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.
Language is imprecise, but definitions should be precise. Because reading that article is very confusing when sex and gender are constantly being mixed up. People who are confused, like me, are then accused of being “transphobic”, but how are we supposed to understand when even the definition mixes things up? Not everybody wants to have a similar discussion as we just had, in order to somewhat understand what’s going on.
Reading the wikipedia article confuses people even further. The comment that caused defederation looks very much like the person read the wikipedia article which states “A woman is an adult female human” and continued down that path. In fact it’s even the very first thing they say.
It is complicated and messy, which is why, if it doesn’t directly concern you, maybe the correct thing to do is to not weigh in with your opinion.