karma @karma@awoo.space

Absolutely just fucking baffled by the Pinball world and the IFPA. I've mostly been screaming about it on my dusty unused bsky presence because the reach is more correct but gods I wanna lay this out in my head here.

So a rated tournament had the venue end up playing bathroom police. Since queer people had nowhere to fucking piss, not to mention the safety issues, a bunch of them left. IFPA policy is mega clear on this: if a group cannot participate due to exclusion based on, among other things, gender identity, the event is invalid. Period. This is black and white.

Due to a series of what the IFPA leadership are calling mistakes and miscommunications, they sent direction to the TD to proceed with the event. At the time they made this call, they had a justifiable defense of "We thought the issue was handled"; it was not and by now some of the impacted individuals had fully withdrawn and left. You can't undo that.

They found out later the issue was not handled and yes, impacted individuals had left. At this point, in my view, the event is entirely tainted and should be discarded. There is no other remedy. Stats are permanently corrupted by an incident that targeted and removed a group of people. The stats must be discarded.

Having found out after the event started that the issue was not handled and people had in fact left, IFPA leadership chose the route of "Well we sent directions to the TD already, we can't pull them back" -- unbeknownst to the rest of us, we thought they had just not ruled yet, so the event proceeded then protests were filed with IFPA.

They took a week to even indicate they received and were considering the protests. At that time they announced they would let the event stand due to the prior actions they took and the need for consistency. They also heavily indicated they did not wish to "punish" the TD by invalidating the event he ran when he was doing his best. It would not come out until later that direction was sent to the TD to continue.

The right thing to do here would be to say "Oh shit, we thought it was handled and made a bad call, we must retroactively invalidate the event". They did not. They stuck to their "consistency".

Somewhere in here, members of the women's advisory board came out and said they unanimously indicated cancelling the stats was the road to take, and this feedback was ignored unilaterally by the director and this alternate route chosen with no feedback.

Also sidebar here: the IFPA leadership laying this issue on the women's board first, then ignoring them when they ruled in a way that the singular director didn't like? Shitty. This was a co-ed event as I grok it; why did you go "Oh it was a trans person, women's work"? If you were seeking their input, why did you not take it?

The response was, as you expect, unhappy. A lot of people are hurt, feel unsafe, and no longer trust IFPA. In the ensuing arguments, insults, death threats, etc flew. When IFPA chose to step in and forcefully close the matter was when someone posted the public Facebook profile of the individual who initiated the bathroom policing. They called this doxxing and threatened anyone continuing to discuss the ruling with a ban.

Then, to make this decision real rich: The IFPA released the entirety of their internal conversation to "address concerns of bigotry" including unredacted RL info of people who filed protests of the event, next to their IFPA member numbers and aliases, effectively doxxing them.

In part of this release, two things became clear: that the decision to not invalidate the event was to "protect" the TD they told to continue (from what, I don't know. This isn't a punishment, it's fixing a screw-up everyone made), and that the cishet male director chose to proceed on this track to "Protect trans people from further drama" (how? I have no fucking clue because they/we're being blamed anyway).

It makes no sense and as a bit of maybe too much of a rationalist I'm despairing not at being thrown under the bus, again, because I expect that anymore-- but they did so much gods damned fucking EXTRA WORK to do this. They had many offramps to say "This was all a mistake, we're sorry, we have to fix the stats and punish the venue" and they haven't. They've stuck to this frankly ludicrous "consistency" route where they inflate the fuck-up until it's godzilla and then try to own the still swelling fuck-up without stopping the growth.

AND... AND... it hurts everyone. Your stats are fucked up, trust in your org is dying, and even cis people who don't care about queer issues who played on at the event should feel hurt by this because the IFPA is not sticking to their published policies.

Y'all are fucking everyone including yourselves while acknowledging you made a mistake but are refusing to do the one thing that'll fix it and aagh.

I despair at how stupid this situation is

egg https://terrycavanagh.itch.io/egg

Also, a version with a more detailed background that I maybe got too carried away with hehe