Iām gonna get real with you folks, weāve had way too many of these posts recently. Iāve been reflecting on this topic a lot the past few days. For me personally, I couldnāt care less about my gender identity. But just because thatās true for me, doesnāt make that true for everyone.
The beauty of the fediverse is that if you donāt 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. Thatās fair enough imo.
Safe spaces should be respected, and Blajahās admins/mods do not deserve abuse for creating and maintaining those spaces.
I can completely understand why Blajah users donāt 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.
Thatās all folks, have at 'er.
Iām speaking in the general, with dragon as the example used because drag is largely the focus of contention.
The next paragraph, āThe rule, and the argument behind it, is about pronouns. And it isnāt 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.ā covers that. I was addressing the rule, and blahaj, not drag.
It hasnāt been blahaj policy that Iāve seen that dragon is a gender, only that you have to treat peopleās pronouns and genders with respect.
Itās one of those where we donāt 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 donāt feel like digging that shit up.
Thank you for this. Itās nice to see that Blahaj is defending all gender identities and not just pronouns.
Ehhh, what that screenshot shows is admins deciding that you didnāt treat pronouns with respect.
Obviously, you disagree with their assessment. I do too, really, though I have seen their argument about it somewhere to and down the various threads.
That is a different thing.
I definitely get why you donāt think itās different, but, looking at it from this side of the screen, thatās not a statement of policy, itās a reaction to their interpretation of what you said.
Against my better judgement, I went into Blahaj back around the time of The Event.
Removed: Gatekeeping
Removed: Gatekeeping
Removed, no note
Removed: Gatekeeping
Removed: Gatekeeping (that oneās literally me)
Removed: Gatekeeping
Removed: Transmed stuff
All of that points pretty firmly to disagreement with dragon as a gender as gatekeeping, not a matter of respecting pronouns.
I think where the disconnect is, is that youāre continuously, in those quotes, making declarations about what it and isnāt gender, what is and isnāt trans.
Thatās what the comments were removed for.
In those quotes, you arenāt seeking understanding, you arenāt discussing the subject, you arenāt expressing an interest, youāre saying, directly āthis is my opinion on the matter, and I refuse to consider any alternativesā
You literally say youāre drawing a line in the sand.
Thatās gatekeeping, 100%
Does it make you a transphobe? Hell no. Does it make you a bad person? Not in any way whatsoever.
But it is you doing exactly what the rule is about: telling other people that they and their gender/pronouns are yours to decide the validity of
And thatās okay, you have a right to have that opinion and draw that line. We all do.
You do see that though, right? That every quote you chose, itās you declaring other peopleās genders and pronouns invalid. It doesnāt matter whether or not it was drag. It doesnāt matter who you were talking about, you donāt very to make that decision for others
You donāt, I donāt, nobody does.
We can all have great discussions about the semantics of gender, of how pronouns function, what their role in language, philosophy, and society are. We can even make declarative statements like that if we want to. But it doesnāt change that if we expect our opinions on the matter to hold sway, weād be assholes.
I mean, cāmon you directly brought in the whole biological argument. Like, the worst possible way to address the subject matter, the claim to have a inherently superior ownership of transness because it has to be biological, and only biology matters? You have to see that thatās the exact bullshit being weaponized against trans people. Even if you didnāt mean it the same way (and I know you didnāt, I know youāre not a bigot), itās the exact worst possible argument to use.
Itās so arrogant, claiming to have not only the ability to know what is and isnāt biological, but whether or not it has validity. You directly say that youāre deciding what is and isnāt valid, for other people. I mean, are you even a doctor? Of any stripe at all. Can you back up the claim that thereās no biological mechanism at play that leads a person to have a connection to an animal that can serve the same role as gender identity?
Because thereās a ton of information about neurodivergence out there, and some of it points to there being a high correlation between trans identities and neurological differences from cis brains. The overlap between a huge range of neuroatypicality and not just trans identity, but the very otherkin related identities being objected to is there, and neurology is biology. It just is. You canāt have a brain that operates independently of its underlying biological imperatives. Itās built by DNA, RNA, and epigenetics into this network of complicated nerves that run through a meat suit, interacting with it chemically and electrically.
Thatās biology. Now, Iām with you, thereās no actual dragons that arenāt komodo. And a cat isnāt a human, nor is a human a cat. But I am not confident in saying that someoneās inner self finding expression by identifying with or as a cat isnāt biological. To the contrary, unless it only appears after disease or injury, I would say that it has to be biological in origin, even though the specific expression may be a psychological development as opposed to purely anatomical or physiological one.
While you are definitely not an enemy, not a transphobe, not a bigot, you definitely broke the rule, multiple times, and you picked your own quotes about it. If this was still about whether or not a mod action was justified, it would be totally YDI with that list of quotes.
At every step, you laid claim to the authority to decide for others whether their identity is valid.
Iām kinda beating a dead horse here because Iām a little flummoxed that you canāt see all those comments and notice that youāre doing exactly what they were removed for.
After all that, it really doesnāt matter what the specific target was, it doesnāt even matter that they are, defacto, making it clear that they accept xenogenders as valid genders within blahaj and that the rule applies to them. What matters at that point is that you had multiple comment removals and kept doing the same thing. Iād have banned you too, even preemptively because it looks like youāre making it a fight.
When did he say the second part?
It sounds like he said the first part only. That, to me, is okay. It sounds like the other people in the conversation are going beyond just stating their opinion to drawing a line in the sand, that there are absolutely no alternatives to their chosen point of view, and in fact any attempted alternatives are specifically forbidden.
Only one of them is me, the one tagged with āliterally meā.
In which case my original point is correct - that dragon being a gender is mandated by Blahaj policy or actions. Stating an opinion to the contrary is āgatekeepingā.
Apparently not, considering the removals.
Then you do agree that Blahaj policy is that dragon must be treated as a gender.
Again, most of them are not me, I picked them not as examples of what I believe, but as examples of objections that were fundamentally or exclusively to ādragonā as a gender, without significant hostility which were removed as gatekeeping - ie me attempting to prove my point that dragon as a gender is absolutely core to this whole debacle.
Southsamurai is right, you do seem to just be starting fights for no reason. How is someone being a dragon or anything else supposed to hurt you? Whatās your motivation? Whatās your goal? Why?
Legitimately, I donāt see how that can be reasonably interpreted to be about pronouns at all. My objection was to dragon as a gender. I was banned for āgatekeepingā. Redirecting that to a pronoun dispute requires a reading that I literally cannot see, not simply one I disagree with.