I’m gonna get real with you folks, we’ve had way too many of these posts recently. I’ve been reflecting on this topic a lot the past few days. For me personally, I couldn’t care less about my gender identity. But just because that’s true for me, doesn’t make that true for everyone.
The beauty of the fediverse is that if you don’t like the way a particular instance or community is moderated you can simply choose another to hang out on, or create your own.
Blajah has made it pretty clear by now they will ban anyone who argues against the validity of xenogenders, in order to create a safe space for those folks. That’s fair enough imo.
Safe spaces should be respected, and Blajah’s admins/mods do not deserve abuse for creating and maintaining those spaces.
I can completely understand why Blajah users don’t want to have to constantly argue with external users about the validity of their chosen identities. Bans are one way Blajah has decided to manage that problem so that their users can experience lemmy in relative peace and safety. While it is a blunt tool and I have my reservations about preemptive bans, there are not many other options for @[email protected], other than defederation from most instances. That would be a terrible outcome for the fediverse as a whole.
In order to help Blajah to maintain their safe space, I would like to propose, if @[email protected] agrees and community sentiment is positive:
- that we no longer accept posts about this topic in this community; and
- we also remove previous posts on this topic from the community.
That’s all folks, have at 'er.
This shouldn’t even be a debate or question. This hateful bullshit against Blahaj just needs to stop and mods need to put their foot down and say enough is enough. Like if this kind of shit arguing against a queer friendly instance for being queer friendly is okay or permitted I don’t think that [email protected] should even be on our instance anymore, and our admins should just remove it.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. I hope this community can put an end to this bullshit and stop endorsing queerphobic users’ complaints.
Nobody is arguing against blahaj for being queer friendly. People are arguing against some of their members for being unfriendly to people, including queer people, among them LittleRatInALittleHat. That’s the only reason people are caring about this.
The type of mentality “you’re not allowed to criticize me, because I am X, and so unless you agree with me you’re being anti-X” is tempting but it is wrong. You might think dragon is a gender, or you might not, it is fine, but refusing to agree that dragon is a gender is not and has never been “transphobia” or in any way anti-queer.
Well, I’m gonna chime in again, because it’s a nice jumping off point.
That argument, that anyone is actually saying dragon is a gender, is simply misrepresenting all of the subject.
Regardless of one’s view on xenopronouns in specific, or neopronouns one general, the claim hasn’t been that dragon is a gender.
The rule, and the argument behind it, is about pronouns. And it isn’t really about the pronouns themselves, as much as it is about who gets to decide when someone is deserving of being respected as an individual.
We’re not biking being asked to share a belief that a person is a dragon, or fucks dragons, or that humans can be part dragon.
What we’re being asked to do is to respect pronouns or just not talk to someone. That’s it. That’s what it’s about.
The rule simply lays out what will happen if people don’t do one of those two things.
You don’t have to agree with the word being used as a pronoun meaning anything other than that it replaces traditional pronouns and makes them happy. Does it matter if they think they’re a dragon, or a tiger? No. It doesn’t matter. If the cognitive dissonance of using a word in an unconventional way is so high that you simply can’t do it, that’s okay. You have multiple options at that point.
One, you can ignore the request, and accept the consequences as they come. Fair or not, those consequences are known.
Two, you can use them anyway, and roll your eyes while you do it. Nobody will know you’re rolling your eyes.
Three, you can use them anyway, and complain about it, which may also have consequences, depending on how you complain.
Four, you can block the individual and never interact with them again, thus preventing cognitive dissonance entirely.
Five, you can choose to just not interact with them at all.
Six, you choose to not interact, but complain about it elsewhere, with possible consequences (as these posts have shown).
There’s even other options, but they’re absurdist stuff like juggling oranges while singing “I’m a little teapot”. So, you know, only entertaining to me.
Now, that’s separate from anything else, I’m only talking about the idea that one has to share a belief to be able to use someone’s pronouns. Like, my pronouns are he/him, they/them, and I’ll accept any gender neutral neopronouns as well. But I’ll accept she/her in a pinch, though I may correct those if it’s relevant. It’s why I never list my pronouns, I’m cool with almost anything, up to and including “that asshole”. That’s not even a joke, I’m fine being referred to that way as a replacement for a pronoun, or in general.
You don’t have to agree with my belief that I’m not obligated to behave in the way a pronoun implies to use any of those. You don’t have to agree with my belief that by accepting almost any pronoun that I improve myself by challenging my own concepts of gender in order to use he/him, or any of the rest.
So, why would you have to believe in anything at all to use any pronoun? You aren’t expected to log off and tell your roommate or whatever, “jeez, this cat I was talking to was a real weirdo, he’s just nuts” and you aren’t expected to log off and tell the same person “I was talking to this cat from blahaj and drag sure did annoy me” you can use any pronoun you want when you aren’t in the presence of the person requesting an individual pronoun, or any neopronouns, or a xenopronoun.
You don’t need to believe anything except that the person, the human being with their own life and needs and pains, is made a little happier by the use of it. That’s it. That’s all you have to believe.
Well put
[heavy sigh]
I’m speaking in the general, with dragon as the example used because drag is largely the focus of contention.
The next paragraph, “The rule, and the argument behind it, is about pronouns. And it isn’t really about the pronouns themselves, as much as it is about who gets to decide when someone is deserving of being respected as an individual.” covers that. I was addressing the rule, and blahaj, not drag.
It hasn’t been blahaj policy that I’ve seen that dragon is a gender, only that you have to treat people’s pronouns and genders with respect.
It’s one of those where we don’t have to agree, we just have to be nice.
Or have the admins specifically addressed the issue as a declarative, and I missed it? I do miss things ;)
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8b47330e-fe59-466e-aef5-b529ed0b05a5.jpeg
I could go further back to the whole kerfluffle this stems from, where there are more examples, but honestly, I don’t feel like digging that shit up.
“They can’t be power tripping mods because they are queer!”
No, that is stupid.
Yes, that does seem to be the consistent position in Blahaj.
Brother in Christ, imagine you had a sub where you talk about basketball and people constantly came in, not fans of basketball just saying “man, basketball? I don’t get it” but they are just using that to argue how basketball shouldn’t exist if you dare engage with that.
You’d ban those posts. Because you want your sub to be about basketball for basketball fans. Not because you want to argue with non fans about the validity of the existence of basketball.
Hope that answer was straight and masculine enough for ya.
Cool, now, how about looking around outside of that sub for people who say “Basketball? I don’t get it” to hand out bans and accuse of being Basketball-phobes? Or, in this case, an actual Basketball fan who dared question a referee’s decision? Unfortunately, the holsum basketball community decided that made them a Sports Hater and an opponent of public schooling, and RIGHTEOUSLY drove them out of town!
I don’t like sports and I’m not particularly traditionally masculine, but thanks for the stereotyping.
It’s part of the definition of “teams.” They need to assign attributes of the enemy team to you, just to make sure everyone understands that they’re on the correct team and need to be supported uncritically.
It’s part of the demonstration of the power relationship. They’re allowed to make snide comments about your sexuality and talk down to you. God help you if you try to do it in the other direction (which is of course as it should be - I’m just calling out the toxic behavior for what it is, not saying it should at all be okay in the other direction.) They’re flexing their privilege within this context.
Idk man. Pick one, or both. Like I say, once you’ve engaged yourself as officially “the enemy” according to established battle lines, people are going to feel like they’re being a good ally if they show up to do battle with you accordingly.