likely in response to my comments on the beehaw post, which i linked to (hopefully im doing this right?). apparently, calling people you dont know for the first time “they/them” before being told their pronouns is “misgendering”. absurd. this kind of attitude threatens the larger LGBTQ community and is partially why cishets hate us after we won so much progress back in the 00s and 10s.
im a queer person. im neurodivergent. this shit is so goddamn fucking annoying, especially as an older queer who got physically assaulted on a near daily basis for being queer in the 90s. the kids today get their panties in a twist over being supposedly “misgendered” by someone calling them gender neutral pronouns before being corrected. narcissistic victimhood bullshit.
anyways, now banned from one of my favorite instances. meanwhile in the US theyre planning on hunting us. but yeah, lets ban fellow queers over their view that people who get mad about being “misgendered” when they arent (cis people are also referred to as “they/them” before further context in a conversation with a stranger) are just attention seeking brats that threaten the larger movement. its so obvious to me that the brats who find reason to be offended over innocent pronoun use never faced real adversity, like getting repeatedly physically beaten.
edit - the best part of all of this is i faced no moderation from beehaw and all of my comments are +1 or higher. power tripping oversensitive neurodivergent hating bastard of a mod over at blahaj IMO.
edit 2 - did this wrong. heres a link to the post i think got me banned from blahaj and a screenshot about it https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37659465
Edit 3 - apparently I did nothing wrong until I made my thoughts known about how the pronoun police fucked over the larger LGBTQ community as our rights are backsliding in America. Yall are gonna whine about being misgendered to the concentration camp guards at the rate we’re going. God forbid I be angry that while queers were busy fighting over pronouns our adversaries stuffed the courts, stuffed the school boards, couped the government, and are installing a fascist dictatorship. When I say that these fucking toddlers are going to learn what real oppression tastes like, that’s what I mean. It’s not that I want us to be hurt or oppressed (as the dog piling idiots have interpreted), it’s that the younger generation is weak as hell and lost the fucking plot in the fight for our rights. I grew up getting beaten in the streets for being queer only for these kids to claim their pronouns not being mind-read is oppression!
Okay I have to ask: if you don’t know someone’s gender, but you can’t call them uh, they/them, then what in the fuck are you supposed to do exactly?
Like, I fully get doing it in person can be being a dick, but on the internet where you absolutely do not know unless someone tells you?
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard today, and I was on reddit earlier.
EXACTLY! its standard english to refer to strangers as they/them before otherwise corrected. to perceive that as “misgendering” is main character syndrome and something that the fellow queer community needs to push back on. im so tired of these privileged queers feigning adversity.
Absolutely. You did nothing wrong here.
Okay I have to ask: if you don’t know someone’s gender, but you can’t call them uh, they/them, then what in the fuck are you supposed to do exactly?
I fully support inclusivity. Rejecting singular “they/them” as generic non-gendered pronouns isn’t inclusive. It’s a special brand of incivility and intolerance.
Whatever your policy is on intolerant individuals, feel free to exercise it.
Ask for the platform to have pronouns built in.
I’m sceptical about hexbear as much as the next person, but they pronouns mandatory policy was a good one
IDK, this would force closeted trans people either to out themselves or misgender themselves. Not everyone is in a position where it’s safe to be themselves, even online.
Interesting point. But then don’t have those people to misgender themselves as well when people ask them their pronouns online?
They would have a lot more options in that case, like they could stop engaging or explain they’re not comfortable being open about it. Requiring having you’re gender identity display in your bio/display name would make it too easy to glean by potential abusers and thus make this platform unsafe for vulnerable trans people.
If it sounds unworkable that typically might be becauze you’re misunderstanding: if you don’t know/remember you of course use they/them, if you do know then you should use those pronouns.
You misunderstood the entire post it looks like.
OP asks the question “what if I know or have been introduced to the person’s pronouns but forget?” This is visible in OP’s own admission: “I am terrible at remembering people’s pronouns.”
Someone responded with slight misunderstanding or perhaps inclarity essentially saying “if you misgender someone you might seem bigoted.”
Then instead of giving any good faith or asking for clarification, you responded with very high toxicity.
Now, I can see that you misunderstood and thought the conversation was about people you don’t know, but your response was very inappropriate and normalizing of hate, using phrases like “For fucks sake this is why the heteros hate us. Younger queers need faux outrage to feel important.” Even the beehaw mod gave you a reprimand.
That behavior and escalation of the conversation is terribly toxic and I do not blame blahaj for not giving you an in depth benefit-of-the-doubt investigation before deciding they didn’t want that behavior.
Verdict: YDI but I get how this misunderstanding happened. My suggestion:
- Reread the post and your comments.
- Acknowledge your misunderstanding and apologize to the person you were toxic to.
- Apologize and clarify the misunderstanding to blahaj.
- Work on your deescalation skills.
I’m so glad to see this post. I was starting to think I was taking crazy pills.
If I was an admin and I banned someone for whatever reason, and their reaction was this insanely aggressive, and they clearly kept using insulting terms to describe everyone (whiny, ‘main character syndrome,’ saying they haven’t suffered enough to be treated with respect) I would definitely not think I was wrong to ban that person. Even if I initially was wrong, the reaction is the kind that makes me think… yeah, don’t want that in my community.
Likewise with the crazy pills thing. Thanks for being normal and actually reading stuff.
So. Funny. About the downvotes. Read the post, people. I’m not trying to attack, it’s literally an obvious misunderstanding that I’m trying to lend clarity to. Behold two entirely different conversations:
@schleudersturz@beehaw.org When I see people I know, I can remember who they are, what we have done together, where we have been, what we have seen and even the tone of voice they might use to exclaim at an occurrence or upon some eventuality but – yet – I often cannot remember their names. Pronouns are like parts of their names. And, so, I tend to address everyone with “they” / “them”.
@inv3r5ion@lemmy.dbzer0.com apparently, calling people you dont know for the first time “they/them” before being told their pronouns is “misgendering”.
“People you don’t know” versus “people you know”
Obvious misunderstanding. It’s all laid out for you if you open your eyes lmao.
I’m not sucking up to the pronoun police.
It’s cool, I’m welcome nowhere.
Your loss friend. I tried to help.
You are welcome here buddy. I get where you are coming from and I used to think in a similar way to you about this topic. I also think dialogue is much more appropriate than sanctions and wild accusations in this sort of situation.
The gay liberation movement was in some ways a very socially conservative branch of queer activism that sought social acceptance for gay men and women, primarily. The approach we took (I’m 50 years old btw) was to adopt mainstream concepts like the gender binary and monogamous marriage and then advocate to extend those concepts to include gay relationships. The truly subversive queer activism of the late 60s and 70s turned into a quest for acceptance rather than a quest to disrupt the status quo. I don’t mean to minimize the achievements of the gay liberation movement, but in reality it did very little for trans folk and did little to challenge existing social structures. It did of course benefit gay men and women, and that should not be discounted. But it was never really about trans rights.
Younger trans folk are more ambitious. They tend to view the success of gay liberation as a capitulation to the mainstream. They could have gone the same route of minimal resistance to the status quo and just advocated for acceptance of trans men and trans women. But instead they are seeking to tear down the tyranny of the gender binary, which is very much so a social construct, albeit distantly rooted in biology. Anthropologists and sociologists have long studied the performativity of gender, and how it is mostly tied to social expectations and norms within a culture rather than any sort of biological essentialism.
So in a way, young trans folk are simply carrying on the tradition of queer radicalism that the gays abandoned in our quest for social acceptance. And I admire them for that. Do I think it will ever lead to a mainstreaming of trans identities? Not really, to be honest. But that isn’t necessarily the goal here. The goal is more to carve out a space for trans folk where they can play with the idea of identity and gender, in order to deconstruct it and challenge it, and to evolve our culture in a humanistic way, rather than clinging to social norms like they are somehow not systems of oppression and discipline ala Foucault.
The question fundamentally is whether it’s better to conform to social expectations to fit in at the expense of giving up on the more radical project of changing culture, or whether it’s best to reject the status quo and simply invent your own culture and spaces. While there is a pragmatism to the former that makes a certain sort of sense, there’s also a bravery and radicalism centred around the latter project that I find more exciting and meaningful.
I’d also point out that this isn’t an either/or scenario. We can enjoy the benefit of gay liberation while also supporting the younger generation to challenge the very social structures that oppress us all.
One key example would be that in the 60s and 70s queer folk and feminists were calling for the abolition of marriage, not for it to be extended to gay people. The marriage abolitionists were much more radical, socially. And many young queer folk (based on my understanding) feel that gender abolition would be a positive step to ending gender apartheid. I’ve gotta say that it took me a while to come around to it, but I’m on board with that objective, even to the point where I’m considering changing my pronouns to they/them.
I don’t really understand why we need a massive extension of gender pronouns to achieve this objective, since if everyone became they/them that would be a good outcome imo. But that’s just my personal opinion. I can see how you can also undermine gender apartheid by making the concept of gender so diverse that it undermines the primacy of the male and female categories. It’s just another way to skin the cat.
In this specific case, I’d say it’s PTB + YDI. I don’t like the militant way in which some trans folk label anyone with a slightly different take on these topics as “transphobic”. How are you ever gonna build support and understanding by insta-jumping to bad faith conclusions at the slightest sign of dissent with the group-think? But then again, trans folk are entitled to a safe space where they can freely explore their identity without constantly having to defend themselves.
That’s lot of words to say I hear you, I acknowledge your experience, and I share some of your concerns. But I also think blaming vulnerable populations for the political climate right now is completely unfair and uncalled for. Trans folks aren’t undermining gay liberation, they are just trying a different approach, and they don’t want to have to conform to social expectations in order to be accepted. They want to be accepted on their own terms, and I acknowledge their bravery in doing so, despite the push-back.
I know this flies in the face of what everyone else seems to be saying, but fuck it.
I don’t know of an acronym, but my reaction is that even if they overreacted, your insanely aggressive response makes me think it’s right to leave it in place. I get that you’re saying that you’re just angry because you like blahaj, but up and down this thread your bitching is so antagonistic… Like, calling it narcissistic, referring to people who care “too much” about their pronouns as having main character syndrome? This is not the behavior of a friend, or an ally, and it’s not one I’d love in a member of my community.
Being queer and neurodivergent is not an excuse to be an asshole. As someone who identifies as both queer and neurodivergent, let me say I wouldn’t unban you for this. Whether the initial ban was right or wrong!
I went through real shit in the 90s for being queer. I wasn’t even diagnosed as neurodivergent (despite a disgusting amount of evidence since I was a child, because “girls don’t get ADHD”) until my goddamned 30s. That doesn’t mean that just because other people are suffering differently, their suffering doesn’t matter, and screaming about it makes you look like an abusive fuck. People don’t have to suffer “enough” for your definition to deserve respect. Jesus.
I get that this could be stepping on your trauma, and nobody loves being excluded, but this reaction ain’t it.
This is stepping on my exclusion trauma. I also wasn’t diagnosed until an adult, and im angry as hell. I’m an asshole for good reason right now - the violence is about to return and what are queers doing? Fighting about FUCKING PRONOUNS. bunch of pathetic whiners.
Honestly fuck the younger queers. They took everything we fought hard for and then pissed it away on being pronoun police so they could pretend to feel oppression after we mostly eradicated it. They have zero respect for their elders yet demand respect from us.
NOTE THAT I NEVER MISGENDERED ANYONE. All I did was point out how utterly fucking RIDICULOUS it is to be OFFENDED by being called they/them by a stranger for the first time as being “misgendered”. These piss babies deserve the violence coming towards them that my generation sacrificed majorly to fight against since they wanna pretend to be oppressed let them taste real oppression.
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I don’t wish to do violence on younger queers, I’m saying that since they want to fake being oppressed so hard they should get a taste of what real oppression feels like.
And they’re going to. Because they lost the fucking plot. Now the fascists are in power and coming for all of us.
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And I fault them for the backslide. I fault them for where things are heading. Us millennials did our part - fighting actual violence - only for the pronoun police to throw it away.
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We required a constant fight for our physical safety and the younger generation got distracted by pronouns and then when pushed on this by elders they throw a fit.
Even if the mod were wrong on this particular action, your insults to queer people throughout these comments have shown that they are absolutely better off without you in their community.
Your grammar in the first sentence is a bit odd.
I would say “even if the mod was wrong” or in the subjunctive mood “even were the mod wrong” but subjunctive suggests you think they weren’t wrong and are presenting a counterfactual. Did you start with plural “mods”? That would use were rather was.
Interesting! You pointed me towards some new refinement of my linguistic knowledge. Subjunctive casts a wide net and covers a whole bunch of attitudes/opinions and can be used for hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and several other things. Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood
Thanks!
Yep subjunctive is pretty versatile. In the context it would come off as counterfactual more than anything else to me
He might just not be a native speaker
Were they ESL (English as a second language) it would also be useful to them to know their word choice was wrong, or if they were going for the subjunctive mood their word order was wrong
Turns out subjunctive just covers a lot more ground than just counterfactuals. Wiki links in my other comment to some more info if you’re interested.
So you were correct? I’ve never heard of this term before, although I suppose I have used it a couple of times in the past
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Let’s say that I (cis, hetero) said something that can be understood as bigotry. It would be only sensible if Blahaj banned me on the spot - better safe than sorry, right?
No.
Are you familiar with the siege syndrome? Then there’s this American notion of inequality ‘cism’, that only members of certain groups can be critical of them. That’s bullshit. Your gender or sexual orientation doesn’t invalidate your opinion (nor validate it).
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I’m not sure on how much siege mentality applies in either case.
“Better safe than sorry” and the whole vibe of preemptively banning because everyone out there is here to get 'em.
It’s not gatekeeping, and this narcissistic faux outrage over being “misgendered” is harmful to the LGBTQ community.
You’re not queer and you don’t understand the level of anger right now that American queers have. As someone who faced outright physical abuse chronically for being queer as a kid seeing permanently online baby queers get pissy over pronouns while we’re about to be hunted again is absolutely fucking rage inducing for good reason. These fucking piss babies need to get their shit together.
The uh scare quotes aren’t really helping your case. Being queer doesn’t mean you automatically understand the seriousness of other queer people’s concerns and it also doesn’t mean you’re free of bigotry.
Consider like lgbt erasure from official histories, many people scoffed at concerns like this and thought it was hysterical pearl clutching to make a big deal about whether or not someone’s sexuality was mentioned or whatever. Others will tell you it literally saved their lives knowing that people like them existed in the past.
I don’t think it’s that hard to just be kind, and if you can’t be kind be funny and then block them and move on :P
Being called they/them by a stranger for the first time IS NOT MISGENDERING.
you’re correct, it’s not.
THANK YOU, case closed, power tripping bastard of an overzealous admin.
no, because that’s not what the conversation where you inserted insulting language was about. re-read my top level comment to this post, please.
Being rude and belittling people’s concerns, calling people that disagree with you little soft children who have never known hardship, saying that people’s concerns are less valid than yours, blaming trans kids figuring themselves out for the hatred we receive. All of that if being a complete dickhead and a bigot.
Look I’m a 35 year old queer, I have been beaten within an inch of my life and left to die in a gutter, I have lived through cops murdering us for fun and being unable to hold hands in public to now. Hell my government made me get steralised to recognise my gender and gay panic was only removed from the books as a valid legal defense for murder in like the last decade.
I know that looking at some of the online discourse can seem a little strange or trivial, but that’s also what straights have been doing to us for centuries about literally all of our concerns. You don’t know what other people are going through, you don’t get to be the judge of what matters to them, and even if you think someone is being more sensitive than is warranted THEY HAVE TOLD YOU THAT THIS MATTERS TO THEM AND THAT IS TRUE. Regardless of what you feel about it, IT HURTS THEM. Why do you want to hurt people?
There is no line of acceptable behaviour that will make you welcome among the broader straight culture. Don’t beat up on comrades, and if you can’t tolerate that kind of culture then being banned from blahaj is doing you a favour because that is the culture there.
Just… log off and check your head mate.
If they’re gonna have hurt feelings over not being misgendered by being called they/them by a stranger then they deserve to be called the oversensitive piss babies they are. And their behavior is threatening to the larger queer movement.
Yeah so people tried to kill me before most people even knew what a trans person was. I uh, don’t think some people figuring out their identity was to blame for that ya know?
You seem really transphobic, and I really think you should reflect on that. Like you’re straight up blaming transgender people for queer oppression but that is predicated on the idea of being going back to behaviours they engaged in long before people even discussed trans people. So clearly the drive to harm queer people doesn’t require pronouns to surface yeah?
I am going to block you now because I think you are an odious and horrible person.
And you seem dramatic as fuck.
Everyone I don’t like is tRaNsPhObIc!
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I’m all about reclaiming the word queer, but “you queers” sounds absolutely terrible. Something like “queer people” would probably come across a lot better
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More so I struggled with physical violence so they have the ability to see pronouns as an issue worthy of feeling “oppressed” by.
It’s just straight up disrespectful to queer elders. And yeah, they don’t know how good they have it. Our violent struggle makes their minor qualms seem major to them. It’s obvious they grew up in a time where oppression was mostly eradicated. It’s telling that the older generations don’t give a fuck about pronouns. Because we were being physically beaten in the streets.
My battle here is that this insane focus on pronouns is HARMFUL to queer people. Excluding queers for …. using they/them as a pronoun for people they don’t know is HARMFUL to queers.
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I think if you’d expressed yourself a bit more reasonably you’d probably be fine expressing the general sentiment that some segment of the queer community is overly focused on performative actions and calling out people who aren’t toeing the line of ideological purity over real world gains in rights and acceptance. You can express criticism in a measured way or you can try to use it as a means to insult and inflict insecurity and hurt. Those are very different things.
It’s the difference between “hey idiot, I ordered this without ketchup, make it again” and “hi, sorry, this wasn’t supposed to have ketchup on it”. One is abusive and unreasonable, the other is a polite way of getting your point across. Dr House is funny to watch on TV, but he’s not a model for effective communication in the real world. If you focus on being as angry and unpleasant as humanly possible at every turn, people will ignore you and shut you out regardless of whether you would be making a good point.
It costs you nothing to find a slightly diplomatic way to make your point, but being overly harsh about it may cost you everything.
I’m not going to tone police myself when these piss baby queers are threatening the physical safety of the rest of us with their stupid pronoun temper tantrums.
I fought the real fight for acceptance and to watch these main characters piss away all we fought for so they can get attention and feel important is not something I’m going to be nice about. Not when society is actively turning against us and the violence I suffered my entire childhood that me and my fellow millennials and those who came before us fought the real fight to end is now returning.
I’m not putting up with main characters faking “oppression” and I guess I no longer belong to the queer community since I’m not going to put up with fake attention seeking claims of being “misgendered”. These people are chronically online.
Then prepare to get banned from spaces that don’t tolerate abusive behavior. And prepare to push people away in any and every relationship that you take this approach in.
I really feel like the old fight is over. I openly walked hand in hand with my boyfriend in 1996 in Sydney and didn’t even get strange looks let alone shouting or hitting
Boys who acted gay in my all boys high school in the 90s did get bullied for acting gay about as much as I got bullied for having the wrong accent, so pretty bad.
I think it’s fair for the youth today to try and improve less significant issues when they feel safe, and I don’t think I have seen people told off for using they/them/themself when they don’t know someone’s pronouns because they have never met before
It’s also the trans people who are getting overt threats from the US government more so than gays, they also rely on hormone therapy and government could deny that usage, driving them to black market hormones and a lot of suicides
And in 1996 I was getting choked out in America. I’m glad things were better for you in Australia.
OP has revealed their true colours in their comments in the threads here. Fucking LGB alliance bullshit. If you wanna divide the queer community like this you are absolutely gatekeeping at best and straight up transphobic in all likelihood. I on the other hand will continue to love and support every single facet of the 2SLGBTQIA+ spectrum without calling something I don’t experience or understand “attention seeking brats”.
“Never faced real adversity” Jesus Christ fuck you. If being denied the opportunity to marry officially is adversity then being denied your EXISTENCE officially is also fucking adversity. This is textbook gate keeping and ladder pulling. You fought for gay/lesbian/bisexual rights and you got somewhere with it and now that transgender and genderqueer people who don’t have their rights are asking for support you call them whiny piss babies.
I’m trying my absolute best to bee nice as per my instance, but no. From the bottom of my autistic, transgender, lesbian heart - fuck you.
And here’s the kicker. I could not be more opposed to you right now. BUT I will still fight for you and accept you as part of the queer community.
Stop trying to hide behind your queerness or neurodivergence and take ownership of your bigotry and try to address it.
Do not bother replying to me, OP,
I will not read it.But I hope you grow.YDI
LOL YOU THINK THIS IS ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE?
No you dumb fuck, I used to be BEAT IN THE FUCKING STREET FOR 15 FUCKING YEARS OF MY LIFE.
Hearing whiny fucks bitch and moan about how oppressed they are because somebody called them a they/them instead of he/him or she/her is fucking INFURIATING.
And y’all don’t want to admit that the pronoun bullshit is why we’ve lost so much of what we gained. Y’all don’t want to admit that being whiny fucks made y’all lose the plot.
So now we’re all at risk, from the bottom of my autistic lesbian heart, fuck all the people who got hung up on pronouns instead of fighting the real fucking fights. Pronouns in your bio and rainbows in the street and corporate rainbow washing didn’t do fucking shit for any of us but the kids bought it hook line and sinker.
While queers were whining about their pronouns the federalist society took over our courts. While queers were whining about their pronouns our country got couped. Queers are gonna be whining about their pronouns all the way to the concentration camp guards.
God you’re insufferable. Fine I’ll bite.
I used gay marriage as a way to help you see similarities.
Answer me one question, real quick: do you think transgender and genderqueer people are oppressed?
YES! But not because somebody accidentally called them they!
Fucking HELL the dog piling omg my feelings are hurt queers are insufferable
I don’t give a fuck about gay marriage I give a fuck about my physical safety in the streets my generation fought long and hard for only for the pronoun police generation to piss away
Cool at least you understand that we’re oppressed.
You act like all we suffer is pronouns and other stuff you consider inconsequential. We’re being beaten and bullied at school, we’re being murdered, we’re having entire government campaigns created to eradicate us. You’d think that under all that oppression, we could at least expect a member of our queer community to not call us piss babies for wanting our pronouns respected.
You should give a fuck about gay marriage and you should give a fuck about the erasure of the existence of transgender people. You should also give a fuck about any of us being beaten or abused or denied the life saving healthcare we require. You don’t need to draw a line in the sand conveniently at issues that don’t affect you.
I AM queer. Gender nonconforming. I’ve faced trans related violence just by being perceived as trans as an adult.
The majority of the online discourse is a bunch of queer children whining about their pronouns. “You’re misgendering someone if you call them they/them! It erases their gender!” No the fuck it does not. I’d like to reiterate I got banned for arguing that. not for disrespecting someone’s established pronouns, but for arguing about how fucking ridiculous this splitting hairs is when we have much bigger fights to fight right now.
And yeah, this shit is triggering to me because I’ve been beat up within inches of my life and we’re fighting about fucking pronouns???while they’re building concentration camps for us??? (referring to Guantanamo, a legal black hole, which for now will be used for immigrants but we all know it’s not stopping there and the immigrants don’t deserve that treatment either)
I believe we should call people what they want to be called while at the same time not having a fucking shit fit and banning people over using fucking English as intended. Apparently based on the dog piling of whiny queer comments it’s like I called for everyone to be hung. Fucking UNREAL.
No one seems to take your thoughts negative on that post. Odd.
exactly! and its not even a beehaw mod banning me, its a blahaj one. bizarre.
Don’t complain that queer people are softer than they used to be, celebrate that they don’t have to toughen up and can be themselves with less fear of backlash
That was always the goal, the pronoun police have undermined the fight for years now. Being offended over every little fucking thing gains one absolutely zero respect.
im a queer person. im neurodivergent. this shit is so goddamn fucking annoying, especially as an older queer who got physically assaulted on a near daily basis for being queer in the 90s. the kids today get their panties in a twist over being supposedly “misgendered” by someone calling them gender neutral pronouns before being corrected. narcissistic victimhood bullshit.
People shouldn’t need to suffer a specific amount to deserve your respect. This is important to many people. But you use it to insult those people. Regardless of why you got banned or how angry you are about it, saying things like this is not a good look. It looks a lot like victim blaming and gatekeeping.
Your experienced suffering doesn’t make you better than anybody else or give you carte blanche to anything, including insulting or trivializing what others consider important. I would encourage you to treat people to the respect and kindness you deserved but didn’t get in the 90s.
Because the suffering matters. We were beat to shit in the streets so these toddlers can whine about being misgendered.
These people are fucking weak and gonna learn real soon what actual oppression tastes like.
It’s ultimately about the fact that no one in their life respects them. Do you really not remember being treated that way? Being disrespected on every basic level because of who you are? Don’t you remember how much it fucking grated on your nerves?
I grew up in the deep south, and it affected me deeply that everyone around me liked to use gay as a synonym for stupid, bad and especially defective. I remember how I just couldn’t take it anymore, to the point that I flipped out at one point in highschool and literally got up screaming in a class and flipped a table.
The constant, inescapable pressure is unbearable. It drives you nuts, to the extent that if it shows up when you think you’re around people who are cool with stuff it stings especially bad.
Ask yourself what matters to you more, honestly, do you care more about other queer people or you own feelings, because that’s what you’re asking other people to do as well. The pronouns thing isn’t a big deal for you, but hell, everyone’s got baggage. Everyone’s got things that set them off because of some fucked up shit in their past.
Because it’s kind of sickening to see a fellow queer person relishing seeing other queer people get the boot. I won’t lie, it makes me so angry and so sad.
Because no matter how much I may be annoyed by some sections of online queer spaces (I’ve been on Tumblr for a fucking decade and God I’m tired of it), I don’t want them to suffer. I want them to be okay, and I don’t think you actually want them to suffer either.
I think you’re angry and you feel rejected by people who should be understanding. We’re all freaks and weirdos to the outside world, we’re all used to being policed to the extent that we can barely breathe. Seeing it on the inside of the community must be really frustrating and blazingly painful. I’m sorry that this happened to you, I really am.
But I do want you to consider who you want to be, and what you want to care about here. I see someone spiralling and I want to let you know that it’s not to late to take a moment and reflect on where you want things to go.
I find these issues so tiring. Lemmy is a project run by volunteers, usually with specific goals in mind.
While I think that more democratic means of administering instances would be good I also can’t really see how to implement them and if someone is volunteering to run a server then criticising the precise way they do it, especially when moderator actions are public, seem a bit rich.
Different servers have different goal, some are trying to be public squares like this one, where more voices are welcome than not even to the detriment of some people. Others are trying to be safe cozy spaces, or friend clubs or whatever and someone just not liking your vibe is a fine reason to pre-emptively close the door in your face.
When someone does so they’re not even restricting your ability to see things, and usually not even making an account on their instance. You can literally run a bot to mirror everything over to your own version of a community if you don’t like the way they administer theirs. All they are doing is restricting your ability to send messages to their userbase under that particular account. Blahaj is going for a certain vibe, it’s not a vibe I want so I’m not their and I don’t really use their communities but it’s very clearly communicated to the userbase and behaviour like this is done specifically so users that feel vulnerable have a place to be gay with like zero confrontation about the particular way they want to be.
So who cares?
As a queer excommunicated from the queer community because I won’t play their pronoun games and entertain their faux outrage, I care.
You are a dickhead who prefers to hang out in spaces where being a dickhead to people is welcome. That isn’t the case at blahaj, there’s no reason for you to speak there. You can still read it, and if you want to participate in that culture then you can make a new account and just follow their rules and norms on that account, then be a dickhead about queer people on SJW or whatever with all the little arseholes that will give you a gold star for being “one of the cool queers”
Blahaj just feels like bizarro land, where the kinds of people who are usually inclusive seem to go out of their way to hate anything that isn’t exactly like them, and share their exact ideas. It’s basically /c/Conservative, but gay (er, openly gay anyway).
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It seems more to me like the TQ wants to rid themselves of the LGB with their pronoun tirades and temper tantrums.
Oh… Wow. With all due politeness I request that you please cool it with this rhetoric. It is dangerous. The community needs to band together right now. I’m sympathetic for you but this makes you seem hostile and jaded.
Hostile because it’s the TQ busy being the pronoun police. Their tirades are threatening us all.
The entire trans and queer community (which by your word choice elsewhere in the thread you are ostensibly a part of)? The ENTIRETY of it? I say this with respect and with your best interests at heart: get a grip. Take a breather. Scream into a pillow. But don’t be like that.
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No, I’m ranting about the whole community being overtaken with “poly” views, which I don’t have to agree with or accept as a monogamous person whos been used and abused and lied to by so called “ethically” non monogamous people. They can all fuck each other for all I care, but I’m not going to stand for being fucked over.
I used to live in a city. Doesn’t matter where I live, the queer community is only accepting of a certain kind of queer. Which I’m not.
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Calling a queer person homophobic and transphobic because they don’t agree with absurd pronoun policing or polyamory. Classic.
Sorry I’m not one of the cool kids.
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It’s not that I want them to suffer, it’s that they want to be oppressed so bad maybe they should get a taste of what real oppression looks like.
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People can be poly all they want, it’s not for me. At all. It’s emotionally harmful, traumatizing and makes me feel unsafe. I refuse to date anyone poly which shrinks an already small number of people in my rural area. Claiming I’m a “grandma” is fucking offensive. I need emotional trust in a partner to have sex, and for damn good reasons I do not trust poly people. Ethical they are not. Not in my numerous experiences. They’re delusional about their emotional intelligence. Not just me! I have queer friends with similar bad experiences.
Comparing me to your born again Christian friend is also offensive. I don’t hide who I am. I don’t think queer people should hide who they are. I am not nor have I ever been Christian, not raised in that religion at all.
Demanding emotional trust in a romantic relationship and only finding that trust in naturally monogamous people is not oppression, it’s protecting myself from harm.
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What is ethical monogamist if not a typical committed monogamous relationship where you don’t fuck each other over emotionally?
we should not be direction anger into our own community
This is why I’m so heated about the pronoun police finding things to be mad about. It’s in bad faith.
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Don’t take this personally but I don’t trust poly people “choosing” to be mono. That’s a situation I was in.
I believe, like sexuality, it is hardwired. Either you are or you aren’t, and if you’re in your unnatural state for long enough you’ll resent it and go back to your natural state. Whichever it is, I think it goes both ways for poly and mono.
As for point 2 I always discuss this with partners and I’m not poly at all. Better for everyone to be on the same page about expectations.
Blahaj mods are insanely ban happy. I do not understand for the life of me what you did wrong here. I don’t even really understand what kind of online community they are trying to cultivate with this?
Wow, feels so spiteful. It’s them not you.
To be charitable to the other side, perhaps this mod is so burned out on “just asking questions” that a sincere question has become hard to recognize 🤷♀️
i wasnt the original poster, i was just commenting. both me and OP are neurodivergent.
Ahh, thanks for the clarification
At times blahaj reminds me of lemmy.ml or grad. Probably plenty of decent users but the extremists are ruining it for everyone.
Some are probably actually bad actors - either paid or just so far in the tank, they can’t see it’s on fire.
What extremist? Where? Is it the (upvoted) China romanticisation?
I’m on ml, it’s pretty normal here.
Try asking about Tienanmen Square or the Uyghurs. Give some citations, when people order you what you’re allowed to conclude about it. You will quickly find your experience becoming no longer normal.
Then try the same experiment in mirror image in literally any other place. Bring up genocide in Gaza, the massacre of native Americans, Belgians in the Congo, or Trump’s horrifying mismanagement of Covid and the resulting death toll. There is a pretense among the Lemmy.ml moderators that they are just mirroring some kind of pro-US, pro-NATO echo chamber that exists on the “other side”, but this is a fantasy.
Try debunking Western narratives on Tienanmen Square or the Uyghurs on db0 or bunch of other instances. You will quickly find that echo chamber that exists on the other side is not just a fantasy.
And so what? The fact that Lemmy is a decentralized community, with instances owned and populated by people from all over the world with different worldviews, is actually the main advantage that Lemmy has over Reddit. The tendence of Lemmyverce to split into a few separated echo chambers is actually a cancer that is slowly killing Lemmy, and it doesn’t matter whether what is enforcing that cancer is pro-China or pro-EU.
it doesn’t matter whether what is enforcing that cancer is pro-China or pro-EU
Where is someone enforcing the pro-EU viewpoint, and banning anyone who disagrees with it?
Like I said, the pretense that lemmy.ml’s authoritarianism exists in mirror image on the “other side” communities is one of their persistent pretenses, I guess as a sort of whataboutism to make it seem less comically wrong.
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Comments like this are why its hardly surprising that they ban people.
The revolutionaries of the past would be disgusted with you. Speaking truth to power is one of the common heroic actions of the left: Standing up for people who are being abused, even when the people doing it are getting away with it, and demanding and enforcing that no one talk about it. Shame on you for coming down on the side of the abuser.
Propaganda frameworks like the one you’ve absorbed often include redefining common words and concepts in ways that support the desired conclusions, as you’re doing with “trolling” and “people who have already made their minds up.” It’s one of the reasons a certain contingent on Lemmy frequently will tell the person they’re talking to, what the person they’re talking to believes and how they behave. They need to enforce a certain framework for the conversation, in which what they’re doing makes sense, because taking it from first principles will cause them to see it in an “undesirable” light.
I do agree with you trying to have the conversation with that contingent is usually pointless. I’m actually happy to back up anything I am saying, try to open your eyes if you want to insist that the Chinese government’s version of events is trustworthy, but I doubt you’re interested and I won’t try to make the attempt if you don’t want it.
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Propaganda frameworks like the one you’ve absorbed often include redefining common words and concepts in ways that support the desired conclusions
an influx of spammy low effort comments
deliberately trying to irk the mods and the community as a whole
Edit 2: Actually, I can tell you exactly what happens when someone comes in and makes this kind of “spammy low effort” attempt at talking about the Uyghurs on lemmy.ml, because I’ve done it. I spent about half a day talking back and forth with someone who was very, very insistently insisting to me that there was no genocide in Xinjiang, and the UN had proved it. To their credit, nobody removed anything I had to say, which I was a little surprised by. The post was deleted by its creator some time later, so I can’t link to it, which is a shame because the whole exchange was pretty lengthy and interesting, and apparently consenting on both sides. I’ll take out a random excerpt of the whole conversation here:
I asked, “Can you link me to the UN report where they found there was no genocide, and the so-called victims were millionaires?” You sent me a report. It doesn’t say there was no genocide, and it doesn’t say the so-called victims were millionaires. I realize you’re saying that a reasonable person can read the report and conclude that obviously there is no genocide at all, but I don’t completely agree with that. I’m allowed to not agree with you. That’s not “fighting.”
I’m really not trying to be hard to talk to or get you riled up. What you describe as “fighting” or refusing to absorb the information you are providing, I view as just healthy skepticism. If you run way, way ahead of your sources by painting a huge picture, you are completely correct that I’m going to refuse to become passive and let you educate me and believe everything you say. I’m going to take a step back and say, “Well, okay, I get what you’re saying, but what is your backing?” I can do that even if I’m not that familiar with the topic. The fact that you’re so upset that I’m not just believing everything you say is weird to me.
Edit: Also, this part deserves a real response:
Go speak truth to power on the streets, the Lemmy.ml mods aren’t “the power”, just some random people running their own instance.
Very true. I also think participating on the internet is probably not helping much of anything, in the current crisis, in comparison with actually getting out and doing something.
But still, if we are going to talk about internet stuff, big actions start from little actions. The same people who are swearing that they understand the way to make real progress, and everything needs to be reorganized to match their theories in order to fix the world, have in my view already gone askew and started abusing the tiny amount of power they currently have, and created a little “The Sims” version of a dystopian world which I want no part of. I think that’s relevant to point out. And, which theory we’re going to use and how we’re all going to understand the world, including how we talk about it on the internet, absolutely has power in the real world in the aggregate. C.f. this most recent US election.
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Normal is pretty relative. Your ideas of normal is most people’s insane. Or, maybe they only behave like nuts on other instances.
.ml has some normal communities. There’s not much politics in their programming coms, for example. If that user isn’t in any of their bad communities they may only see the actually normal
