Transphobia in the fediverse - Discuss Online
discuss.online
I’ve only been on Lemmy a few days and I’ve already witnessed a lot of thinly veiled transphobia, anything from people dismissing the existence of trans people, to trying to claim we are predators. I’ve also seen people downvoted in the general communities for expressing trans support, or seemingly for no reason other than simply being openly trans or visibly queer. I know it’s an ongoing effort to moderate transphobia on Lemmy, and the fediverse as a whole. We have to also address mentions of thinly veiled transphobia and transphobic users. Transphobia isn’t just a differing opinion, it is a dangerous hateful sentiment which causes harm to vulnerable people and it needs to be addressed, at the instance and community level. We need to put in the effort to identify transphobic dogwhistles and language used by transphobes to eradicate this type of behavior from our communities and servers alike. Some people will argue that the light stuff isn’t something to worry about, but that’s not true. This is a tactic they use to blend in with normies and make them think that nothing they are doing or saying is wrong. It’s what transphobic right-wing YouTubers and Facebook users do to avoid being banned for hate speech. We are better than these corporations though, Fediverse is run by communities and for the users, we should not let these things slide as easily as Corporations do, they’re in it to make money, we… We’re in it to create a community for the users. Part of that means kicking out those who don’t have all our best interests at heart.

I’ve only been on Lemmy a few days and I’ve already witnessed a lot of thinly veiled transphobia, anything from people dismissing the existence of trans people, to trying to claim we are predators. I’ve also seen people downvoted in the general communities for expressing trans support, or seemingly for no reason other than simply being openly trans or visibly queer. I know it’s an ongoing effort to moderate transphobia on Lemmy, and the fediverse as a whole. We have to also address mentions of thinly veiled transphobia and transphobic users. Transphobia isn’t just a differing opinion, it is a dangerous hateful sentiment which causes harm to vulnerable people and it needs to be addressed, at the instance and community level. We need to put in the effort to identify transphobic dogwhistles and language used by transphobes to eradicate this type of behavior from our communities and servers alike.

Some people will argue that the light stuff isn’t something to worry about, but that’s not true. This is a tactic they use to blend in with normies and make them think that nothing they are doing or saying is wrong. It’s what transphobic right-wing YouTubers and Facebook users do to avoid being banned for hate speech. We are better than these corporations though, Fediverse is run by communities and for the users, we should not let these things slide as easily as Corporations do, they’re in it to make money, we… We’re in it to create a community for the users. Part of that means kicking out those who don’t have all our best interests at heart.

    • Blazingtransfem98OPEnglish
      164·
      2 months ago

      I’m not sure how relevant that is, considering most of the accounts I’ve seen doing this are from lemmy.world, I’ve seen some doing it from .ml but most are from .world.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.worldEnglish
        262·
        2 months ago

        Nutomic is a core Lemmy developer. While their actual admin power is limited to .ml communities and users, their role in the development and future of Lemmy gives them legitimacy and undeserved importance on other instances.

        Even if you don’t believe that Nutomic’s status and personal attitude around trans individuals subtly influences the whole Lemmy community, consider that a large part of Lemmy rests on Nutomic’s goodwill and professionalism. For example, if a change to add pronouns to user pages is ever rejected, can you trust that it was for a legitimate reason when the people who have the final say are transphobic?

        • Blazingtransfem98OPEnglish
          51·
          2 months ago

          Good point, even though their power is limited to their instances they can make subtle changes to annoy or frustrate Lemmy usage for LGBTQ people, or refuse changes that could make it better for us, including pronoun tags, or vote transparency. Though while I can see how they can cause issues for us indirectly, the issues I mentioned seem to be more so the responsibility of the admins of Lemmy.world and the moderators of the communities there.

          • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            141·
            2 months ago

            I’m not in any way supporting or justifying their transphobic views, but having them and using them to influence open source development are 2 different things.

            My views define my choices. If I hated the flavour of coffee, I wouldn’t drink coffee. I would say no if you offered to buy me a coffee. I would avoid coffee-flavoured desserts. If I had an influence on a community space and made a decision that beverage-related discussions about other caffeinated drinks were acceptable, but not coffee, you could not argue in good faith that my personal views did not have a bearing on that.

            Having a bigoted view is never acceptable. Such people should not have an influence on communities, particularly when the group or groups they are bigoted against exist. Bigotry is hate, and hate is unacceptable. And hate is a very strong emotion for very weak and pathetic people, and it most certainly influences action, as the strength of the emotion is the only thing about them that makes them feel strong.

            Being hateful and acting on hate are exactly the same thing, because that is what hate motivates you to do.

              • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                15·
                2 months ago

                This is a lie: “Yes, I hate people, but I don’t let it influence me.”

                This is because: Hate is how you see other people.

                If I see you as less than human, I will treat you as less than human.

          • Blazingtransfem98OPEnglish
            81·
            2 months ago

            Folks this is what should happen in any decent Lemmy instance or community, someone posts transphobia apologia and the comment where they did it is removed. That is the bare minimum of what should happen. They should also ideally be banned from the community. This is an example of communities doing what is necessary to protect minority groups, as well as not letting their communities become safe-spaces for intolerance (AKA, Nazi bars).

            • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              10·
              2 months ago

              They should also ideally be banned from the community

              They have ban banned from all blåhaj zone based communities

              • Blazingtransfem98OPEnglish
                71·
                2 months ago

                That’s good, though it’s also concerning that he moderates quite a few communities, and could easily use that power against people like us, might be a good idea to dissuade people from using those communities on his profile, or even just remove them entirely from the instance. Transphobic people suck, transphobic mods like him are worse.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        2 months ago

        Report them. Transphobia violates the Lemmy.World ToS 1.2. If the community mods don’t handle it, then report it to an admin.

        • Blazingtransfem98OPEnglish
          71·
          2 months ago

          Will it reach the admins there if I’m on a different instance? I’m not exactly sure how reports federate but I heard admins on other servers can’t see them, or won’t always see them.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        considering most of the accounts I’ve seen doing this are from lemmy.world

        Ah, that explains (in part) why I haven’t seen very much of this myself. Their instance is failing to properly federate comments and votes, so I often don’t see comments from LW users unless I come across a post that’s a week old—or they reply to my own comments, in which case I see it a week later.

        • Blazingtransfem98OPEnglish
          21·
          2 months ago

          I haven’t noticed that, it seems to be working fine from where I am. People were able to respond to me and vote just fine, I commented in a Lemmy.world thread the other day.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
            4·
            2 months ago

            No, it’s only an issue with instances that are geographically a long way away from them because Lemmy sends one action at a time, so if the round trip time of sending and acknowledging receipt of an action (a comment, post, vote, etc.) is longer than the average speed at which actions are done, the backlog builds up and federation falls behind. It’s a problem for my instance hosted in Australia, and it was a problem for the NZ instance until they developed a hack that lets LW send its federation messages to a proxy in Europe that sends them batched to NZ as a workaround.

            • Blazingtransfem98OPEnglish
              21·
              2 months ago

              I guess that makes sense. I’m not sure where discuss.online is but I guess it’s close to Europe, closer than aussie.zone is at least.

              • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
                2·
                2 months ago

                I had a quick look at your instance with traceroute and it seems to be hosted in the US. Which matches up well with the administrator being (according to his bio linked in the sidebar) American.