Update: In light of the programming.dev update here https://programming.dev/post/8399272, the defederation is no longer going ahead.
However, something more needs to be said. Even here on Blahaj, some of our users took issue with the choice to defederate over this issue.
So I would like to give some background and context.
Blahaj Zone exists, because both Kaity and I left mainstream social media to escape transphobia. Reddit, with its lackluster approach to fighting transphobia, and twitter, with its outright celebration of transphobia pushed us here, to the fediverse, and to create Blahaj Zone and Blahaj Lemmy.
To that end, we will continue to treat transphobia seriously. Our goal is to create a space where gender diverse folk can exist and let our defenses down a little, where we don’t have to worry about getting dragged in to an argument with a transphobe, or a bad faith actor “just asking questions”.
If you are looking for a more reddit like experience, where in the interest of increased engagement, we let low level transphobia slide, and push responsibility for dealing with it on to community mods and individual users, then you will likely not be happy with blahaj going forward. If you choose to stay here, understand that we may defederate again in the future over similar issues.
The choice is yours.
======
It has recently been brought to my attention that the lead admin of programming.dev is engaging in ongoing transphobia.
You can see the conversation in question here https://programming.dev/comment/6131539
For that reason we will be defederating from programming.dev in 48 hours.
There are only three communities on that instance used by small number of our users, so this won’t have a big impact, but if you are one of those users, you will need to use an alt account on another instance if you wish to access the communities.
This isn’t that.
This is the lead (cis) admin of a Fediverse instance telling trans people that a Potter game is “the opposite of transphobic” and then arguing with trans folk about it, diminishing the relevance of their pronouns as a side issue, and calling trans folk “insane” for having an issue with the game.
The hexbear pile-on clearly got to them, but that’s not an excuse for the other behaviour. I need to know that other admins will deal with transphobia even when it’s hard, not that they’ll resort to it when they’re frustrated.
Having read the thread I really don’t think the programming.dev admin was being transphobic. I know I’m cis so I’m less likely to see transphobia, and I am more lenient with my judgement, but it really looks like they were at worst abrasive or indifferent towards the sensitivities of the issue at hand, and not outright transphobic.
Taking into account that this type of behavior is common in tech debates and that they have explicitly shown their support for trans people elsewhere, I believe that they are not transphobic, just bothersome to you guys in this debate topic because of how important it is to you to treat it with higher respect than some random topic.
Removed by mod
I appreciate the input but you’re going to get massacred.
Meanwhile they have 50 pts of people who agree
It feels like I’ve seen these exact words a thousand times before
Tell me more, cis person from another instance, how the queer people should run their instance
Welp… I knew this wouldn’t be productive. Just trying to respectfully provide an alternative opinion. Don’t dismiss others because of who they are, dismiss them because of what they say. If what I say is wrong then you’ll have a good reason to dismiss me without resorting to my gender identity.
Edit: To be clear, you can run this instance however you want, and nothing I say can take that away from you. I just think you’re acting on faulty information, so the result of this defederation won’t align with your intentions.
I have been managing communities online and offline for decades. I am also a member of the minority group impacted by this issue.
You do not have the same lived experience or familiarity with the issue at hand
When I tell you that I’m acting in an informed and considered way, I hope you respect that.
I am also in talks with an admin from programming.dev to try and resolve this.
I appreciate that your comment was made in good will, but implying that I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m somehow failing to understand the topic at hand is not helping anything
So, I’m not the person you’re replying too, nor am I a member of this minority group, but I do consider myself an ally. I do not personally know how offensive what was said is so I won’t comment saying “it’s not that bad” or anything of the sort.
But this is a thing I’ve seen in leftest communities where we don’t know when to use the carrot vs when to use the stick. I’ll admit I’ve said things in hindsight I feel awful about. But I’ve corrected that behavior because my friends knowing my good intentions lead me to be a better person. Here and like other similar communites however instead of talking to people in good faith to try to correct their behavior instead choose to punish and ostrisize them.
I don’t know what your admin team’s chat with the programming.dev admin team looks like, but I hope it can be resolved. I’ll be very disapoinyed with my admins if it can’t and will leave in solidarity.
Being respectful would have had you stop right there. Instead you decided to continue and blame the “oh so sensitive trans people” for rightfully calling out shitty behavior.
I have been respectful by staying out of top-level discussion to give your voices primary visibility and by qualifying my statements with my identity so that you can choose to value or discount them as you see fit. But I believe diversity of opinion is critical to making important decisions, so I have provided some. Let’s not waste any space getting personal when there is nothing more to say here that would be useful for the purposes of this overall thread.
Being permissive of shitty behaviors and transphobic attitudes while being dismissive of the concerns of the people who are targeted by these behaviors is not good “diversity of opinion.” I’m sorry you feel that I’m dismissing your opinion, but maybe you should reconsider the way you tell queer people how to handle bad actors.
Valid, I’ll do a self-eval of my approach later. However, there is something that I need to address first:
My point is that their behaviors aren’t, in fact, transphobic*, just insensitive to the weight that the topic demands (which you could call shitty). I’m not dismissing people’s concerns-- I think it’s right to be vigilant when you see potentially transphobic comments-- I just think that once you evaluate the source of that concern it turns out to be not the issue that it may appear to be. Causing emotional turmoil without good reason is in itself bad, but also not transphobic.
* with the exception of telling a trans person that her pronouns are unimportant, which I won’t defend
Edit: You know, I added that asterisk after I reviewed the thread, but I realized now: how can I defend the admin here if there is actually something like this? Sure, it’s based on ignorance and not hate, but given that and his generally insensitive approach, and his position of power on the instance, it does make sense to consider defederation. I’ll leave you to it, sorry. I do think that as he’s otherwise an ally and he didn’t do this out of hate, it may be best not to defederate-- but that’s not a decision I should or can make for your community.
But this isn’t what happened. He said that it isn’t reasonable to get offended at being referred to as “they” because not all clients show names the same way, and there’s no reasonable way for him to know what pronouns to use.
Hey, good on you.
You’re assuming bad faith instead of remembering Hanlon’s razor. programming.dev’s technical admin is not your enemy.
When confronted with something he did wrong, he chose to double down.
We know what kind of person he is.
What exactly did he do wrong? I’m super confused about what’s transphobic about the mod’s responses, other than that they disagreed with what a trans person (from hexbear no less) was saying
All the Harry Potter stuff aside, he was called out for using the wrong pronoun for someone. That’s fair, it happens. A normal person just apologizes and moves on.
Our friend gets instead decides to get all “trans people are too sensitive and this is why no one likes you”. That’s a pretty big yikes.
The fact that he was baited into it (because, let’s be fair he totally was) is no excuse. It’s some pretty horrific shit to say for a supposed “ally” (which is a total bullshit term anyway. We know what it’s worth when things get tough).
If he actually said “trans people are too sensitive and this is why no one likes you” I’d be right there with you. He didn’t say that, though. Maybe that’s what it meant, but it’s not the read I got. He said that getting offended at him [for making a mistake] was not helping their case.
Yeah, he should have handled it differently, but it’s not “trans people are too sensitive and this is why no one likes you”, it’s “we’re in an argument and you’re getting upset at me for something I couldn’t have known.”
Because she didn’t just tell him her pronouns, she accused him of misgendering her intentionally, in a discussion where they’re already attacking each other back and forth so it easily reads as another attack to someone who’s not used to being told pronouns.
And I mean fuck, maybe he’s really a monster beneath all of that. But I don’t think that what we’ve been shown is enough to condemn him and know what type of person he is. It certainly isn’t enough to condemn an entire instance in my opinion.
Maybe I give people too much credit, but defederation is a big deal and I haven’t seen people talking about other instances of transphobia either from this admin or other people on the instance, so it seems like there’s a good chance that it’s a miscommunication.
Oh I agree with most of this. If you look up my top comment, I don’t support defederation over this. This is something that needed to be handled at the community mod level.
He’s not a monster. He’s just a normal guy. He reacted poorly and he has some low hanging fruit in personal growth roadmap he can take care of. But I’d be lying if I said I haven’t done similar things online and worse, albeit in different contexts.
In the end, it comes down whether you trust the instance admins as a whole and the instance administration processes. I don’t get the impression that he operates as a dictator that abuses admin rights to settle personal slap fights. I get the impression administrating programming.dev is a team effort.