Full Post

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.

Just normal terf Island things. ukkk

cw:transphobia The context

https://feddit.uk/post/27973987/16868783

The feddit admins have responded in this post:

https://piefed.social/post/691666

Admin Responses

flamingo-scant@feddit.uk 17 hours ago

To be clear, there were no posts, this is about two comments by one of our users, both of which I personally pushed back on. We’re still discussing what to do, but consensus takes time.

ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk 19 hours ago

Address the comments or address the defederation?

I was the Admin who was contacted by Ada and that is a mischaracterisation of what I said. Our rules still stand that we won’t allow transphobia.

Unfortunately, as the ruling on the interpretation of the law has recently changed, we are going to have to figure out how we approach this and that is going to require a consensus amongst the Admins, and an agreement on our wording going forward.

This is going to take a bit for us to work out (although not too long, we’re getting there, I have been active on Lemmy but I don’t call the shots, and we need input from all Admins) and if, in the meantime, LBZ feel we aren’t moving fast enough and they need to defederate from us then that is obviously their right.

flamingo-scant@feddit.uk 14 hours ago

The issue is this rule in c/unitedkingdom and c/uk_politics: Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.

We’ve never had anything like the current wave of transphobia, not even those pogroms back in July, so we’ve never had to work out the exact line between ‘disappointing’ and ‘horrible’. Working out that line needs discussion with all the admins, which unfortunately takes time. Regardless of what the government says or does, transphobia is not and will never be allowed here.

  • triplenadir@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    68·
    13 hours ago

    This is a good move. I’ve reported a lot of tankie-like remarks on feddit that never get their comments removed and it’s concerning. Better to cut off any suspected tankie incubator than suffer the consequences

    So absolutely on-brand for lemm.ee:

    • hallucinating tankies everywhere
    • “not intended for non blahaj users” garfield.jpg
    • leftists are apparently the same as, and worse than, bigots

    Impeccable

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      53·
      14 hours ago

      Under that, from a dbz0 user:

      I’d rather my comm ban people that complain about ‘tankies’. It’s a useless term which can mean 100 things to different people, only serving really to divide the left.

      Is it just me, or has dbz taken a noticeable turn for the cooler in these last few month?

      • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        15·
        10 hours ago

        Dbz the user is an insufferable debatelord who barely hides their contempt for you while posturing as jaqing off. Who was rightfully banned here around a year ago due to said tendencies (that I may or may not have got them to mask off on).

        Dbz the forum is pretty chill. Little to Reddit for my liking, but not terrible.

      • tocopherol [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        21·
        13 hours ago

        Hey that’s me big-cool

        I made an account there maybe two years ago, they can generally be alright but a far cry from the glorious posters of hexbear. I only really use it these days to see what’s happening on .world and the general lib-sphere that we aren’t fedded with.

      • Kumikommunism [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        33·
        14 hours ago

        dbz has always had an almost even split of weirdos and decent people. But they get a lot of influence from the lemm.ee and .world types, so a lot of threads on there go a bad direction. Also their political (and adjacent) communities are overrun by liberals. Their climate and ecology ones don’t allow any criticism of Democrats, for example.

  • godlessworm [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    30·
    14 hours ago

    i don’t really get how all this federating and different instances and stuff works but i do love how they’re all connected and all have beef with each other. it’s fun.

    • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      33·
      14 hours ago

      Why stay federated with them when they seriously need to discuss this? What is there to work out, banning a blatant transphobe takes literally 2 seconds. Fuck these spineless cowards and their shit instance.

  • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    61·
    17 hours ago

    Blahaj: Goes out of its way to defend chasers and transphobes at the cost of a significant portion of lemmy’s trans users

    Also Blahaj: Why are we having so many issues with transphobes!

    hillary-apartment

    • corvidenjoyer [she/her]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      19·
      15 hours ago

      Feddit is the problem here so anyone who comes here would come likely come from there. Idk if we have access to feddit from here but moving from blahaj to here to access it would likely only be a temporary solution if nothing changes.

      Fish. fishe

  • AntifaSuperWombat [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    48·
    18 hours ago

    One of this guy’s posts is really flummoxing me:

    transphobia

    A woman is an adult female. A transwoman is an adult female who used to be male. It’s not difficult to grasp that they are different things. You can admit that and still believe that transwomen should be treated with dignity like anyone else.

    Personally I don’t give a shit what bathroom people use or what they want to be referred to. I’ll go along with whatever… But a woman and a transwoman are different things, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Always have been different things and always will be, no matter what the law states, now or in the future.

    So instead of doing the whole, hurr durr, trans women are women but not female, this guy does the opposite and claims that we are female but women. kbity-how

    I mean, he literally writes it out:

    A woman is an adult female. A transwoman is an adult female

    WTF?!? In over a decade of keeping an eye on transphobic rhetoric, I’ve never seen anyone pull out that kind of move. Transphobes somehow always manage to break my brain in completely new ways. ohnoes

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      48·
      17 hours ago

      They’re using transwoman instead of trans woman.

      This is used to define us as an ideological choice over a biological reality. To them a transwoman is a man identifying as a woman instead of a woman with the medical condition of being trans.

      The entire goal of doing this is to push trans people out of medicine.

      This was usually just a “mistake” made by well intentioned people up until this ruling but I’m inclined to moderate this behaviour from this point onwards in my online communities and force people onto “trans woman”. If they refuse, banned.

      It dehumanises trans women. It turns them into things instead of women with a medical condition.

      • AntifaSuperWombat [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        281·
        17 hours ago

        I used to think that people who called out the missing space, even when the writer was obviously not bigoted, were going a bit overboard. But thanks to this anomaly of a transphobe, I can clearly see why this is necessary now.

        To them a transwoman is a man identifying as a woman instead of a woman with the medical condition of being trans.

        In his next comment he used the phrase: “previously being a biological male and now identifying as a woman”, which actually makes me more angry than straight-up calling us men.

        Because what thit implies is that, even if there was some magical thing that could turn us completely cis, he would still claim that we aren’t real women because we’ve not always been this way. Just completely othering us.

        So it’s kinda nice to at least once see a transphobe acknowledge that we are biologically female, but on the other hand, JUST FUCK THIS GUY, SERIOUSLY!

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          24·
          17 hours ago

          It’s a similar behaviour that you see from self described “gold star lesbians”, except it’s gold star cis. There’s a purity to it, the implication is that one is tainted and can never be pure.

          It launders the transphobia. They can use some terms that make them look supportive while simultaneously being transphobic through the purity bs.

          EDIT: Oh and I felt the same about the “transwoman” thing until the behaviour I’ve seen since the uk ruling.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      20·
      17 hours ago
      transphobia

      But a woman and a transwoman are different things, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise

      This is straight up the same rhetoric white “feminists” had about black women during the early 20th century, transforming adjectives into exclusionary essentialist dogma

      • AntifaSuperWombat [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        18·
        16 hours ago

        His reply to the admin explaining to him how “trans” is an adjective starts off with this:

        more transphobia

        I don’t use the term cis. I use the term woman and you knew exactly what I meant. A blonde woman is a description of a woman’s hair colour and is a semantic-based response that is nothing to do with this point. You know this; it’s a foolish riposte that’s nothing at all to do with the clear and simple fact that a woman who used to be a man is not the same thing as a (cis) woman.

        I can call it a woman who used to have a penis or a woman who used to be a man if you want me to be pedantic about it. Nothing to do with hair colour, or skin colour, or anything else except previously being a biological male and now identifying as a woman.

        So you’re spot-on with the phrase “transforming adjectives into exclusionary essentialist dogma”.

        He calls us biologically female and he’s also willing to call us women, but only if he can add the dislaimer about our past. His dogmatic worldviews just don’t allow him to acknowledge us as just women, no matter what.