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.
The comments in question were removed last week and our internal position has been clarified, that there's no need to change our working definition of transphobia, albeit with some new considerations to allow people to talk about the transphobic actions of the British state. We want to make a statement, but the others seem busy with things outside of Lemmy.
I'm currently working on some guidelines for c/uk_politics to help potentially less informed users navigate the current situation without inadvertently being transphobic.
Thank you. Looking forward that announcement, hopefully that they convince Blahaj to redeferate
Yeah, I hope the guidelines help. I really want to believe that a lot of attitudes we see about trans people are from a place of ignorance rather than malice, though I do fear that I'm being naïve. The admin statement will, frustratingly, take awhile, if at all, as it's been two weeks since I've heard from another admin, unless I make one unilaterally.