I’m gonna get real with you folks, we’ve had way too many of these posts recently. I’ve been reflecting on this topic a lot the past few days. For me personally, I couldn’t care less about my gender identity. But just because that’s true for me, doesn’t make that true for everyone.
The beauty of the fediverse is that if you don’t 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. That’s fair enough imo.
Safe spaces should be respected, and Blajah’s admins/mods do not deserve abuse for creating and maintaining those spaces.
I can completely understand why Blajah users don’t 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.
That’s all folks, have at 'er.
Edit: thanks for all your feedback and comments. I think it’s clear that the vast majority of people are fed up with this topic coming up repeatedly.
Summarizing the feedback, I’d say most folks would prefer to retain previous posts for the sake of posterity, and to serve as an example of why we don’t want anymore of these posts. I’m happy to take that on board. For those folks saying I’m a PTB for intervening in this way, I’ll just remind you that I haven’t made any arbitrary mod decisions, and I’ve 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 there’s a bunch of queer and straight people who have a problem with xenogenders. Personally, I think that’s a valid perspective and shouldn’t sanctioned on our instance. But for Blajah, they’ve drawn a line in the sand over this and that’s ok too. Our instance won’t 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 “no more posts about Blajah’s mod policies” rather than making it a sweeping and overly broad statement. I think that’s 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 Blajah’s safe space policy. You are of course free to discuss those topics outside of this community.
Note that this decision isn’t 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 isn’t getting a “free pass” over YPTB posts - if you feel they are power tripping over other issues then feel free to make a post here. But if it’s 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 it’s not a mainstream opinion.
For those folks who feel aggrieved about being accused of “transphobia” or “gatekeeping” over their views on this topic, I completely understand just how hurtful it can be to be unfairly (imo) accused in this way. I’ve 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. That’s been a longstanding instance policy on dbzer0.
Thank everyone for your feedback.
This shouldn’t even be a debate or question. This hateful bullshit against Blahaj just needs to stop and mods need to put their foot down and say enough is enough. Like if this kind of shit arguing against a queer friendly instance for being queer friendly is okay or permitted I don’t think that !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com should even be on our instance anymore, and our admins should just remove it.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope this community can put an end to this bullshit and stop endorsing queerphobic users’ complaints.
Nobody is arguing against blahaj for being queer friendly. People are arguing against some of their members for being unfriendly to people, including queer people, among them LittleRatInALittleHat. That’s the only reason people are caring about this.
The type of mentality “you’re not allowed to criticize me, because I am X, and so unless you agree with me you’re being anti-X” is tempting but it is wrong. You might think dragon is a gender, or you might not, it is fine, but refusing to agree that dragon is a gender is not and has never been “transphobia” or in any way anti-queer.
Well I think queer people can have any gender they want, and you just have to deal with it because it’s none of your business.
Well, I’m gonna chime in again, because it’s a nice jumping off point.
That argument, that anyone is actually saying dragon is a gender, is simply misrepresenting all of the subject.
Regardless of one’s view on xenopronouns in specific, or neopronouns one general, the claim hasn’t been that dragon is a gender.
The rule, and the argument behind it, is about pronouns. And it isn’t really about the pronouns themselves, as much as it is about who gets to decide when someone is deserving of being respected as an individual.
We’re not biking being asked to share a belief that a person is a dragon, or fucks dragons, or that humans can be part dragon.
What we’re being asked to do is to respect pronouns or just not talk to someone. That’s it. That’s what it’s about.
The rule simply lays out what will happen if people don’t do one of those two things.
You don’t have to agree with the word being used as a pronoun meaning anything other than that it replaces traditional pronouns and makes them happy. Does it matter if they think they’re a dragon, or a tiger? No. It doesn’t matter. If the cognitive dissonance of using a word in an unconventional way is so high that you simply can’t do it, that’s okay. You have multiple options at that point.
One, you can ignore the request, and accept the consequences as they come. Fair or not, those consequences are known.
Two, you can use them anyway, and roll your eyes while you do it. Nobody will know you’re rolling your eyes.
Three, you can use them anyway, and complain about it, which may also have consequences, depending on how you complain.
Four, you can block the individual and never interact with them again, thus preventing cognitive dissonance entirely.
Five, you can choose to just not interact with them at all.
Six, you choose to not interact, but complain about it elsewhere, with possible consequences (as these posts have shown).
There’s even other options, but they’re absurdist stuff like juggling oranges while singing “I’m a little teapot”. So, you know, only entertaining to me.
Now, that’s separate from anything else, I’m only talking about the idea that one has to share a belief to be able to use someone’s pronouns. Like, my pronouns are he/him, they/them, and I’ll accept any gender neutral neopronouns as well. But I’ll accept she/her in a pinch, though I may correct those if it’s relevant. It’s why I never list my pronouns, I’m cool with almost anything, up to and including “that asshole”. That’s not even a joke, I’m fine being referred to that way as a replacement for a pronoun, or in general.
You don’t have to agree with my belief that I’m not obligated to behave in the way a pronoun implies to use any of those. You don’t have to agree with my belief that by accepting almost any pronoun that I improve myself by challenging my own concepts of gender in order to use he/him, or any of the rest.
So, why would you have to believe in anything at all to use any pronoun? You aren’t expected to log off and tell your roommate or whatever, “jeez, this cat I was talking to was a real weirdo, he’s just nuts” and you aren’t expected to log off and tell the same person “I was talking to this cat from blahaj and drag sure did annoy me” you can use any pronoun you want when you aren’t in the presence of the person requesting an individual pronoun, or any neopronouns, or a xenopronoun.
You don’t need to believe anything except that the person, the human being with their own life and needs and pains, is made a little happier by the use of it. That’s it. That’s all you have to believe.
PugJesus already covered it. Just to clarify, though, because your point is perfectly fair:
I get the policy about using pronouns when you’re talking to people. It makes some amount of sense to me, I already talked elsewhere in these comments about why I can completely understand just needing to set a clear, consistent policy on using people’s pronouns regardless of anything else. Makes sense. I kind of think that when someone’s clearly exploiting that policy to mock queer people to their faces, there maybe needs to be a commonsense exception instead of going to bat for the anti-queer troll, but it’s whatever. As people have pointed out, that problem has already been solved and dealt with.
When I say “dragon is a gender,” I am talking about people who are screaming that anyone who doesn’t agree with the policy is “misgendering” or “transphobic” or a fascist or secretly yearns to start calling all these LGBTQ people slurs. It’s super weird, and dishonest. It’s divisive and stupid. And using the word “misgendering” in reference to it, which a ton of people are doing, is predicated on the assumption (never started explicitly) that dragon is a gender. And people are getting banned (PugJesus is one, LittleRatInALittleHat is one) not for ever refusing to use the pronouns to anybody in particular, but just by talking about the policy or saying their opinion on it or pointing out that dragon is not, in fact, a gender.
Your list of multiple options doesn’t really apply, since neither PugJesus nor LittleRatInALittleHat were interacting directly with anybody at all, just talking about the issue in general terms. They’ve got a right to do that, I think. Again, I get the reason for the original policy. What’s ridiculous is using that as a jumping-off point to say “If you have any disagreement with this policy, even if you’re not expressing it to me but just talking with other people about it in general, you are bad and transphobic and you need to be banned and you’re a fascist and you hate queer people and you’re not allowed to disagree with me because I have X identity and if you do, you are anti-X.”
Well put
Being queer-friendly doesn’t mean they’re immune to criticism. The issues people have with that instance have little to do with it being queer-friendly, and more to do with heavy-handed mod practices, and I think it’s incredibly disingenuous to suggest that that’s the reason why people are upset.
If I were a Blahaj user, I’d be posting about defederation from db0. The transphobia needs to end.
“They can’t be power tripping mods because they are queer!”
No, that is stupid.