cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/25042034
This post is “FYI only” for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the “adult human female” dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and “civil disagreement” on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to “sort it out through discussion and voting”. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little “sorting out” has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
Defederate an instance because of a single problematic user doesn’t feel right.
But also deferating an instance because their admins don’t comply their own rules doesn’t feel wrong.
Read the “offending” text:
https://sh.itjust.works/post/36737764/18213591
This is hardly transphobia.
One of the responses in that thread had the right idea
If you read the message that way and substitute the gender component for racial equivalents, I’d love for you to explain how the message isn’t racist. And I’m sure there would be plenty of “moderate whites” that would have gladly explained it to me back then too.
The end result of your line of thinking is that one cannot recognize their own ethnicity as that would be racist.
It would be like you telling an ethnic Lemkos that it’s racist for them to claim they are not white.
Seperate but equal, ey buddy?
Where does it say that? Please cite the exact part that calls for “separate” approach.
Be clear and specific.
Funnily enough, nobody cares about your opinion. You’re welcome to make whatever decisions you want, just like the people on Blahaj can say that is transphobia.
Depends - many people would say that not including transwomen in the category of “women” (without qualifier) is transphobia, and the comment literally says:
So the comment is basically arguing that “women” should only be used to mean “cis women”, which some might (perhaps rightfully) consider transphobia.
I’d argue it wasn’t defederated because of one user, it was defederating because of a fundamental disagreement in moderation policies.
The one user could’ve been saying anything people could find deplorable. It was that the admin chose to be hands-off about it that pulled the trigger.
Which is a good thing, in that servers are allowed to decide how they want to handle moderation, and other server owners are allowed to decide if they accept that, or if they expect the moderation will lead to continued problems of the same vein down the road. The fediverse working as intended.
Well said. It’s curious how marginalized people’s decisions to protect themselves are always up for debate. If someone doesn’t agree with this moderation decision, cool, don’t use Blahaj.