For some reason every conversation about this simple rule gets way too toxic
There’s definitely some additional nuance (like a pronouns in bio/username situation) but this should cover the broad needs of anyone who is approaching this with good faith.
You're viewing a single thread.
AND HOLY SHIT does it get toxic. for some reason there’s no will for even this basic level of nuance. currently watching an entire anti-blahaj hate crusade over a simple misunderstanding where the left and the right conclusions of the chart got conflated as though they are the same thing.
then i tried to help clarify and got called insults.
just… so sad :(
I think one of the issues is that several of the people involved in that crusade were also banned from blahaj.
People tend to not disclose their conflict of interest.
That’s a very probably true analysis :(
Relevant meme post of what brought on a lot of those bans for onlookers.
Could you please tell the context behing that post?
first three paragraphs of this history post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/12094663
Dare I ask?
Edit 3: I've been trying to talk to her most of the day. It's not proving fruitful. I'm holding out hope for her but she's just continuing to tantrum.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37755294
Short version: elder queer makes post replies to a post on beehaw asking if it's actually okay to stick with they/them pronouns for everyone because OOP'w autistic brain discards gender as irrelevant information (like how you cant remember your dreams or what you had for breakfast last week), so she tends to forget people's pronouns. This caused OOP to accidentally misgender someone who thought she knew their pronouns, and she's worried about hurting other people's feelings. OP angrily insists that they/them is how you address people you don't know the gender of, full stop, and then goes on a rant about how kids these days are little babies etc. Then a mod saw that post, interpreted this as gatekeeping who gets to be nb, and banned her from all of blahaj.zone.
To be clear, she is being an ass there throwing a big tantrum over getting banned. I think she will calm down soon. This seems like the
BTW, I also have this problem, Ive just learned to do a better job of hiding it because for some fucking reason when transphobes (and traumatized trans friends) hear me ask "I forgot X's gender, what was it again?" they hear "Oh no, the trans-genderism and the pronouns is so confusing, they should stick with calling themselves by their peepee and vajoojay like the founding fathers intended" and then i wake up the next day with no friends. So I've just learned to not ask for help and correct myself when i fuck up. It was also hard to learn that the apology has to be through your immediate actions by immediately correcting yourself and moving on; it is so easy to panic and apologize like you just ran over their cat, but dramatic apology + autistic RBF = what looks like passive aggressive sarcasm.
I get why this happens, and I can't be mad at trans people for being traumatized by all the transphobes. After the 3rd or 4th time you find out someone you thought was your friend secretly wants to call you a slur, you start getting paranoid. And more importantly for this subject, if someone told me that our mutual friend X misgendered someone, I am immediately blocking X's number, passing the word on to my friends, and shunning X for the rest of their life, no questions asked because that's how transphobes should be treated.
Edit: forgot she said she is a lesbian. Changed the pronouns
Edit 2: thank you kind commenter for pointing out that OP was one of the commenters on the beehaw post, not the poster. Read the comments, she came across as an old yelling about how kids these days are too soft. Edited my summary to reflect this.
Ah yeah. I banned her. Not because she defaults to they/them, but because she was victim blaming queer folk as the cause of their own oppression, and using a lot of thinly veiled insults against gender diverse folk
And for what it's worth, I'm almost certainly a similar age to her
Aren't you afraid of just creating an echo chamber where no criticism is possible at all?
You can disagree with their idea of what the effect is of people being (perceived as) overly sensitive to pronouns, but isn't it a topic that should be discussed in the queer space, and shouldn't there be room for such points of view?
If they'd be personally attacking people, i can get giving them a temp ban a few times and see if they learn how to behave, but perma banning fellow queers from your queer discussion space because their opinions don't match yours really doesn't sound like a good basis for a heatlhy space to talk about queer issues.
And great that you're similar in age survived being young and queer better, does that invalidate their experience?
Aren't you afraid of just creating an echo chamber where no criticism is possible at all?
In a world where we are being erased, attacked, harassed and turned in to political footballs, where every major social media platform has explicitly green lit attacks and harassment on us, concerns over “echo chambers” aren’t even on my list.
Bigotry is bigotry. It has no place here. The user in question wasn’t banned for defaulting to they/them. She was banned because she was actively blaming the victims of transphobia for the transphobia they received. She isn’t gender diverse herself, she is a cis woman who decided that the people asking for their pronouns to be respected are the real cause of the bigotry we face.
On top of that, she also threw a lot of comments that made it clear what she really things of gender diverse folk. “ attention seeking brats”. “ Younger queers need faux outrage to feel important”, “ if some chud gets all hissy about their pronouns”. “ As a cis lesbian who’s gender nonconforming, I’ve spent years putting up with their pronoun based faux “oppression” temper tantrums out of an effort to be “accepting” only to watch larger society completely flip on us”
tl;dr - a cis woman victim blaming gender diverse folk and gatekeeping them at the same time got banned.
And great that you're similar in age survived being young and queer better, does that invalidate their experience?
No, age doesn’t invalidate alternative perspectives. That was the very point I was making. The user in question was using her age as an “elder queer” to invalidate the younger queer folk. She clearly included me in the “young queer” category in some of her coments. I pointed out my age to highlight that being an “elder queer” that has been exposed to awful shit isn’t an excuse to invalidate folks.
She isn’t gender diverse herself, she is a cis woman who decided that the people asking for their pronouns to be respected are the real cause of the bigotry we face.
They way i read it their point, it was about people being aggressive in having their pronouns being respected, even in situations where there's clearly no malice or when their pronouns just aren't known. I have no clue if that's actually happening, but if it is, i can imagine that's not very benificial to the cause.
But yeah, they do seem to generalize too much, and then blame everything on the next generation. why don't you just ban them for a week, and send them a message that while there might be something to their point, generalizing the heck out of it and blaiming the new generation for everything isn't the solution either, and not the best way to approach this discussion.
Maybe a bit of empathy an genuine feedback can make them a good faith contributor that has similar experiences in their life?
They way i read it their point, it was about people being aggressive in having their pronouns being respected, even in situations where there's clearly no malice or when their pronouns just aren't known
Yes, that’s what she’s angry about, but it’s not why she was banned.
why don't you just ban them for a week, and send them a message that while there might be something to their point, generalizing the heck out of it and blaiming the new generation for everything isn't the solution either, and not the best way to approach this discussion.
Because then she just comes back and slips under the radar, and I have no way of knowing if anything is changed, unless I follow up on it. If she wants to access the instance, she can approach me and we can talk about what it will take. It’s permanent in the sense that it won’t automatically expire, not in the sense that it can’t be removed.
Maybe a bit of empathy an genuine feedback can make them a good faith contributor that has similar experiences in their life?
You are more than welcome to make that attempt and have that discussion, however, in my experience, mods and admins reaching out after bans to try and have these conversations don’t change opinions, they just further inflame the sense of injustice the person is feeling.
I don’t have the resources or will to try and manually talk around every person who throws around bigotry for what they believe are genuine reasons, nor to expose the rest of the community to gatekeeping whilst they “work through it”. And honestly, most folk who feel as strongly as she does aren’t open to being talked around in any case.
Yeah, the more I try to talk with her, the more obvious it is that she's not willing to stop projecting. I hope she sleeps on this and realizes she's being closeminded.
Important detail: the person who posted that question isn't the one who got banned, it was one of the commenters
Ah, missed that.
Edit: they just replied to my comment on their post. They're still ranting about the baby gays being soft. Smh
see my comment history if you are truly interested. fair warning: it’s fucken bad.
