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.

https://feddit.uk/post/27973987/16868783

flamingo-scant@feddit.uk 17 hours ago

To be clear, there were no posts, this is about two comments by one of our users, both of which I personally pushed back on. We're still discussing what to do, but consensus takes time.

ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.uk 19 hours ago

Address the comments or address the defederation?

I was the Admin who was contacted by Ada and that is a mischaracterisation of what I said. Our rules still stand that we won't allow transphobia.

Unfortunately, as the ruling on the interpretation of the law has recently changed, we are going to have to figure out how we approach this and that is going to require a consensus amongst the Admins, and an agreement on our wording going forward.

This is going to take a bit for us to work out (although not too long, we're getting there, I have been active on Lemmy but I don't call the shots, and we need input from all Admins) and if, in the meantime, LBZ feel we aren't moving fast enough and they need to defederate from us then that is obviously their right.

flamingo-scant@feddit.uk 14 hours ago

The issue is this rule in c/unitedkingdom and c/uk_politics: Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.

We've never had anything like the current wave of transphobia, not even those pogroms back in July, so we've never had to work out the exact line between 'disappointing' and 'horrible'. Working out that line needs discussion with all the admins, which unfortunately takes time. Regardless of what the government says or does, transphobia is not and will never be allowed here.