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.
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?