As someone who’s a mod for a few LGBTQ specific comms on blahaj and is in the blahaj mod chat (keep in mind that I’m not an admin btw) I can confirm that there’s been some brigading of specifically this instance and it’s users (because it’s tied for position with hexbear as biggest trans focused instance on the lemmyverse, it’s widely federated so more visible to transphobes, and the users on hexbear are basically psychotic so anyone wanting to harass trans people tends to go for the squishier target of trans people here rather than go to hexbear and get dozens of replies telling them to post pictures of their dick, sending them pictures of a pig shitting itself and calling them a “hitlerite KKKracker” that deserve to be executed by firing squad and then being off and on harassed by the bears for the next two weeks) by transphobes in the past but normally it’s just one or two people doing it at once across a load of alts and they pretty quickly get banned. Also since the admins are in Australia, sometimes it takes a while for accounts to be removed and get site wide bans because admins are asleep when trolls from Europe and America are active so the transphobic comments get seen by more people before they get ban hammered.
At one point there was a pair of tiny instances that had open sign ups and literally no moderation that accounts were just being made on with the specific purpose of harassing trans users on here but they got defederated. By now, most of the overtly transphobic people have gotten bored though and stopped doing it.
There’s also the occasional problem with the sort of “i’m just asking questions” transphobic gender critical stuff the person you’re replying to was mentioning, but because that mainly comes from people using their actual long term accounts and not just trying to drive by harass users here, once they get banned they usually don’t tend to come back; since Lemmy’s growth has slowed now, a lot of the bad gender critical people have been banned by now and there’s not many new ones coming in.
TL;DR: there’s been problems with overt and covert transphobia in the past but it’s mostly been dealt with by now but we still get the occasional thing every now and again.
Thanks foryour thorough answer. I and I’m guessing manyothers experience lemmy as a very leftist space. Therefore I was a bit surprised when the other person claimed that transphobia was"rampant".
the main kind of transphobia we see on lemmy kind of takes on a different skew than in most places bcs of the left wing nature of lemmy, so we don’t really see any overt conservative types anymore bcs they all got bullied off but what we do see is that a lot of the time now, transphobia (at least of the gender critical type) comes from users who are life long committed dyed in the wool older democrat supporters or whatever who dont really agree with trans stuff or whatever but just accept it because they think everyone deserves to live their life and they oppose Republicans attacking us. So they’ll make some faux pas about transness, be corrected by a trans user but then double down, get into an argument and then at some point just start being openly transphobic. So for instance a while ago i saw someone who kept saying he was really trans positive and woke and he didnt oppose trans rights at all, briefly make a shitty joke saying that on lemmy it was always the “leftist pronoun brigades” having shitty takes in the news threads, get (tbh kind of agressively) told what he said was transphobic, which he replied to by doubling down, and then a few replies on and he was saying that he accepted trans people but nonbinary people were all
[CW for transphobia:]
‘mentally ill basement dwellers appropriating the trans struggle to cancel people for not accepting their made up pronouns’
but yeah, transphobia is a lot less noticeable on lemmy than reddit imo, but it is still there and some of the more right wing instances aren’t particularly good about banning their transphobic users if they just use dogwhistles instead of being outright anti trans
ok. I guess I’ve been hanging out in a bit too radically based communities to experience that. That’s some seriously shitty stuff I really didn’t expect on lemmy.
Thanks for explaining that stuff. I’m seriously sorry for all the trans folks who have to endure that shit. I’m gonna be a bit more vigilant in the future.
I talked to an overtly gender critical person like, a week or two ago?? A thing of the past? Crazy.
Calling gender critical people “soft transphobia” is such a huge misnomer. They’re not transphobia-lite, they’re STRONGLY transphobic but they are very skilled at crafting arguments in a way that don’t appear transphobic to people who aren’t versed in the rhetoric.
what i meant by that is blahaj is no longer being explicitly targeted for harassment and we don’t see as many gender critical types as we used to, not that they’re gone. The problem with moderation is that we can only ban someone for transphobia once we’ve seen them being transphobic which means other people will see it too, also if someone never interacts with blahaj we’re less likly to see them to ban them in the first place, so comms on instances other than blahaj are more likely to have transphobes on. There’s also some limitations in the mod tools because mods can’t forward users to the admins for instance wide bans after giving them comm bans so we have to use a matrix chat to message the admins asking them to ban them which is clunkier and occasionally some people slip through the cracks.
Out of curiousity what was the username of the person you had an argument with and what comm was it on? Because if they still haven’t been banned or just got a comm wide ban by mistake I can message the mod chat to get them permanently banned instance wide.
But also yeah, the “soft transphobia” thing was badly phrased on my part, you’re right, i’ll edit the comment.
That person ended up deleting their account, I don’t recall their username. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t in blahaj.zone, but thanks for offering to look into it.
I hear you that mods have worked to curb transphobia on blahaj.zone, unfortunately I still see it around in my general experience using Lemmy and people like this other commenter unwittingly (or wittingly) fail to notice the red flags.
we do our best to get rid of the committed transphobes, but unfortunately there’s also far too many people in the world in general who think they’re great trans allies but refuse to notice the anti trans dogwhistle and talk down to trans people who point them out. Unfortunately, we can’t really deal with them unless we pivoted to become a siloed off walled garden instance, and honestly the will just isnt really there from either the majority of the users or the admins to do that.
If seeing these types bothers you a lot, i’d reccomend maybe checking out hexbear.net because they boot these types out at the drop of a hat, and basically just chat to each other in their own local comms - the only thing is that along with all the pro trans stuff they post they’re also very pro china and pro-veganism, occasionally anti-anarchist (despite anti anarchist sectarianism being banned and anti anarchist posts and comments getting removed and users occasionally banned for them there;s a sort of vibe that anarchism is only accepted as long as its not overtly critical of anti western countries in the wrong ways, also they have a whole thing of making fun of “reddit anarchists” which frequently bleeds over into just being plausibly deniable sectarian posting), quite anti-trot and very anti-liberal and arent really willing to budge on these positions so if that doesnt mesh with you you might not like it.
As someone who’s a mod for a few LGBTQ specific comms on blahaj and is in the blahaj mod chat (keep in mind that I’m not an admin btw) I can confirm that there’s been some brigading of specifically this instance and it’s users (because it’s tied for position with hexbear as biggest trans focused instance on the lemmyverse, it’s widely federated so more visible to transphobes, and the users on hexbear are basically psychotic so anyone wanting to harass trans people tends to go for the squishier target of trans people here rather than go to hexbear and get dozens of replies telling them to post pictures of their dick, sending them pictures of a pig shitting itself and calling them a “hitlerite KKKracker” that deserve to be executed by firing squad and then being off and on harassed by the bears for the next two weeks) by transphobes in the past but normally it’s just one or two people doing it at once across a load of alts and they pretty quickly get banned. Also since the admins are in Australia, sometimes it takes a while for accounts to be removed and get site wide bans because admins are asleep when trolls from Europe and America are active so the transphobic comments get seen by more people before they get ban hammered.
At one point there was a pair of tiny instances that had open sign ups and literally no moderation that accounts were just being made on with the specific purpose of harassing trans users on here but they got defederated. By now, most of the overtly transphobic people have gotten bored though and stopped doing it.
There’s also the occasional problem with the sort of “i’m just asking questions” transphobic gender critical stuff the person you’re replying to was mentioning, but because that mainly comes from people using their actual long term accounts and not just trying to drive by harass users here, once they get banned they usually don’t tend to come back; since Lemmy’s growth has slowed now, a lot of the bad gender critical people have been banned by now and there’s not many new ones coming in.
TL;DR: there’s been problems with overt and covert transphobia in the past but it’s mostly been dealt with by now but we still get the occasional thing every now and again.
Thanks foryour thorough answer. I and I’m guessing manyothers experience lemmy as a very leftist space. Therefore I was a bit surprised when the other person claimed that transphobia was"rampant".
the main kind of transphobia we see on lemmy kind of takes on a different skew than in most places bcs of the left wing nature of lemmy, so we don’t really see any overt conservative types anymore bcs they all got bullied off but what we do see is that a lot of the time now, transphobia (at least of the gender critical type) comes from users who are life long committed dyed in the wool older democrat supporters or whatever who dont really agree with trans stuff or whatever but just accept it because they think everyone deserves to live their life and they oppose Republicans attacking us. So they’ll make some faux pas about transness, be corrected by a trans user but then double down, get into an argument and then at some point just start being openly transphobic. So for instance a while ago i saw someone who kept saying he was really trans positive and woke and he didnt oppose trans rights at all, briefly make a shitty joke saying that on lemmy it was always the “leftist pronoun brigades” having shitty takes in the news threads, get (tbh kind of agressively) told what he said was transphobic, which he replied to by doubling down, and then a few replies on and he was saying that he accepted trans people but nonbinary people were all
[CW for transphobia:]
‘mentally ill basement dwellers appropriating the trans struggle to cancel people for not accepting their made up pronouns’
but yeah, transphobia is a lot less noticeable on lemmy than reddit imo, but it is still there and some of the more right wing instances aren’t particularly good about banning their transphobic users if they just use dogwhistles instead of being outright anti trans
big oof
ok. I guess I’ve been hanging out in a bit too radically based communities to experience that. That’s some seriously shitty stuff I really didn’t expect on lemmy.
Thanks for explaining that stuff. I’m seriously sorry for all the trans folks who have to endure that shit. I’m gonna be a bit more vigilant in the future.
I talked to an overtly gender critical person like, a week or two ago?? A thing of the past? Crazy.
Calling gender critical people “soft transphobia” is such a huge misnomer. They’re not transphobia-lite, they’re STRONGLY transphobic but they are very skilled at crafting arguments in a way that don’t appear transphobic to people who aren’t versed in the rhetoric.
what i meant by that is blahaj is no longer being explicitly targeted for harassment and we don’t see as many gender critical types as we used to, not that they’re gone. The problem with moderation is that we can only ban someone for transphobia once we’ve seen them being transphobic which means other people will see it too, also if someone never interacts with blahaj we’re less likly to see them to ban them in the first place, so comms on instances other than blahaj are more likely to have transphobes on. There’s also some limitations in the mod tools because mods can’t forward users to the admins for instance wide bans after giving them comm bans so we have to use a matrix chat to message the admins asking them to ban them which is clunkier and occasionally some people slip through the cracks.
Out of curiousity what was the username of the person you had an argument with and what comm was it on? Because if they still haven’t been banned or just got a comm wide ban by mistake I can message the mod chat to get them permanently banned instance wide.
But also yeah, the “soft transphobia” thing was badly phrased on my part, you’re right, i’ll edit the comment.
That person ended up deleting their account, I don’t recall their username. And I’m pretty sure they weren’t in blahaj.zone, but thanks for offering to look into it.
I hear you that mods have worked to curb transphobia on blahaj.zone, unfortunately I still see it around in my general experience using Lemmy and people like this other commenter unwittingly (or wittingly) fail to notice the red flags.
we do our best to get rid of the committed transphobes, but unfortunately there’s also far too many people in the world in general who think they’re great trans allies but refuse to notice the anti trans dogwhistle and talk down to trans people who point them out. Unfortunately, we can’t really deal with them unless we pivoted to become a siloed off walled garden instance, and honestly the will just isnt really there from either the majority of the users or the admins to do that.
If seeing these types bothers you a lot, i’d reccomend maybe checking out hexbear.net because they boot these types out at the drop of a hat, and basically just chat to each other in their own local comms - the only thing is that along with all the pro trans stuff they post they’re also very pro china and pro-veganism, occasionally anti-anarchist (despite anti anarchist sectarianism being banned and anti anarchist posts and comments getting removed and users occasionally banned for them there;s a sort of vibe that anarchism is only accepted as long as its not overtly critical of anti western countries in the wrong ways, also they have a whole thing of making fun of “reddit anarchists” which frequently bleeds over into just being plausibly deniable sectarian posting), quite anti-trot and very anti-liberal and arent really willing to budge on these positions so if that doesnt mesh with you you might not like it.