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Nonbinary teens are now banned from nonprofit Hack Club’s “Gender Empowering” Events.
My fellow robot lovers,
I’m really sad to say that Hack Club, a youth tech nonprofit, is now barring nonbinary and transmasc people from participating in their “Gender Empowering” Athena events, from all available public knowledge.
The way they went about this, announcing this, interacting with the community, and such, is also unsettling.
This is bad. How do I state this stronger? The screenshots in the link I sent expound on this.
This has more information, as it wasn’t possible for me to add so many things here.
I’m sad to say this but: If Hack Club continues on this path and refuses to change…. It may very well be worth switching from their HCB to something else, since many FRC teams use HCB.
Please help us revert this change and show how bad it is. Any support is really welcome and needed.
Hack Club staff may possibly respond here.
seg9585 2
Obviously I feel gender discrimination has no place in STEM, but reading the docs you shared, my guess for their reasoning is that:
- Their major promoted event is a sleepover coding activity and the organizers wanted to assure a single-gender environment for that
- The creator of the NPO (or the events they are doing state “By girls for girls” so a nonbinary doesn’t fall into that category
What bugs me is why they are turning this back - for ages, the Athena Intiative that Hack Club runs has included enbies and other gender minorities.
The language also isn’t clear, with “Girls and girl identifying people”, or similar language being used, which definitely isn’t the best wording.
Aaron_Li 4
For anyone else who may have alarms going off (especially given the political events), it’s not a literal giant sleepover, but a hackathon that is sleepover themed.
What is Sleepover?
Sleepover is a slumber-party style hackathon led by teen girls, for teen girls. Code 30 hours from now until April 15th, 2025 and fly out to Chicago, Illinois to make friends, eat amazing food, and code. Along the way, your child can earn prizes such as plushies, Airpods, iPads and more, all for building projects.
Sleepover - Hack Club
I assume you’re using gender in place of sex here? a single gender would still include trans women, which would bring up the same kinda logistical issues that non binary people do in terms of bathrooms/changing/ etc. unless you meant to imply that said event should be a single sex event ?
Nonbinary people and being girls is a bit of a square is a rectangle but not all squares are rectangles situtation. I myself both consider myself both a girl and nonbinary and I’ve had plenty of experience where the girlness of a person can change given that they are genderfluid.
It’s unclear if bigender, demigirl, girlflux, genderfluid, or other genders with some fem leaning parts sometimes are even allowed as of now.
It’s also been noted that labeling it as “and people who identify as girls” isn’t very inclusive, and I hope that they simply terrible at wording.
Corbin 7
genuinely, I don’t get the gendered teams or anything that excludes other high school kids, isn’t FIRST about bringing like-minded people together?
8
Can anybody source these screenshots? the user and their repo seem to have been banned from gitlab
Zaque 9
FIRST’s mission is to inspire young people to pursue careers in STEM. For gender minorities on teams without a very strong culture of inclusivity it can be intimidating and even overwhelming to participate, and this in turn can lead these students to look away from STEM. Providing spaces where they can build their confidence and have an environment more conducive to nurturing an interest in STEM that will be able to weather future difficulties is absolutely a net positive, as long as those environments aren’t made over restrictive like the example presented by OP.
Corbin 10
well the whole point of FIRST is to unify people, no matter who you are, and if you’re uncomfortable with stepping out of your comfort zone, just do it, you shouldn’t allow people you don’t even know to influence what your choices are. If you want to be on a robotics team, be on the robotics team. I can say this for sure, I wasn’t confident when I joined FRC in my 8th grade year, and after being in FRC for 3 years now, I am more confident than ever because I learned to speak my mind, stand up for myself, and think independently. I don’t think people should care who you are, they should be happy that they have another teammate and someone who is interested in FRC.
sokoloff 11
The irony is fairly thick here in a thread about creating a gender-inclusive environment…
Zaque 12
That is not the point of FIRST
Even if you ignore the misogyny in this statement, it would be completely useless.
I don’t think you’ll find anyone on this forum who disagrees that this is how it should be. That doesn’t mean it is how things are, and it shouldn’t be the responsibility of those suffering discrimination to fix those issues, especially as children.
Essentially, we unfortunately still live in a society where girls face multiple roadblocks to entering STEM fields, from a scarcer pool of role models to stereotypes about STEM being more masculine and many others. Any single issue might not be insurmountable but taken as a whole it leads to fewer women in STEM. Telling literal children that they should “just get over it” (where “it” is the entire societal history of how women have been treated compared to men) is tone-deaf and frankly demonstrates a lack of empathy to imagine what it must be like to be in that situation. I’d highly encourage you to refrain from commenting on this topic for a while and instead take some time to listen to and absorb the actual lived experiences of girls and women who are facing or have faced these challenges to gain a greater respect for the issues being discussed here.
This post kinda pins all of the responsibility for building personal relationships and social skills on FIRST. FRC/FTC/FLL alone does not build people, it is an organization that some groups use as a tool for to assist in building young people up. If the space you are in does not use FRC/FTC/FLL in that way then you will not get the same journey as you and I both have had.
Put more simply: environments and people build people, robots help but they are a tool not a solution
Also I would heavily recommend editing out the second sentence of your post, it is somewhat asinine to say “grow a pair” on a thread about trans rights.