This community is housed on an instance run by two trans women, focused on the needs of the queer and gender diverse community.
We allowed 196 here because we were promised the community is queer and trans inclusive.
If you’re here it’s because you’re aggressively supportive of trans folk. Not middle of the ground, not “just asking questions”.
If your response to that is, “yes, but…” then this isn’t the instance for you, and by extension, this isn’t the community for you.
tl;dr - Unambiguous support and inclusion, or fuck off somewhere else.
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Edit - I changed the phrase "aggressive support to “unambiguous support”, as there was some confusion over the intent behind my previous phrasing.
Trans people are cool. Love em. Full human rights for everyone, end discrimination. This post, though, is obnoxious though.
Sending edicts out to the public is never the play. Use your sidebar. Moderate stuff. Make it cool to not be a bigot. But the second you start doing goofy shit like this, you’re painting a target on your back and coming across way more fragile than you must actually be.
I personally have a policy about blocking any community that has admins who feel it necessary to try to police people’s thoughts. As much as bigots piss me off, this isn’t how people conduct themselves in a place that purports to be a safe haven. You don’t patronize and denigrate the general public out of frustration, unless you want them as an enemy for some reason. The idea you needed you adjust your terminology in retrospect confirms how poorly you wrote your initial message.
Also, I have to say, “We allowed 196 to be here” is a curious statement. What exactly did you allow? Is opening a community a big endeavor? I’ve opened up a bunch, and never have I felt like I was owed someone for doing it.
Ban bad behavior. Don’t try to tell people how to think. We have a word for the latter and it’s not pretty.
Super hot garbage take. It’s not trans people’s job to make it “appealing” to you to not be a bigot, you should not be a bigot because you don’t want to be a steaming pile of human garbage. You should be able come to the conclusion that ANY discrimination is stupid by yourself.
It’s also not trans people’s jobs to make supporting them fun for you - they just want to live their lives like anyone else here does. And it’s well within their right to call out discriminatory bullshittery when they see it.
Plus, they are literally running this instance. This community wouldn’t exist (in this form) if their instance were not up and running. If they’re strictly against transphobia, which really isn’t a hot take but basic human rights, then it’s their perogative to enforce that as they see fit. Making this post and calling it out is exactly what any mod team on Rexxit ever did. How’s this any different from that?
Yeah. Whenever this is pointed out I see people saying “oh so you DON’T think it should be cool not to be a bigot? Nice political strategy there”, and completely missing the point. It’s already not cool to be a bigot, and communities like this one are already reinforcing that with the trans-positive memes. On the whole, so is media made by trans people, and many other things.
So by denying this when they say that, they’re implying that “being cool” means even more than that. The implication is that trans people need to be conciliatory and open up their spaces to people that want them dead, and that when they “critique” us we should just sit there and take it but when we critique them it’s “thought policing”.
It’s a completely ridiculous ask, not to mention cowardly that they’ll wrap it behind implication rather than just say it to our faces.
They’re not telling anyone “how to think”. They’re telling transphobes and “trans sceptics” to fuck off. And who cares if they do it with a pinned post rather than a sidebar announcement? Some apps hide the sidebar in a menu.
Also when you say you opened a bunch of communities, do you mean you hosted them? Because those two women are literally running the server this instance is running on. Doesn’t sound all that easy to me.
So block this instance? I’m not sure why you feel the need to post about it.
Also I have a bone to pick about the ‘telling people how to think is wrong. We have a word for the latter and it’s not pretty’. Firstly that’s pretty polemic for no good reason. Assuming you’re dancing round the word fascist, it seems pretty unpleasant and unnecessary to allude to the group that committed genocide of queer people and deliberately destroyed research into trans issues to set it back decades.
Now onto the substance of the claim – that telling people how to think is fascist. This is completely absurd, the key difference being that fascists don’t just ‘tell people how to think’; they brutally enforce it with violence.
This post and the trans women making it are not about to use the full force of the state to prevent people thinking about transphobia. What they are doing is posting that, to take part in the community that they are investing money to host, you must unambiguously support trans rights.
The comparison you have implied is completely and utterly absurd, and the dramatic language and comparisons you have used to make it is cringe.
These aren’t mods talking, it’s admins. They manage and pay for the server 196 is hosted on, that’s a pretty big endeavor
“Thought policing”? It stops being a thought when you put the effort into typing it on your keyboard and spewing it out into the world for everyone else to read.
Getdafugouttahere.
massive self report that you consider the admins saying “don’t be transphobic on our instance” to be “policing people’s thoughts”
lemmy.blahaj.zone determines the rules of conduct. They have determined that “Just Asking Questions” to push anti-trans views and other types of masked, subtle transphobia is not tolerated in this space.
ohhh noooo