Iām gonna get real with you folks, weāve had way too many of these posts recently. Iāve been reflecting on this topic a lot the past few days. For me personally, I couldnāt care less about my gender identity. But just because thatās true for me, doesnāt make that true for everyone.
The beauty of the fediverse is that if you donāt like the way a particular instance or community is moderated you can simply choose another to hang out on, or create your own.
Blajah has made it pretty clear by now they will ban anyone who argues against the validity of xenogenders, in order to create a safe space for those folks. Thatās fair enough imo.
Safe spaces should be respected, and Blajahās admins/mods do not deserve abuse for creating and maintaining those spaces.
I can completely understand why Blajah users donāt want to have to constantly argue with external users about the validity of their chosen identities. Bans are one way Blajah has decided to manage that problem so that their users can experience lemmy in relative peace and safety. While it is a blunt tool and I have my reservations about preemptive bans, there are not many other options for @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, other than defederation from most instances. That would be a terrible outcome for the fediverse as a whole.
In order to help Blajah to maintain their safe space, I would like to propose, if @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com agrees and community sentiment is positive:
- that we no longer accept posts about this topic in this community; and
- we also remove previous posts on this topic from the community.
Thatās all folks, have at 'er.
Edit: thanks for all your feedback and comments. I think itās clear that the vast majority of people are fed up with this topic coming up repeatedly.
Summarizing the feedback, Iād say most folks would prefer to retain previous posts for the sake of posterity, and to serve as an example of why we donāt want anymore of these posts. Iām happy to take that on board. For those folks saying Iām a PTB for intervening in this way, Iāll just remind you that I havenāt made any arbitrary mod decisions, and Iāve consulted with db0 and the community as a whole before taking any mod actions.
I think the way to move forward with this is to acknowledge that thereās a bunch of queer and straight people who have a problem with xenogenders. Personally, I think thatās a valid perspective and shouldnāt sanctioned on our instance. But for Blajah, theyāve drawn a line in the sand over this and thatās ok too. Our instance wonāt be blocking anyone over their opinions on the topic, especially in this community where free discussion is necessary and encouraged. But safe spaces should be respected.
A lot of folks mentioned I should more more specific about the āno more posts about Blajahās mod policiesā rather than making it a sweeping and overly broad statement. I think thatās good feedback. I will amend this to "No more posts in this community about the validity or otherwise of neopronouns, xenogenders, and bans originating from Blajah about gatekeeping or transphobia. This is in recognition of Blajahās safe space policy. You are of course free to discuss those topics outside of this community.
Note that this decision isnāt about ideological gatekeeping, its about reducing the workload for our own mods and admins in trying to moderate this community, and to avoid iterating over the same old topics again and again.
Blajah isnāt getting a āfree passā over YPTB posts - if you feel they are power tripping over other issues then feel free to make a post here. But if itās a post questioning the validity of xenogenders or about Blajah bans for gatekeeping then that will no longer be allowed here. Those folks deserve a safe space on Lemmy, even if itās not a mainstream opinion.
For those folks who feel aggrieved about being accused of ātransphobiaā or āgatekeepingā over their views on this topic, I completely understand just how hurtful it can be to be unfairly (imo) accused in this way. Iāve been in the same position, and I also found it difficult to deal with. I want those folks to know that our instance does not require you to support xenogenders in order to participate in our instance. However we do require that you use preferred pronouns whenever they are specified. Thatās been a longstanding instance policy on dbzer0.
Thank everyone for your feedback.
I suppose since the bans started with Draconic Neo calling down Ada, and then Ada finding that a valid reason for a ban, not just for me, but later, separately, without being called in, also for the trans user in question, that I see it in a very āunstated approvalā light. I am also very pissed about the harassment situation, though, so I may be making connections with tunnel vision.
Yeah, I think Adaās just applying the rules. Thatās fair (orā¦ well, it makes sense why sheās doing it I mean.) Like I say, I think the goal should be building a social contract where harassing a user in that fashion is going to be seen as āholy shit whatās wrong with that personā as opposed to something normal. Right now, itās normal for some weird reason. But I think thatās a separate thing, only tangentially related to the moderation. It just happens that that person is also able to abuse the rules to involve moderators against people who theyāre having that type of disagreement with.
Would the harassment-victim have stuck around, if not for the moderation? I donāt know. Maybe so. But I donāt think the moderation is the issue.
Like I said, I see a very āWink winkā attitude of permissiveness in this, especially considering the second ban was not from Ada being tagged.
Going back to the old forum days comparison, upsetting one of the big users would always get you swarmed, even if the big user didnāt deign to publicly involve themselves.
That kind of community culture is cultivated.
Yeah, but this type of post is community cultivation, too. Itās defining a whole instance as āthe enemyā to some group of people, to some extent, and then for people on that instance, itās defining whole groups of people on āthe other sideā of the argument as transphobic fascists who donāt want to respect peopleās gender pronouns.
Like I say, youāre not wrong. I think a lot of it roots back, too, to mods just not having time to make these Wisdom-of-Solomon decisions about every single interpersonal spat that develops that involves their instance in some way. Maybe Ada should have looked over the conversation with RatInAHat and gotten back to the reporter and said, āYou know what? Thatās clearly not transphobia. I get what you mean but Iām not going to take any action here. Please chill out and stop harassing that person.ā Maybe she should be carefully weighing whether Dragonfucker really needs their pronouns respected, whether someone who doesnāt is really going to impact the community negatively in any way. But then, some exceptions having been carved out, now sheās suddenly in charge of making all these little corner-case judgement calls for everybodyās little issues. And now some fraction of the community is yelling at her because in their mind sheās betrayed them. And, of course, even if she does it perfectly, the trolls will find some new weird little edge case to test the boundaries with, always with a bunch of accounts (some of which are perfectly real people who are just impassioned about the issue for one reason or another) yelling all the time about how sheās doing terrible and they need to quit and find a new server. Itās too much. Itās just nonstop.
I have no idea what the real solution is. I do think having a social contract in place where something like DraconicNEOās combative posts to RatInAHat would be seen as wild and unreasonable by everyone involved would be a good start. I think a lot of it starts with defining good behavior in terms of, well, good behavior, instead of in terms of āI belong to the right grouping so shut up and do what I say.ā But itās just tough to develop that on Lemmy, honestly. The modern internet, Lemmy included, has adopted some traditional features that are almost tailor-made for producing toxic interactions. I think the only reason why everything isnāt like this, is that the vast majority of people really arenāt cockheads, and mostly just want to talk about anime or whatever and mostly be nice to each other.