I’m on my way home from CFI’s Women in Secularism conference. It was an intense conference in the best way possible. Speakers I have seen give speeches elsewhere were at their most passionate here. I finally got to see speakers who should be on every atheist convention organizer’s wish list. I’ll be talking more about the conference over the next few days.
Right now, though, I’m going to talk about something that happened almost outside the conference. It had its genesis on stage, when Jen McCreight mentioned that, when she started speaking at conferences, multiple people contacted her behind the scenes to tell her which male speakers she should steer clear of.
This announcement made no noticeable ripple in the room at the time. When I tweeted something to that effect, however, discussion started. One guy I’ve never heard of before thought we should tell him who these speakers were or, well, he’d just be snarky in the future when the topic came up because he couldn’t be responsible for knowing. Another said women should do more naming and shaming. A female speaker said the same happened to her. Someone who arranges speakers for her group expressed concern that this wasn’t common knowledge.
Then the topic started infecting the barcon and hallcon. I had multiple conversations over multiple tables yesterday. It turns out I have a few things to say on the topic.
So did other people, and you’ll find some of what they had to say here. You won’t find their names unless they let me know they want to claim their words. I’ll explain why in more general terms later. Most importantly, though, we didn’t talk about whether individual statements were off the record, but one of the premises of conversations like these is that the whole topic is off the record. If it weren’t, we’d have both less and more to talk about.
Without further ado, presented in the form of a FAQ:
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