my players. They NEVER made anything better, they only ever made my job harder, and rarely have they ever contributed anything themselves apart from their constant nitpicking. At least for me that was and still is where all my outrage towards him comes from. I don't expect a "well done" or pat on the back, but I expect useless little shits like him to either zip it or contribute in a way that doesn't actively hurt what they pretend their cause is. Instead the clown walks around and acts all high and mighty while still having shown 0 contribution to the issue himself, made no case for his own criticism (he basically just piggy backed on the sensible ideas that others have suggested as his intentions)... shall I continue? He doesn't contribute to the issue he claims to be of importance, he doesn't contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way, all he does is at best provide nothing, and at worst hurt things even more. Did my behaviour reflect badly on myself here? Probably yeah, when it comes to showing self control. I shouldn't have engaged with him in the first place. But I'll just point towards the fact that all my anger comes from the fact that I have made an effort, however flawed it may have been, but the intention was definitely there and call it overall balanced out at that point. I take the hit on self control in exchange for "fought the enemy of the cause". Not to mention that I did not find the reactions much defensive at all. It was less "how dare you attack my honour" and more just utter confusion at what the hell he is even on about. I gave a rough idea of how a defensive action from me would have looked like. If all your criticism boils down to "overall good, but not perfect" you deserve to be driven out of town with thorny sticks. Especially when presenting it in the way he did, which again, at best does nothing and at worst drives people away from the cause. At best he is an incompetent enemy, at worst just an enemy.
Have you tried not being a cis dude and a piece of shit sexist?
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On July 06 2026 03:59 Fleetfeet wrote:
I'm not proud of my contribution to this saga or where it ended up. I (as seemingly all of us did) took the original statement (regarding paraphrased"you all don't even realize how toxic you all make these spaces" personally) and responded defensively. I don't know what the correct response is/was, but I don't think it's the level of shitting on GH we've seen.
I think it's trivial for us to collectively agree that the (women's league) should be named in accordance to the people who would be included in it. I think it stands as reasonable criticism for our part of gamer spaces and inclusivity, and while I might disagree with GH on its severity or value as evidence that we're all unaware of how toxic we make an environment, I don't think where this has ended up looks good for any of us. I'd rather we have fewer shitty and mean voices, and as much as we all enjoy a good Kwark snipe now and then I don't wish for that as the general tenor of any conversation.
This is good, and I appreciate it. The "correct response" is to discuss the systemic issues (someone like DPB is plenty capable of identifying these) that makes it so hard for us to have TL's women's teams (and/or their fans that are women) share their opinions on this subject here instead of centering whiteclub men's feelings and good deeds.
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On July 06 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 03:59 Fleetfeet wrote:
I'm not proud of my contribution to this saga or where it ended up. I (as seemingly all of us did) took the original statement (regarding paraphrased"you all don't even realize how toxic you all make these spaces" personally) and responded defensively. I don't know what the correct response is/was, but I don't think it's the level of shitting on GH we've seen.
I think it's trivial for us to collectively agree that the (women's league) should be named in accordance to the people who would be included in it. I think it stands as reasonable criticism for our part of gamer spaces and inclusivity, and while I might disagree with GH on its severity or value as evidence that we're all unaware of how toxic we make an environment, I don't think where this has ended up looks good for any of us. I'd rather we have fewer shitty and mean voices, and as much as we all enjoy a good Kwark snipe now and then I don't wish for that as the general tenor of any conversation. This is good, and I appreciate it. The "correct response" is to discuss the systemic issues (someone like DPB is plenty capable of identifying these) that makes it so hard for us to have TL's women's teams (and/or their fans that are women) share their opinions on this subject here instead of centering whiteclub men's feelings and good deeds.
Wtf dude, you're the one who brought up the topic, shat all over people whose opinions don't completely line up with your own, demanded they know the opinion of TL's womens' teams regarding the use of "female" and are now here acting all holier than thou and lamenting that we shouldn't be discussing it among "white club". If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen. But I'm sure dealing with your trolly bullshit is much much better for the fight against global capitalism than dealing with oBlade's trolly bullshit. I'm not sure how, but you're involved in this discussion therefore it must be of the highest possible value to socialism.
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On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: Show nested quote +On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 16:00 Simberto wrote:On July 04 2026 09:57 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 09:39 WombaT wrote:
[quote]
Right then, I’ve seen the light. We’ll just stop bothering and everything will sort itself out, seems much more sensible. Not sure why I didn’t think of that before This is the textbook tantrum that typically follows. Okay, then explain what you expect us to do. Not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic seems like a very good thing a person can do, but apparently that isn't good enough for you. So explain, instead of giving semi-toxic oneliners. What is it that you actually expect. I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy. I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic? Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament'
Male is the default, female is the 'other'.
Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'.
He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament'
Male is the default, female is the 'other'.
Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'.
He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing?
It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine.
The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to.
EDIT: as a bit of an aside, are we really all going to ignore the pretty obvious problems with "female identifying" as trans inclusivity?
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On July 06 2026 05:18 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 04:34 Artesimo wrote:On July 06 2026 03:59 Fleetfeet wrote:
I'm not proud of my contribution to this saga or where it ended up. I (as seemingly all of us did) took the original statement (regarding paraphrased"you all don't even realize how toxic you all make these spaces" personally) and responded defensively. I don't know what the correct response is/was, but I don't think it's the level of shitting on GH we've seen.
I think it's trivial for us to collectively agree that the (women's league) should be named in accordance to the people who would be included in it. I think it stands as reasonable criticism for our part of gamer spaces and inclusivity, and while I might disagree with GH on its severity or value as evidence that we're all unaware of how toxic we make an environment, I don't think where this has ended up looks good for any of us. I'd rather we have fewer shitty and mean voices, and as much as we all enjoy a good Kwark snipe now and then I don't wish for that as the general tenor of any conversation. Nah, it absolutely is. When you see someone making a genuine effort, and you have a problem with what they are doing, you don't attack them. You go like "hey nice job, but you could improve here...". You definitely don't cherry pick some minute detail and attack them over it as if what they did was irrelevant or even counterproductive. Because again, I have encountered this type of person while trying to make things actively better for my players. They NEVER made anything better, they only ever made my job harder, and rarely have they ever contributed anything themselves apart from their constant nitpicking. At least for me that was and still is where all my outrage towards him comes from. I don't expect a "well done" or pat on the back, but I expect useless little shits like him to either zip it or contribute in a way that doesn't actively hurt what they pretend their cause is. Instead the clown walks around and acts all high and mighty while still having shown 0 contribution to the issue himself, made no case for his own criticism (he basically just piggy backed on the sensible ideas that others have suggested as his intentions)... shall I continue? He doesn't contribute to the issue he claims to be of importance, he doesn't contribute to the discussion in any meaningful way, all he does is at best provide nothing, and at worst hurt things even more. Did my behaviour reflect badly on myself here? Probably yeah, when it comes to showing self control. I shouldn't have engaged with him in the first place. But I'll just point towards the fact that all my anger comes from the fact that I have made an effort, however flawed it may have been, but the intention was definitely there and call it overall balanced out at that point. I take the hit on self control in exchange for "fought the enemy of the cause". Not to mention that I did not find the reactions much defensive at all. It was less "how dare you attack my honour" and more just utter confusion at what the hell he is even on about. I gave a rough idea of how a defensive action from me would have looked like. If all your criticism boils down to "overall good, but not perfect" you deserve to be driven out of town with thorny sticks. Especially when presenting it in the way he did, which again, at best does nothing and at worst drives people away from the cause. At best he is an incompetent enemy, at worst just an enemy. Have you tried not being a cis dude and a piece of shit sexist?
Well in all fairness, being a women has never been more accessible in my lifetime, so maybe this really is on me. I could just become one, join the tl female/womens team, and sort this all out by just demanding whatever I feel like is the best solution. Unfortunately I am too washed for competition these days... man it really does always come down to "not good enough"... 
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On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 16:00 Simberto wrote:On July 04 2026 09:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
This is the textbook tantrum that typically follows. Okay, then explain what you expect us to do. Not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic seems like a very good thing a person can do, but apparently that isn't good enough for you. So explain, instead of giving semi-toxic oneliners. What is it that you actually expect. I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy. I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic? Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine.The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to.
Thank you for the feedback. That bolded part implies intentionality, which I don't think is a fair accusation to assert, but can you elaborate more on what you mean by me overintellectualizing the issue?
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On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 16:00 Simberto wrote:On July 04 2026 09:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
This is the textbook tantrum that typically follows. Okay, then explain what you expect us to do. Not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic seems like a very good thing a person can do, but apparently that isn't good enough for you. So explain, instead of giving semi-toxic oneliners. What is it that you actually expect. I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy. I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic? Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine. The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to.
It would help the tenor of the conversation a lot more if you put in the same amount of effort in your posts as DPB did in the post you're quoting.
I also severely doubt the lack of women viewpoints in this thread is a result of using the wrong word here or there.
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On July 06 2026 05:44 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 16:00 Simberto wrote:
[quote]
Okay, then explain what you expect us to do. Not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic seems like a very good thing a person can do, but apparently that isn't good enough for you.
So explain, instead of giving semi-toxic oneliners. What is it that you actually expect. I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy. I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic? Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:
[quote]
Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else.
It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues.
On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:
[quote]
I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive.
Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine.The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. That implies intentionality, which I don't think is a fair accusation to assert, but can you elaborate more on what you mean by me overintellectualizing the issue?
I don't mean you're doing it intentionally, I mean that it's what people do and you're people. Basically, it's very easy for communities to debate the grammar of "nouning" to avoid facing the uncomfortable reality of how we've built and maintained a community that is so severely lacking women in the space participating in the first place.
Sure there are structural societal issues that makes it make sense for white guys to outnumber the rest of us here, but there being NO women here comfortable to share their gender (most of you probably didn't notice you chased away a trans person [not plasmid] somewhat recently) and opinions is directly the responsibility of the members of this space.
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On July 06 2026 05:54 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 05:44 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy.
I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic?
Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
[quote]
I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that.
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine.The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. That implies intentionality, which I don't think is a fair accusation to assert, but can you elaborate more on what you mean by me overintellectualizing the issue? I don't mean you're doing it intentionally, I mean that it's what people do and you're people. Basically, it's very easy for communities to debate the grammar of "nouning" to avoid facing the uncomfortable reality of how we've built and maintained a community that is so severely lacking women in the space participating in the first place. Sure there are structural societal issues that makes it make sense for white guys to outnumber the rest of us here, but there being NO women here comfortable to share their gender (most of you probably didn't notice you chased away a trans person [not plasmid] somewhat recently) and opinions is directly the responsibility of the members of this space.
Thank you for the clarification.
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On July 06 2026 05:47 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 16:00 Simberto wrote:
[quote]
Okay, then explain what you expect us to do. Not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic seems like a very good thing a person can do, but apparently that isn't good enough for you.
So explain, instead of giving semi-toxic oneliners. What is it that you actually expect. I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy. I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic? Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:
[quote]
Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else.
It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues.
On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:
[quote]
I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive.
Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine. The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. It would help the tenor of the conversation a lot more if you put in the same amount of effort in your posts as DPB did in the post you're quoting. I also severely doubt the lack of women viewpoints in this thread is a result of using the wrong word here or there.
Especially given that no one has been able locate even a single woman that had this issue.
Giving so much oxygen to non issues is one of things that GH constantly belly aches about to the thread in regards to right wing posters. When his real issue is clearly that he just wants the attention.
Fleet, you don’t need to feel bad for him, this is what he wants. If he wanted actual discussion he would just do it, he has been given plenty of opportunity.
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On July 06 2026 05:47 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 16:00 Simberto wrote:
[quote]
Okay, then explain what you expect us to do. Not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic seems like a very good thing a person can do, but apparently that isn't good enough for you.
So explain, instead of giving semi-toxic oneliners. What is it that you actually expect. I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy. I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic? Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:
[quote]
Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else.
It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues.
On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:
[quote]
I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive.
Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine. The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. It would help the tenor of the conversation a lot more if you put in the same amount of effort in your posts as DPB did in the post you're quoting. I also severely doubt the lack of women viewpoints in this thread is a result of using the wrong word here or there.
Especially given that no one has been able locate even a single woman that had this issue.
Giving so much oxygen to non issues is one of things that GH constantly belly aches about to the thread in regards to right wing posters. When his real issue is clearly that he just wants the attention.
Fleet, you don’t need to feel bad for him, this is what he wants. If he wanted actual discussion he would just do it, he has been given plenty of opportunity. The guy who has chased more people away then anyone else complaining that people are doing that, is just the chefs kiss.
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On July 06 2026 06:05 Billyboy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 05:47 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy.
I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic?
Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
[quote]
I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that.
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine. The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. It would help the tenor of the conversation a lot more if you put in the same amount of effort in your posts as DPB did in the post you're quoting. I also severely doubt the lack of women viewpoints in this thread is a result of using the wrong word here or there. Especially given that no one has been able locate even a single woman that had this issue. Giving so much oxygen to non issues is one of things that GH constantly belly aches about to the thread in regards to right wing posters. When his real issue is clearly that he just wants the attention. Fleet, you don’t need to feel bad for him, this is what he wants. If he wanted actual discussion he would just do it, he has been given plenty of opportunity.
To be fair, locating women on TL is generally somewhat hard, given that the sites core demographic is mostly the people who were into competitive Starcraft roughly 20-30 years ago.
I think there a few more male men-dominated online spaces than this site.
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Northern Ireland27148 Posts
On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 18:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 16:00 Simberto wrote:On July 04 2026 09:57 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
This is the textbook tantrum that typically follows. Okay, then explain what you expect us to do. Not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic seems like a very good thing a person can do, but apparently that isn't good enough for you. So explain, instead of giving semi-toxic oneliners. What is it that you actually expect. I didn't mean to imply that not being toxic and working on making your immediate surroundings not toxic wasn't a good thing to do, same for being a nice guy. I used the "nice guy" "not all men" framing hoping the familiarity was already there from online Dem rhetoric. Are you guys actually not familiar with why responding that way is problematic? Are we considering TL.net our immediate surroundings? + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine. The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. EDIT: as a bit of an aside, are we really all going to ignore the pretty obvious problems with "female identifying" as trans inclusivity?
Oh fuck right off with that.
What you actually did was just shit on everyone else’s efforts and opinions and throw vagaries and buzzwords around for 2 straight days and maybe answered 20% of questions directed your way.
You’re not doing anything outside of being exceptionally irritating, and as per you seemingly can’t grasp why that might be the case.
What’s more, as per, you’re taking the posts and heavy lifting of other users who are trying to expand on what they think you mean and going ‘yeah that’s definitely what I meant’
It’s bullshit man, complete bullshit. Lord only knows how your community organising in the name of socialism is going if you can’t avoid pissing off a whole bunch of people who largely probably agree with you.
Do better.
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On July 06 2026 05:55 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 05:54 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 05:44 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:[quote] + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female".
Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on?
I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine.The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. That implies intentionality, which I don't think is a fair accusation to assert, but can you elaborate more on what you mean by me overintellectualizing the issue? I don't mean you're doing it intentionally, I mean that it's what people do and you're people. Basically, it's very easy for communities to debate the grammar of "nouning" to avoid facing the uncomfortable reality of how we've built and maintained a community that is so severely lacking women in the space participating in the first place. Sure there are structural societal issues that makes it make sense for white guys to outnumber the rest of us here, but there being NO women here comfortable to share their gender (most of you probably didn't notice you chased away a trans person [not plasmid] somewhat recently) and opinions is directly the responsibility of the members of this space. Thank you for the clarification. My pleasure. Thank you for your receptivity.
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On July 06 2026 06:09 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 06:05 Billyboy wrote:On July 06 2026 05:47 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:[quote] + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female".
Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on?
I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine. The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. It would help the tenor of the conversation a lot more if you put in the same amount of effort in your posts as DPB did in the post you're quoting. I also severely doubt the lack of women viewpoints in this thread is a result of using the wrong word here or there. Especially given that no one has been able locate even a single woman that had this issue. Giving so much oxygen to non issues is one of things that GH constantly belly aches about to the thread in regards to right wing posters. When his real issue is clearly that he just wants the attention. Fleet, you don’t need to feel bad for him, this is what he wants. If he wanted actual discussion he would just do it, he has been given plenty of opportunity. To be fair, locating women on TL is generally somewhat hard, given that the sites core demographic is mostly the people who were into competitive Starcraft roughly 20-30 years ago. I think there a few more male men-dominated online spaces than this site.
True but I’m talking about the few of that asked the women in our lives.
The reality is this is just stupid shit disturbing. Female can mean biological sex, or gender the same as the word women can. That GH made up that female only means biological and women only means gender is just BS he is using to try to make himself superior.
Definitions of women
OED
English–An adult female human being. The counterpart of man
MW
an adult female person
Cambridge
an adult female human being:
And hilariously when I swapped the definition to female this was there.
She was voted the best female vocalist.
She was the school's first trans female athlete.
I really really hope he’s not trying to “educate” trans women on the troublesome usage of the word female.
I really hope no one is gullible enough to go along with this.
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Northern Ireland27148 Posts
On July 06 2026 06:09 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On July 06 2026 06:05 Billyboy wrote:On July 06 2026 05:47 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 06 2026 05:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 06 2026 00:36 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:GH, you clearly wanted me to contribute to the conversation: On July 04 2026 21:09 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 20:47 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 Artesimo wrote:On July 04 2026 19:59 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 04 2026 19:26 Artesimo wrote:[quote] + Show Spoiler +Is anything gaming related that isn't a lan party or among a circle of offline friends be considered the immediate surrounding?
Also anyone who is even remotely interested in actually improving things and helping the cause would have explained why they think its problematic instead of asking it condescendingly. Remember when I ranted in here about all the US people being all talk and no bite when it comes to trump and his politics? If I had to pick an avatar of that, it would be you. Nothing I have ever read from you gave me the impression that you do anything meaningful to further your causes, only snarky remarks, and if you do something its probably the kind of action that only alienates your target audience and drives everyone away. Your post history is a perfect example for that.
Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming? I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams. + Show Spoiler +Due to me having a professional background in that area with over a decade of experience, I was able to effectively build up some talent, help them navigate the space and get them into contact with other high skilled male players for scrims to help them improve as well as being shown acceptance from people that matter more than some random online person. I also used my credibility and connections within the scene to have some players, admins, and organisers within the scene/the leagues the teams I coached competed in get reprimanded or even sanctioned for sexist behaviour and boundary crossing, and I would say I hade a lasting positive impact on multiple scenes by that.
I can also say that I directly got at least 18 of the players I coached to feel like they can actually have a place in the scene, and that had considered leaving it all together before joining one of the rosters I coached. Overall its probably more, but I just stick to the ones that directly told me so.
So what have you done? I would not be surprised if you couldn't think of a single person who you directly affected positively in this, and I would be even less surprised if in total you managed to drive more people away and turn the "normal sexism"/ "casual sexists" or whatever you wanna call the average joe who is insensitive and doesn't think much about their behaviour into doubling down on their BS because you come out with garbage like your post right there.
Let me tell you from someone who actually did the work, after the actual sexists, you are the type of person that was my biggest enemy throughout my coaching activities. Which ultimately prompted this post because by god your posting is normally insufferable but you really managed to hit a nerve with that one for me. You are not an ally, your are the enemy. I want to thank you for bringing this issue in the competitive CS scene to my attention. Answer my questions coward or go into hiding. While I'm not sure why he went full-asshole against WombaT in this specific conversation, GH doesn't seem to be interested in having a good-faith conversation right now on this legitimately important topic. I wouldn't be surprised if he purposely answers your statement with a faux-shocked "how dare you tell a person of color to go into hiding; this is exactly what I mean about you all making this a terrible place for us". That's a shame. You were one of those I was holding out hope for as not pretending you don't know that/why "female" is a problematic way to refer to women's leagues in order to ignore the systemic critique to focus on the personal. On July 05 2026 04:05 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Does the term "female identifying" in an attempt to include trans women genuinely not immediately stand out to you as problematic for obvious reasons? No one (besides DPB who I'm hoping will elaborate)? On July 05 2026 05:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:19 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 05:08 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 05:04 GreenHorizons wrote:
Does anyone want to keep them as "female tournaments" or can we just fix that right now? I am happy to throw my full weight behind this cause after you convinced me that you have done anything of meaning in regards to my earlier repeated request. + Show Spoiler +Or is that too much work for the cause you champion?
Like cmon dude, even the most pathetic loser would have come up with a simple lie by now.. . As a rational adult your support shouldn't be conditioned on me meeting your demands to prove my credentials as a genderqueer revolutionary socialist. Well you already established that I am woefully ignorant and uneducated on the issue, so I am looking for a figurehead to put my trust in. I just need something that shows me you are deserving of this trust. + Show Spoiler +Else I might support something that goes completely against of what my intention was, and this is such a difficult to understand issue for someone as ignorant as me, that there simply is no other way than to blindly follow not just any forum shizo, but the right forum shizo. Maybe try DPB or DanHH since they agreed and aren't conditioning their support respectively? And I did: On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female".
Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on?
I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. https://tl.net/forum/general/532255-us-politics-mega-thread?page=5834#116662 What feedback do you have for my long post? What parts do you agree with, what parts do you disagree with, and what parts am I missing? It's not terrible relatively. It's a reasonable interpretation of the nouning issue. Fleet's right about mistakenly taking it personally and reacting defensively. To be fair, it is the only reason we're having the opportunity to address this (overall minor but symbolic) issue with Liquipedia (an overlapping community with us) calling tournaments for women and girls "female tournaments" that I didn't even personally realize was happening. I guess I'd say you're also overintellecualizing to avoid the personal responsibility we all share for there functionally not being women here comfortable to opine. The word, responses, and general tenor was just emblematic of the issues I'm trying to bring attention to. It would help the tenor of the conversation a lot more if you put in the same amount of effort in your posts as DPB did in the post you're quoting. I also severely doubt the lack of women viewpoints in this thread is a result of using the wrong word here or there. Especially given that no one has been able locate even a single woman that had this issue. Giving so much oxygen to non issues is one of things that GH constantly belly aches about to the thread in regards to right wing posters. When his real issue is clearly that he just wants the attention. Fleet, you don’t need to feel bad for him, this is what he wants. If he wanted actual discussion he would just do it, he has been given plenty of opportunity. To be fair, locating women on TL is generally somewhat hard, given that the sites core demographic is mostly the people who were into competitive Starcraft roughly 20-30 years ago. I think there a few more male men-dominated online spaces than this site.
Yeah that might be tricky, although I’m sure there are more than I think who just don’t disclose. Off the top of my head I can recall like, two cis women posters and two trans women who post(ed) semi-regularly here.
It’s not a growing hobby. I do wonder if modern TL standards had been around back in the day if representation might look a bit better. Perhaps not hugely but a bit.
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