- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- fediverse@lemmy.world
I’ve only been on Lemmy a few days and I’ve already witnessed a lot of thinly veiled transphobia, anything from people dismissing the existence of trans people, to trying to claim we are predators. I’ve also seen people downvoted in the general communities for expressing trans support, or seemingly for no reason other than simply being openly trans or visibly queer. I know it’s an ongoing effort to moderate transphobia on Lemmy, and the fediverse as a whole. We have to also address mentions of thinly veiled transphobia and transphobic users. Transphobia isn’t just a differing opinion, it is a dangerous hateful sentiment which causes harm to vulnerable people and it needs to be addressed, at the instance and community level. We need to put in the effort to identify transphobic dogwhistles and language used by transphobes to eradicate this type of behavior from our communities and servers alike.
Some people will argue that the light stuff isn’t something to worry about, but that’s not true. This is a tactic they use to blend in with normies and make them think that nothing they are doing or saying is wrong. It’s what transphobic right-wing YouTubers and Facebook users do to avoid being banned for hate speech. We are better than these corporations though, Fediverse is run by communities and for the users, we should not let these things slide as easily as Corporations do, they’re in it to make money, we… We’re in it to create a community for the users. Part of that means kicking out those who don’t have all our best interests at heart.
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This is why this explicitly trans protective instance does not allow downvotes and bans transphobe, even the “just asking questions” type, and the people that excuse it
Thanks for being there for us 🫡
Yeah, we need more instances to do this. People who undermine our right to exist represent an existential threat to our existence. No matter how innocuous it seems at first glance.
This may be of importance to consider. When those in power are bigoted, people feel safer expressing it themselves.
I’m not sure how relevant that is, considering most of the accounts I’ve seen doing this are from lemmy.world, I’ve seen some doing it from .ml but most are from .world.
Nutomic is a core Lemmy developer. While their actual admin power is limited to .ml communities and users, their role in the development and future of Lemmy gives them legitimacy and undeserved importance on other instances.
Even if you don’t believe that Nutomic’s status and personal attitude around trans individuals subtly influences the whole Lemmy community, consider that a large part of Lemmy rests on Nutomic’s goodwill and professionalism. For example, if a change to add pronouns to user pages is ever rejected, can you trust that it was for a legitimate reason when the people who have the final say are transphobic?
Good point, even though their power is limited to their instances they can make subtle changes to annoy or frustrate Lemmy usage for LGBTQ people, or refuse changes that could make it better for us, including pronoun tags, or vote transparency. Though while I can see how they can cause issues for us indirectly, the issues I mentioned seem to be more so the responsibility of the admins of Lemmy.world and the moderators of the communities there.
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I’m not in any way supporting or justifying their transphobic views, but having them and using them to influence open source development are 2 different things.
My views define my choices. If I hated the flavour of coffee, I wouldn’t drink coffee. I would say no if you offered to buy me a coffee. I would avoid coffee-flavoured desserts. If I had an influence on a community space and made a decision that beverage-related discussions about other caffeinated drinks were acceptable, but not coffee, you could not argue in good faith that my personal views did not have a bearing on that.
Having a bigoted view is never acceptable. Such people should not have an influence on communities, particularly when the group or groups they are bigoted against exist. Bigotry is hate, and hate is unacceptable. And hate is a very strong emotion for very weak and pathetic people, and it most certainly influences action, as the strength of the emotion is the only thing about them that makes them feel strong.
Being hateful and acting on hate are exactly the same thing, because that is what hate motivates you to do.
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This is a lie: “Yes, I hate people, but I don’t let it influence me.”
This is because: Hate is how you see other people.
If I see you as less than human, I will treat you as less than human.
Folks this is what should happen in any decent Lemmy instance or community, someone posts transphobia apologia and the comment where they did it is removed. That is the bare minimum of what should happen. They should also ideally be banned from the community. This is an example of communities doing what is necessary to protect minority groups, as well as not letting their communities become safe-spaces for intolerance (AKA, Nazi bars).
They should also ideally be banned from the community
They have ban banned from all blåhaj zone based communities
That’s good, though it’s also concerning that he moderates quite a few communities, and could easily use that power against people like us, might be a good idea to dissuade people from using those communities on his profile, or even just remove them entirely from the instance. Transphobic people suck, transphobic mods like him are worse.
Report them. Transphobia violates the Lemmy.World ToS 1.2. If the community mods don’t handle it, then report it to an admin.
Will it reach the admins there if I’m on a different instance? I’m not exactly sure how reports federate but I heard admins on other servers can’t see them, or won’t always see them.
It will reach both the moderators of the community where it was commented/posted and admins of the instance where the account is made.
Oh, it goes to the account’s instance admins, not the community’s instance admins? That explains a lot.
Yeah, it’s both: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4286
I had a lil dum dum moment. Lol
That’s good, the more who receive the reports the better, and the more likely it is something will be done.
Wait, something like that didn’t even cross my mind and now I’m questioning myself… Give me a moment to look it up on my phone. Will report back if I get the answer…
You can also just DM an admin directly if there is an issue with a mod
considering most of the accounts I’ve seen doing this are from lemmy.world
Ah, that explains (in part) why I haven’t seen very much of this myself. Their instance is failing to properly federate comments and votes, so I often don’t see comments from LW users unless I come across a post that’s a week old—or they reply to my own comments, in which case I see it a week later.
I haven’t noticed that, it seems to be working fine from where I am. People were able to respond to me and vote just fine, I commented in a Lemmy.world thread the other day.
No, it’s only an issue with instances that are geographically a long way away from them because Lemmy sends one action at a time, so if the round trip time of sending and acknowledging receipt of an action (a comment, post, vote, etc.) is longer than the average speed at which actions are done, the backlog builds up and federation falls behind. It’s a problem for my instance hosted in Australia, and it was a problem for the NZ instance until they developed a hack that lets LW send its federation messages to a proxy in Europe that sends them batched to NZ as a workaround.
I guess that makes sense. I’m not sure where discuss.online is but I guess it’s close to Europe, closer than aussie.zone is at least.
I had a quick look at your instance with traceroute and it seems to be hosted in the US. Which matches up well with the administrator being (according to his bio linked in the sidebar) American.
Yup. I don’t feel comfortable using my one account where I am openly trans on any trans or queer non related communities because unfortunately transphobia is too rampant.
Damn, I though lemmy was more open to you folks and it’s sad to see that I was simply missing what’s going on. :(
As a mod i see more things than most people do
Like I know that what you and your community goes through is just as bad as any other oppression in the world, but at the same time it is kind of funny that transphobes are so afraid of you because they might want to have sex with you.
It’s the craziest shit, and if it weren’t so dangerous and sad and fucked up it would be so empowering.
i definitely wouldn’t say that’s the primary motivation behind transphobes’ reasoning. In my expierence it’s the upsetting of an entire worldview they were raised in and what they were taught as the truth their whole lives being false. Hell, just even being unable to cope with nuance and gray areas in the natural world.
That is a good point that I hadn’t considered.
I hear this a lot and I wonder how Lemmy or even the Fediverse as a whole got that status?
I don’t see anything that would make the Fediverse a safer place, except for the fact that the software itself, allows for the creation of closed communities.
As soon as you open up your community to the rest of the Fediverse though, you are at the mercy of the rest of the internet, that unfortunately includes assholes.
Now, as a Lemmy administrator myself, I can fortunately say that I haven’t experienced any transphobia from my users or have transphobia reported by my users. But do note that I am only talking about actual reports made by users. If it hasn’t been reported, I am not aware of it.
I’m sorry to hear that, genuinely. I hope we can build a more inclusive environment going forward.
Sorry to hear indeed 😔
It’s unfortunate that it must be like that, people like us should be able to feel safe being who we are and not have to hide and pretend to me something we aren’t. That’s why it’s so important that this problem be dealt with on a large scale, by instance admins across the fediverse.
I find this very interesting, I thought of people on Lemmy as generally more open and less… bigoted, so this comes as a rather unfortunate surprise, thank you for pointing out :(
There’s a very strong libertarian bent and that can often go antisocial.
or in the case of .ml, a tankie bent that skews authoritarian and right-wing on many social / cultural issues
They love to hate the “left” which is weird since people on the left would be most likely to accept what they argue for.
tankies hate liberals (who they think of as to the right) and think of themselves as the only true “left”; to be fair I agree with the first part, that liberals are not well characterized as left-wing; I just disagree with the last part, I think authoritarianism is contrary to leftist values like egalitarianism.
Yeah, many people here are way less open than you’d otherwise think.
transphobia on the Internet? gasps
no but really the best thing we can do is to stand up for ourselves and our community members and act in good faith, unfortunately even on lemmy there are massive divides in the trans community, but I know there are very many smart and wonderful individuals here that may convince fence sitters just by being who they are, so thanks yall
meant to post on lemmy.ml, editing and reposting
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You are describing people in the community, please don’t overgeneralize based on your experiences. Also please don’t badmouth people trying to be helpful when it comes to questioning gender identity, I know some people can come off as a bit pushy, me too sometimes, but most of us do it out of love and a desire to help.
