The trans activists are being EXTREMELY HOMOPHOBIC.

This is only slightly related to the broader topic, but I thought this anecdote fit because it really demonstrates how some people don't even attempt to consult reality before they try to skew it in favor of social justice.

So on 2ch/5ch there's a board referred to as geehaa (ゲーハー) which is shortened katakana letters for the words "game" and "hardware" and refers to discussing game hardware, which is one of the many game-related boards over there. Obviously, anyone who is a gamer knows that actual discussions of hardware tend to be difficult to find when discussing platforms and instead the overwhelming amount of discussion is really dumb console war bullshit. I think this crosses borders and languages and if there was ever something like a test to see whether you know your shit as a gamer, it's one of the very first things you'll probably ever run into on the internet when it comes to games.

For this reason, geehaa is hated by a lot of gamers with common sense and avoided like the plague. The only reason you'd visit it is because sometimes the users post hard to find and accurate sales figures from the likes of Dengeki or Nintendo Dream, who are not as easy to reference as Media Create and Enterbrain are. (So I guess it's kind of like the old, old NeoGAF.)

In any case, well before I ever came to KIA or really knew about GamerGate (it's possible it was before GamerGate) I got into conversation with one of those "I'm on expert on Japanese culture" foreigners who come to Japan and lecture us about how we have to do better. According this person, geehaa is homophobic because it stands for "gay hardware" and was named to be a joke after the Japanese comedian Hard Gay. It was named that as a dumping ground, and incites violence against gay people because it associates them with violent arguments. I remember just being flabbergasted that someone was that ignorant and spreading around this crap. I mean where do you even start?

  1. Hard Gay came well after the game hardware was created in the in the late 90s, early 2000 and he was only popular for a short period of time, like most of those comics on Japanese television who have explosively popularity for a little while and then fall off the map. He was primarily known as a wrestler anyway.

  2. The word for the loan word gay in katakana is gei (ゲイ), not gee. They cannot be interchanged. This is as fundamental as knowing that "e" coming after a vowel letter in English makes the vowel sound change. This is like kindergarten/ 1st grade Japanese. There is a difference between vowel extending by way of adding the "i" character and vowel extending by using what's called chou-on, which extends the vowel for another letter as in gee. You literally completely different words from it, even the pronunciation sounds similar or the same.

  3. If you knew anything about how the more crude language on the 2ch category of boards, it very seldom ever uses gay slurs and instead uses any number of colorful language from other areas, but the usage of gay as a slur is just not a thing on 2ch (these days not spilled out into 5ch and the matome blogs too). It may be a 4chan thing, but it is not a 2ch thing.

That someone would try to spread around this nonsense without even doing a basic level of fact checking is utterly hilarious and sad. I was incredibly surprised that anyone would do something so stupid back then. I wish I could say it was a one off and I never ran into such a surprising display of idiocy again. Alas ...

/r/KotakuInAction Thread