cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/25042034
This post is "FYI only" for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the "adult human female" dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and "civil disagreement" on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to "sort it out through discussion and voting". However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little "sorting out" has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
Just because it's have a cordial tone, but it's pretty tranphobic all around the place. Master class on sealioning.
I mean the basic argument, that trans identifying peoples are in their own distinct categories outside of the typical gender binary, actually has some interesting meat to it.
Trans men and women do have different experiences from their cisgender counterparts, different medical needs, different journeys. None of which I am experienced enough in the subject to speak to.
Kinda loses me on their “I don’t use the word cis” part though
Op argument is that they are Real Women and then then Women Who Used To Have Penis, reducing the trans experience and identify to the sex they were born into. The part of not using the word cis is not even the worst, imo, like using the word "thing" to talk about people is pretty disgusting, or comparing "blonde women" with "trans women" like if gender identity was just a superficial aspect of a person instead of the fundamental one it is.
See, I just don’t think what you’ve deduced the argument to was what was actually said.
Think of it from a math perspective. The non-transphobic stance would be that woman is the superset which contains subsets of trans, cis, and others. The comment says they're two separate sets, woman and transwoman. This is why cis doesn't have to be used, because woman is sufficient to describe the set, because trans women aren't part of it.
This fucking website, "Let me just simplify that to the idea of math supersets for you"...and it works
That was very helpful way of reframing the discussion. Thank you.
Yeah honestly, I think saying trans women are not women, like that gatekeeping part is the main issue. You know, trans women aren't the same as cis women from like what they went through but they are still gatekeeping. Trans women are women. When you just say women without any further info people will derive that its referring to most probably cis women but this differentiation really does not matter. I think thats what the OP is arguing but who knows.
But personally it really depends on moderation style. I don't take huge offense to the feddit.uk mods not removing this. Its on the edge but if for example they don't have like gatekeeping rules about it then the other users should just downvote it. If it doesn't fall in lines with the rules then remove it but defederation of one comment is a lot if you ask me. But I get that they want to be a save space for LGBTQ+ people
Idk just saying that transwomen and cis women are different doesn't seem transphobic in and of itself, especially since the person seems to be saying that they should have the same rights now
Right, I agree, but that's not what they're saying. They're saying women and transwomen aren't the same.
As in, a rephrase of "transwomen aren't women".
Agreed - but the crucial point here is that the comment says that trans women are not women, which is a stance many would consider to be transphobia. I think the proper way to say it is that trans women and cis women are obviously not the same thing, but both are women.
This is the exact semantic they are talking about in the post. You just have different semantic parent objects. You want trans/cis with parent of woman, they used Transwoman/woman with parent as person. They are semantically equivalent.
They are not equivalent - one semantic assigns trans women under the category of women (not transphobic) while the other semantic assigns trans women as separate from the category of women (which many would say is transphobic).
Question ya wanna ask yourself is "WHY do they wanna differentiate between the two?"
What is the purpose of that distinction?
Is it medical care? 'Cos specific considerations are the only nice reason i can think of why you'd need to do that. Can think of a lot of nasty reasons why though.
The whole "I'm not saying 'cis'" is the biggest red flag. Typically in their mind it's because cis means "normal" instead of just being an adjective. It's like the people that say they have nothing against the gays (TM) but they don't like it shoved in their faces. Nothing against them but don't exist near me energy.
It's a very polite post on the surface, but do note that they refer to trans women as "it". I think they're being very polite because they know that saying "I think trans women are just deluded men and I don't want to respect those things" doesn't go as well.
They don't. Read the text carefully. The use of "it" doesn't seem to be in relation to trans women.
I agree it confusing, but the use of it seems to be more general. Note how the rest of the text doesn't use such a construction.
The UK is known for polite transphobia.
Isn't that pretty much just JK Rowling? Iirc, the govt and BBC are pretty good about it
Considering recent events, I'd disagree with the idea the government is good about it.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/uk/uk-supreme-court-ruling-definition-woman-intl/index.html