The thread about dragonfucker getting banned has been honestly very uncomfortable for me to go through. I don’t know or particularly care about this user, nor do I know what drama drag’s involved in, or how much of that is drag’s fault. But I have read a significant amount of inexcusably transphobic assertions from a large number of users, many of them accusing drag of being a troll or even a disgrace to the transgender community for the unspeakably vile sin of having a neopronoun.
Like, I’m not attempting to defend drag here. People are saying that drag was probably banned for more reasons beyond screenshotting DMs, but when reading into the thread it seems to me that the only thing that everyone hates about drag is… that drag has a non-normative gender identity? And that’s somehow making a joke of the transgender community? I mean, fill me in if you feel like it, but no amount of trolling or crimes drag has commited justifies the amount of ridiculing that this person has received on the basis of drag’s gender identity on that thread. It does seem to me, as an external observer, that a large amount of users were eagerly awaiting for drag to have a less than ideal behavior for everyone to be immensely mean to drag and to claim “See? I always knew drag was just a troll! No one can possibly have a gender identity this far from what I’m comfortable tolerating!”.
It’s making me feel bad on baseline empathy alone, and neopronouns or non-binary genders aren’t really an emotionally charged topic for me. I’m cis male, lol. But seeing the unimaginably hostile reaction many have had towards this user on the basis of drag’s quirky pronoun, which literally does not hurt anybody, has made me very uncomfortable.
I have already been feeling uncomfortable on Lemmy, in general, because of this insane obsession users from certain instances have with tankies, and the disingenuity anything politics is treated because of that (and politics being such a prevalent topic on Lemmy is certainly not helping!). I don’t like how, for example, I have seen orders of magnitude more people shitting on Hexbear trolls than actual Hexbear users trolling back when it was online. But Hexbear trolls, or tankies, or whatever, are an abstract group, that is not contingent on some intimately held aspect of yourself. This drama however is targeting a specific user, a single person, who belongs in an already excluded demography, and is probably still figuring things out about dragself. It’s a whole new level of fucked up.
My mutuals from other sites, some of whom are leftists, and some of whom are trans, are wary of moving into the Fediverse and particularly Lemmy because of stuff like this. I have argued in favor of the Fediverse in the past because I’m a bit of a FOSS nut, but this I cannot defend against.
Anyway sorry for the rambling lol. The other thread made me feel bad enough on a gut level that I had to let it out. Also, for what it’s worth, I have seen enough people with non-normative gender identities to trust that OP is not, in fact, a drag alt. Not that this being the case would change much about the recalcitrant transphobia.
yeah i’ve decided to leave this community based on essentially the same thing you’ve described. i mean i know people are shitters on the wider fediverse, but i figured the places beehaw federated with were at least decent
i guess not
also, the whole thing of “bot is obviously a drag alt” smacks of the same prejudiced “only one person could have a weird gender identity, it must be the same person”
could y’all please stick to talking about how someone behaves, not how they identify? it’s not that fucking hard
politics complaint aside, your observation about people using this to complain about a neopronoun seems apt. none of the content of complaints about drag’s use of neopronouns actually seem relevant to drag’s use of neopronouns. someone trolling with neopronouns is trivially handled by just accepting the neopronouns…
someone trolling with neopronouns is trivially handled by just accepting the neopronouns
Absolutely, and I can’t stop thinking about that.
For the sake of argument, let’s take at face value the claims that drag is just some anti-trans troll that is doing the attack helicopter bit. That drag is secretly some 4channer cis dude in mom’s basement wanting to stir up some drama on Lemmy to expose hyporcrisy.
Then this troll has done an absolutely stellar job forcing everyone to show their true colors on this topic.
Drag has proven, unquestionably and beyond a shade of doubt, that Lemmy is not safe for non-binary people, not even on Blahaj. And that is despite the admin’s (in my eyes) best efforts to handle the situation.
Then, of course, there is the tiny little detail that this is a wildly bad faith assumption that requires going through a few hoops. Most of the assumption hinges on neopronouns being quirky and uncommon. And if the assumption happens to be wrong, then all this dogpiling has achieved is to wreak havoc on a vulnerable person’s mental health, and possibly even cause some trauma down the line.
I don’t care if dragonfucker needs to apologize about wronging someone else; at this point a few users absolutely need to apologize to drag as well.
Yeah, I have, and it’s honestly disgusting. But for every pig shit emoji I have seen, I have also seen hundreds of comments shitting on tankies, dunking on commenters for expressing “radical leftist opinions” that are not that radical outside of social media, shitting on the work of the Lemmy devs for being professed marxist-lenninists, or claiming that Lemmy.ml is somehow cancer on the network that needs getting rid of, because it’s nominally a tankie instance despite the sheer amount of democrat shilling, Israel apologia and NATO bootlicking you can see here.
It’s a matter of scale. I will concede that I simpatize with the more leftist parts of the political spectrum, both marxists and anarchists, but I feel like at this point I would be grossed out at Lemmy even if I was 100% a liberal. Political disagreements are fine I guess, but the way they permeate the culture on Lemmy is weird, obsessive and unhealthy, and most importantly, it comes from a very small number of instances. And it’s not the tankie ones.
The Soviet Union made being gay illegal. Marxism-Leninism has a very long history of calling queerness “bourgeois decadence”. Some tankies choose to follow in the footsteps of that history. Others just ignore it and pretend it was excusable. Tankies aren’t allies.
I debated with myself about replying to this comment because of our few messages yesterday/day before.
I decided to chime in because, despite not being terribly fond of you, your point here is very important, and valid.
I had an account on .ml, as I am very left, and everything was fine at first. I eventually got sick of the constant rhetoric of: America bad, which means China and Russia are really good, and we would all be better off living in a M-L utopia like they do there!
And look, I’m not a Xenophobe/Sinophobe/Russophobe, I think that the people of those countries are just people. Sure America bad, but it’s a bit fucked up to go from that and recognising that some of what is said about them(China/Russia) is almost certainly propaganda, to the frothing true-believer fanaticism that goes on.
There’s a lot of talk at hexbear(when I’d gone to have a look and make my own opinion of them) and some parts of .ml about 2SLGBTQ+ safe space, acceptance and protection. And at the same time through the actions of folk there and the admins/mods it was clear that it was lip service.
I moved on, and then Trump was elected again. All of a sudden you had loads these .ml accounts not only calling people enablers of the bourgeoisie, Sheeple etc, then in the next breath they are Staning Trump. On more than one occasion when I called them out on parroting the GOP lines about things, they would quote Sartre at me and say I was a class traitor.
Was a real “Masks Off” realisation for me.
Again Drag, I am hardly a fan of you, and I’m sure you’re aware of that…but you’re absolutely right here. Tankies, or at least the ones that are the most vocal, are not allies, are not even tolerant as far as I can see.
Also considering how many times in the last thread you replied to a comment that Ada had made apologising, I’m positive that they know. I feel like this thread is a bit superfluous. And isn’t doing you any favours.
Well, that comment by nutomic is certainly unfortunate, but I don’t think that’s exactly what people are thinking when they complain about tankies. The Soviet Union banning homosexuality is certainly also unfortunate, but it’s not different from what every other country on Earth was doing in the 20th century. It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization. My country also banned homosexuality, for the record, and we absolutely were not communists.
It also just happens that most LGBT people I know, by a landslide, are marxists, because it’s the logical consequence of applying to capitalism the same questioning that allows breaking free of the cisheteronorm. Sometimes economics and gender/sexuality intersect in interesting ways, and to an extent attempting to stomp out marxist ideology also often inadvertely makes the place hostile to LGBT people.
You can argue that “tankie” only refers to toxic, LGBTphobic marxists such as nutomic right here, and I mean, fair. But I’m complaining about the Lemmy community being incessantly hostile to people and communities that are outside of a very narrow worldview that you can really only find in terminally online people. 99% of the usage I have seen of the word “tankie” on Lemmy has been for this, It is keeping people out of the norm away from this platform and, as seen with the way so many users harassed drag, for good reason.
The thread about dragonfucker getting banned has been honestly very uncomfortable for me to go through. I don’t know or particularly care about this user, nor do I know what drama drag’s involved in, or how much of that is drag’s fault. But I have read a significant amount of inexcusably transphobic assertions from a large number of users, many of them accusing drag of being a troll or even a disgrace to the transgender community for the unspeakably vile sin of having a neopronoun.
Like, I’m not attempting to defend drag here. People are saying that drag was probably banned for more reasons beyond screenshotting DMs, but when reading into the thread it seems to me that the only thing that everyone hates about drag is… that drag has a non-normative gender identity? And that’s somehow making a joke of the transgender community? I mean, fill me in if you feel like it, but no amount of trolling or crimes drag has commited justifies the amount of ridiculing that this person has received on the basis of drag’s gender identity on that thread. It does seem to me, as an external observer, that a large amount of users were eagerly awaiting for drag to have a less than ideal behavior for everyone to be immensely mean to drag and to claim “See? I always knew drag was just a troll! No one can possibly have a gender identity this far from what I’m comfortable tolerating!”.
It’s making me feel bad on baseline empathy alone, and neopronouns or non-binary genders aren’t really an emotionally charged topic for me. I’m cis male, lol. But seeing the unimaginably hostile reaction many have had towards this user on the basis of drag’s quirky pronoun, which literally does not hurt anybody, has made me very uncomfortable.
I have already been feeling uncomfortable on Lemmy, in general, because of this insane obsession users from certain instances have with tankies, and the disingenuity anything politics is treated because of that (and politics being such a prevalent topic on Lemmy is certainly not helping!). I don’t like how, for example, I have seen orders of magnitude more people shitting on Hexbear trolls than actual Hexbear users trolling back when it was online. But Hexbear trolls, or tankies, or whatever, are an abstract group, that is not contingent on some intimately held aspect of yourself. This drama however is targeting a specific user, a single person, who belongs in an already excluded demography, and is probably still figuring things out about dragself. It’s a whole new level of fucked up.
My mutuals from other sites, some of whom are leftists, and some of whom are trans, are wary of moving into the Fediverse and particularly Lemmy because of stuff like this. I have argued in favor of the Fediverse in the past because I’m a bit of a FOSS nut, but this I cannot defend against.
Anyway sorry for the rambling lol. The other thread made me feel bad enough on a gut level that I had to let it out. Also, for what it’s worth, I have seen enough people with non-normative gender identities to trust that OP is not, in fact, a drag alt. Not that this being the case would change much about the recalcitrant transphobia.
yeah i’ve decided to leave this community based on essentially the same thing you’ve described. i mean i know people are shitters on the wider fediverse, but i figured the places beehaw federated with were at least decent
i guess not
also, the whole thing of “bot is obviously a drag alt” smacks of the same prejudiced “only one person could have a weird gender identity, it must be the same person”
could y’all please stick to talking about how someone behaves, not how they identify? it’s not that fucking hard
politics complaint aside, your observation about people using this to complain about a neopronoun seems apt. none of the content of complaints about drag’s use of neopronouns actually seem relevant to drag’s use of neopronouns. someone trolling with neopronouns is trivially handled by just accepting the neopronouns…
Absolutely, and I can’t stop thinking about that.
For the sake of argument, let’s take at face value the claims that drag is just some anti-trans troll that is doing the attack helicopter bit. That drag is secretly some 4channer cis dude in mom’s basement wanting to stir up some drama on Lemmy to expose hyporcrisy.
Then this troll has done an absolutely stellar job forcing everyone to show their true colors on this topic.
Drag has proven, unquestionably and beyond a shade of doubt, that Lemmy is not safe for non-binary people, not even on Blahaj. And that is despite the admin’s (in my eyes) best efforts to handle the situation.
Then, of course, there is the tiny little detail that this is a wildly bad faith assumption that requires going through a few hoops. Most of the assumption hinges on neopronouns being quirky and uncommon. And if the assumption happens to be wrong, then all this dogpiling has achieved is to wreak havoc on a vulnerable person’s mental health, and possibly even cause some trauma down the line.
I don’t care if dragonfucker needs to apologize about wronging someone else; at this point a few users absolutely need to apologize to drag as well.
Have you really never seen hexbears do the pig shit spam?
Yeah, I have, and it’s honestly disgusting. But for every pig shit emoji I have seen, I have also seen hundreds of comments shitting on tankies, dunking on commenters for expressing “radical leftist opinions” that are not that radical outside of social media, shitting on the work of the Lemmy devs for being professed marxist-lenninists, or claiming that Lemmy.ml is somehow cancer on the network that needs getting rid of, because it’s nominally a tankie instance despite the sheer amount of democrat shilling, Israel apologia and NATO bootlicking you can see here.
It’s a matter of scale. I will concede that I simpatize with the more leftist parts of the political spectrum, both marxists and anarchists, but I feel like at this point I would be grossed out at Lemmy even if I was 100% a liberal. Political disagreements are fine I guess, but the way they permeate the culture on Lemmy is weird, obsessive and unhealthy, and most importantly, it comes from a very small number of instances. And it’s not the tankie ones.
This is the second in command of lemmy.ml:
The Soviet Union made being gay illegal. Marxism-Leninism has a very long history of calling queerness “bourgeois decadence”. Some tankies choose to follow in the footsteps of that history. Others just ignore it and pretend it was excusable. Tankies aren’t allies.
I debated with myself about replying to this comment because of our few messages yesterday/day before.
I decided to chime in because, despite not being terribly fond of you, your point here is very important, and valid.
I had an account on .ml, as I am very left, and everything was fine at first. I eventually got sick of the constant rhetoric of: America bad, which means China and Russia are really good, and we would all be better off living in a M-L utopia like they do there!
And look, I’m not a Xenophobe/Sinophobe/Russophobe, I think that the people of those countries are just people. Sure America bad, but it’s a bit fucked up to go from that and recognising that some of what is said about them(China/Russia) is almost certainly propaganda, to the frothing true-believer fanaticism that goes on.
There’s a lot of talk at hexbear(when I’d gone to have a look and make my own opinion of them) and some parts of .ml about 2SLGBTQ+ safe space, acceptance and protection. And at the same time through the actions of folk there and the admins/mods it was clear that it was lip service.
I moved on, and then Trump was elected again. All of a sudden you had loads these .ml accounts not only calling people enablers of the bourgeoisie, Sheeple etc, then in the next breath they are Staning Trump. On more than one occasion when I called them out on parroting the GOP lines about things, they would quote Sartre at me and say I was a class traitor.
Was a real “Masks Off” realisation for me.
Again Drag, I am hardly a fan of you, and I’m sure you’re aware of that…but you’re absolutely right here. Tankies, or at least the ones that are the most vocal, are not allies, are not even tolerant as far as I can see.
Also considering how many times in the last thread you replied to a comment that Ada had made apologising, I’m positive that they know. I feel like this thread is a bit superfluous. And isn’t doing you any favours.
Well, that comment by nutomic is certainly unfortunate, but I don’t think that’s exactly what people are thinking when they complain about tankies. The Soviet Union banning homosexuality is certainly also unfortunate, but it’s not different from what every other country on Earth was doing in the 20th century. It’s not reasonable to expect communist countries to get social issues right on the first try and attach their failure to do so to their economic organization. My country also banned homosexuality, for the record, and we absolutely were not communists.
It also just happens that most LGBT people I know, by a landslide, are marxists, because it’s the logical consequence of applying to capitalism the same questioning that allows breaking free of the cisheteronorm. Sometimes economics and gender/sexuality intersect in interesting ways, and to an extent attempting to stomp out marxist ideology also often inadvertely makes the place hostile to LGBT people.
You can argue that “tankie” only refers to toxic, LGBTphobic marxists such as nutomic right here, and I mean, fair. But I’m complaining about the Lemmy community being incessantly hostile to people and communities that are outside of a very narrow worldview that you can really only find in terminally online people. 99% of the usage I have seen of the word “tankie” on Lemmy has been for this, It is keeping people out of the norm away from this platform and, as seen with the way so many users harassed drag, for good reason.