So everyone involved seems to agree that transphobia is bad, but the dude had an idiotic notion of what constituted transphobia.

I feel that if we are in the business of defederating anyone who fails a purity test then lemmy will be quite small indeed.

This alone doesn’t seem like something worth defederating over. It seems like they just got baited hard by Hexbear. Did the comment chain get censored? It doesn’t seem like there’s much active transphobia here, just ignorance of the issues at worst.

From my cursory read, the only thing that reads as actually transphobic to me is when they say “And getting offended by it really isn’t helping your case here.” in response to someone getting mad at being referred to as “they”, and that itself was due to technical issues and not transphobia.

Frankly, one angry snapback and a slap fight with Hexbear doesn’t seem worth defederating over. I’m all for defederating bigots, but I don’t want hapless allies getting caught in the crossfire.

I love you all and I’m obviously against transphobia or any kind of bigotry, but this is probably where I leave this instance.

If I cut out everyone in my life that is 99% of the time a staunch ally, but still eats at Chick-Fil-A, my life would be very, very empty. No one is ever going to be a perfect ally / comrade, even queer people. I feel like it’s especially telling that the person got so heated because they want to be an ally and don’t want people to abandon them because they played a single stupid fucking game. Especially because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, it’s easy to death-of-the-author JKR without realizing the direct transphobia in the game. A lot of the direct transphobia in Hogwarts Legacy isn’t obvious (like misgendering the token trans in the game files) and most people don’t know about it. Does that suck? Yeah. But that doesn’t mean those people are transphobes or bad faith actors.

I get that we need to have a sharp eye to make sure bad faith actors don’t fly under the radar, but false positives do a lot of harm too. I really feel like this came down more to Hexbear doing what Hexbear does and setting the entire thread on fire than it points to transphobia on the programming.dev admin’s side. Of course people are going to get stupid when you’re getting insulted, flamed, and spammed with stupid-ass emoji. If they’re willing to defed from Hexbear and acknowledge the direct transphobia in the game, that would go a long way.

Absolutely agree with this decision. Also, this one thing he said at the end of the argument really rubbed me up the wrong way:

From what I can see right now in the link thread that doesn’t seem to be nearly enough grounds for defederation from programming.dev. What am I missing?

I’m especially confused considering it’s a thread on a lemmy.ml community. I expect community mods to mod and life goes on.

If the admin of programming.dev is a turd when posting on other instances, I expect him to get moderated and/or blocked. Not the instance that is unrelated to the incident defederated.

That conversation is really hard to follow between the hexbear emote spam (and non-emote spam), deleted comments and personal attacks.

This article does a good job at explaining that Hogwarts Legacy is transphobic because some of the profits will be donated to anti-trans causes.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/hogwarts-legacy-release-brings-transphobia-harry-potter-franchise-rcna69628

Rowling herself has implied that her royalty checks are indirect indicators of the popularity of her views on trans rights. She will be profiting off Hogwart’s Legacy, and at least part of that profit will likely go directly into the hands of those responsible for pushing the fight to roll back trans rights, causes Rowling has implied she donates to.

This article explains the antisemitic blood libel conspiracy theory that is a core part of the game’s plot.

https://www.gamepur.com/guides/hogwarts-legacys-goblin-uprising-anti-semitic-plot-controversy-explained

Players can choose to align themselves with Ranrok, but the game explicitly paints this as an evil decision, aligning those players with the Dark wizard faction. On top of that, Ranrok and his Dark wizard allies in the Rookwood Gang have a plan to harness the power of this forbidden magic by abducting the player character (who is a teenager) and extracting and using their blood. This latter detail hews uncomfortably close to “blood libel” conspiracy theories which have been leveled at Jewish communities across the world for centuries, in which Jewish people were accused of abducting and murdering Christian children in order to use their blood in sacrilegious rituals.

I spent some time watching videos on the game’s plot. I couldn’t find a specific line in a cut scene where the villain explicitly says he wants to harvest the protagonist’s blood. But he does explicitly set some guys after the protagonist to try to kidnap them. They need the protagonist because they are the only one who can interface with the MacGuffins, ie plot devices. This MacGuffin interfacing seems to be hereditary in nature. Also, the villain’s powers, specifically the graphics, definitely seemed blood themed to me.

The game is transphobic and antisemitic. Arguing the game is not those things is transphobic and antisemitic. Whether or not the admin in question knew that is irrelevant.

No one is mandated to educate people about any minority group that they are a part of.

That being said, I wholeheartedly believe that it is in our interest as an LGBTQ+ community to educate people when an opportunity arises. So much hate and bigotry is derived from ignorance. The more we can do to educate people about transphobia the safer we and the people we care about will be irl.

Ada is going out of her way to talk to the admin in question which she does not need to do, but I am glad that she is. She would be perfectly justified in defederating the instance without further discussion. Making a safe space for trans people means defederating from instances that espouse transphobia. By defederating, users on blåhaj zone will not see what this admin’s posts or comments, regardless of where the posts or comments are made.

This is what the post in question looks like if your lemmy account is on blåhaj.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7199610

Most of the comments are not visible because we are defederated from Hexbear.

I’m really not a fan of how Hexbear users handled this. I am also not a fan of blåhaj being the admin’s trans best friend. Despite that, I think this comment from the admin is relevant so I’m linking it here.

https://programming.dev/comment/6173847

I get the sense that this admin is engaging in transphobia and antisemitism because of their ignorance involving the game. I hope that in talking to the admin, Ada will be able to explain the error in the admin’s position. Hopefully the admin will correct their position going forward and we can continue to federate with their instance. But I think that in the absence of that hypothetical success it makes sense to defederate.

It took me a bit to think about it, but it’s good that we take a proactive position on combating transphobia. Tolerating intolerance for the convenience it might bring, in not having to make multiple accounts or having more perceived allies, really doesn’t do us any favors in the long run. If we don’t stand up for ourselves we are only giving cover for transphobes to maneuver covertly in our online space. Rowling is a terf. Hogwarts Legacy funds her terf causes. We don’t need blåhaj to be connected to instances that fail to understand that. The point is to have an instance that is a safe space for trans people and more broadly LGBTQ+ people.

I’m adding this at the end, because this shouldn’t matter, but I think some people think it does. I am trans. I am ethnically jewish.

A shame. It reads (particularly at the top of that thread) like an ignorant Admin and a typical Hexbear user(s).

Please note when I say that that I am not suggesting or implying that the Admin was not in the wrong, but that when the Admin said:

It’s literally the opposite of transphobic. It’s like they tried as hard as they could to negate everything bad JKR has ever said…

That seems more like something someone ignorant of a lot of things would say and not necessarily what someone intent on being awful would say. The response to them, also from a Hexbear user, was:

You’re a transphobic clown that cares more about your Harry Potter treats than trans people. Stop pretending otherwise.

Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not. Certainly in the remainder of that thread, the Admin falls pretty short of decent behaviour. However, I think if that first response to the Admin’s response had not been so judgemental and had maybe seen it as ignorance rather than malice and level headedly gone on to explain why the Admin is wrong without the (i think we can all agree) standard Hexbear method of engagement, maybe (not definitely, but maybe) the outcome might have been an ally rather than a defederation.

I suspect that I’m going to get responses to that paragraph stating it’s not a trans persons responsibility to educate others. I do see that and understand it as I am part of a minority group that has been marginalised, persecuted and wished out of existence for hundreds if not thousands of years. I understand exactly how annoying and exhausting it is to feel like you have to continually explain why it’s OK you exist.

But I’ve also come to realise the difference between ignorance and wilful ignorance and that it’s always worth making at least one try with someone. 99% of the time it gets you nowhere, but sometimes it gets you an ally.

I understand the defederation decision and it doesn’t affect my choice to be on Blahaj at all. I guess my hope is that the two Admin’s can talk it out and that refederation is an available option but that if that doesn’t happen, the PD Admin at least learns how they behaved is transphobic and they change their ways.

I’m torn about this. Although I agree that the admin of that instance is being pretty transphobic and abrasive, I don’t know if it’s bad enough to defederate. In addition, I really like some of the communities there (especially the Godot community) and this might be the thing to push me off blahaj.zone…

It’s a hard balance to strike, protecting vulnerable people from potentially harmful instances with bad policies, while at the same time, providing a valuable instance that people will want to use. Unfortunately, this will probably push me and some other individuals onto other instances that may have worse moderation and will likely expose us to a lot more bigotry. It’s a tough situation, and I honestly don’t know what the best option is.

Does this mean that we can’t access the programming.dev communities anymore? I like the Godot community over there.

Anyone have screenshots of the conversations? It appears some of the admin in question’s messages are deleted

this is the way i learn that a mid game like hogwarts legacy won best steam deck game? like how… do they know baldur’s gate 3 exists?

a reassuring move. glad I picked the blahaj

Yah, it’d be one thing if they had just like… packed up their opinion on the game and dropped the whole thing, but then continuing to hammer on about it and like, straight up ignore trans people telling you that they have a problem with the game and people buying it, that’s kind of another things.