Last Thursday, at a Philadelphia JavaScript Developers meetup held at Guru’s Center City HQ, web developer and designer Melody Starling delivered a 15-minute talk before a room of technologists on how to create lo-fi hip hop beats using the output of the JavaScript package manager install.

The day after Starling delivered their talk, a transphobic comment hit the email inboxes of 1,901 members of the group, including Starling, who is trans.

In the message, an attendee by the name of Scott O’Connor railed against organizers for promoting “satanic values” by allowing Starling — referred to by O’Connor in the note to as an “abomination of God” — to give a presentation. O’Connor, a self-described Phoenixville resident who signed up for the event to “meet other JAVA SCRIPT (sic) programmers in the region,” went on to call organizers a disgrace to society, and ended the hate speech rant by complaining about the non-gendered bathrooms at Guru.

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