Everything he’s said about trans people comes from a place of ignorance, not malice in my view.

we’re at a point with thr anti-trans hysteria where it doesn’t matter as much how you got to the anti-trans camp than the fact of being anti-trans

malice would make it worse, and would even further justify outrage, but being anti-trans due to ignorance is bad enough, especially for trans folks who are currently very vulnerable and whose rights are being stripped by majoritarian ignorance (and let’s be real: latent bigotry) weaponized by a malicious anti-trans activist minority.

It does show he is not going to learn from or sincerely apologize for his transphobic statement

Furthermore, I think it’s perfectly fine to bring up such a problematic statement from a person, no matter how old it is, for as long as it’s still relevant. Just because he isn’t making statements publicly doesn’t mean he doesn’t still believe these things, or takes actions (e.g. voting) that supports these statements.

If he had retracted his statements, gave a sincere apology and made some effort to educate himself then it would be different. Then I’d be right along with you in stating that it should just be allowed to rest.

But given that Nutomic has clearly demonstrated that he hasn’t done any of that in the time since his original statement, then it’s fair game to keep such things about his character in the public mind

Transphobia is a deal breaker for a substantial portion of the lemmy userbase. Also, other open-source communities are fiercely pro-trans, like Debian. And Ubuntu recently chastised mods for pushing the idea that transness is inappropriate for bios, supposedly because it is seen as sex-related. In this interval you say “nothing new happened”, this probably means that the person is question is at least as transphobic as they were back then. If you consider transphobes only get more and more radicalized (Rowling, Chapelle, Mace, etc), it can only be expected to get worse, so that is why I said “at least”. If he ceased to be a transphobe I suppose he would be out telling everybody, perhaps add a changelog that pronouns are canonically supported in ML. In the meantime, genocidal anti-trans rhetoric and legislation has only gotten worse, rendering his previous standing on the issue, even if stable, relatively worse from an ethical viewpoint, and if trans people under the new circumstances are more suspicious and feel less safe in the instance, they are fully justified, taking all the above into consideration. Being “as antisemitic as before” for an individual between 1938 and 1942 does not mean the same amount of antisemitism. The amount of things done to us in the surrounding environment has severely worsened, so being on the same ideological position comes with condoning a lot more cruelty against us. Because this is a prejudice and the “amount” of prejudice does not really matter when not only genocidal rhetoric is heightened, but also because right-fucking-now there is all this talk about cracking down on trans online spaces as havens of extremism. If the rest of this comment has not persuaded you yet, then this last part should be an eye opener, because being a fediverse instance admin, in this toxic social climate of intense transphobia is reason right enough for any trans people in ML to pull a reddit-exodus on them. So, yes, keeping the issue afloat is perfectly justified in my view.