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.
You misunderstood me. I'm talking about languages that do have different words for gender and sex. Romance languages do, but I wonder which other languages do as well. If you look at the wiktionary, languages that do have their own different words for it are in the minority. Most seem to borrow it from English.
Anyway, it seems like gender studies have a lot of work to do bringing their point across. It doesn't look like they're doing a good job, because it seems to be in a state of flux and the chosen terminology is extremely confusing as it overloads or seeks to replace an existing term with a new definition. And when someone doesn't understand, often they are written off as a transphobe (luckily not in our discussion) and called out instead of called in.
The wikipedia article on the word "woman" starting off with "A woman is an adult female human" parses terribly. A 'gender' is an adult 'sex' human. Wat?
Had it been "A 'new term' is an adult human presenting as a woman", it would've been waaaay easier to point someone to it and say "see, this is what I mean when I use 'new term'". Instead we ge discussions like these where someone has to explain "Look, the definition says this, but the 'old term' doesn't refer to the old concept, but to the new concept. I know it doesn't mention the new concept, but if you read the whole thing, you'll see that it's complicated, but can be broken down to 'new term' are 'old term'" and by then you've lost a bunch of people who just aren't interested and would rather talk about politics or the weather.
But thanks for being more illuminating than the wikipedia article. What a terrible article.
Wikipedia is good — for some things. But as everyone knows, it's also able to be edited by anyone.
My native language isn't even in PIE languages.
We generally call people "it" without anyone even being aware there's a connotation there if one translates the terms into English. (Except pets, they're afforded the proper they/them or just she/her or he/him, but not as often "it" as of people.
To me it seems like transphobia and active denial of these facts they don't accept is more the issue.
It's really not a complex issues for any one dedicated to finding out what it's about.
That's the thing, it shouldn't take dedication to find this stuff out. Not everybody's going to want to dedicate time to something that is supposedly simple. If you need to dedicate time to find out what it's about, then it isn't simple.
That's why IMO reusing "woman" and "man" for what previously / still is considered gender/sex was not a good move. It's much easier to say "this is 'new term' and it's not the same as 'old term'" instead of "this is 'new term', which is the same as 'old term' but means something different, you have to re-learn it". Confusion should've been the expected result.
Every "in" group has their things and expect people from the "out" group to understand. Like many people on the fediverse expect people to know what an operating system is, that linux is better than mac and windows, and that the fediverse runs on activitypub. Or car enthusiasts can't imagine people not knowing which models Opel released, how VWs compare to Mercedes, what a "V8" engine even is, and that ABS is absolutely necessary in cold countries. The difference is that the effect of not knowing or not understanding things of certain groups can get you called a derogatory term that nobody outside of the group cares about.
Regardless, this was an interesting discussion. We'll see how things turn out in the future, maybe a new term will be introduced to reduce confusion, or people will slowly adapt to the current situation.
It is simple, and yes, most people are unwilling to educate themselves even on simple matters.
This phenomena isn't new to humans. Third sexes/genders have been around since literally before the invention of writing.
It's rather black and white to try to claim that the people unaware of th distinction between sex and gender haven't implicitly understood some of the differences and used the language in that way.
That's why it'd be silly to talk about "women penguins", or do you disagree?