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.

  • @PugJesusEnglish
    2•3 hours ago

    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.

    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!

    Hope that answer was straight and masculine enough for ya.

    I don’t like sports and I’m not particularly traditionally masculine, but thanks for the stereotyping.

    • @[email protected]
      5•3 hours ago

      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.