There's a big gap between "transphobia is rampantly unchecked" and "it's not overt transphobia", whether you want to acknowledge that or not.
The "political theory" spouted by tankies is a cover. They reveal their true nature in the people that they glorify, such Mao, Stalin, Xi Jinping and even the Kim dynasty.
Going around assuming the worst of other people is not a path to success, or peace, or acceptance. If you are regularly looking for reasons to be angry, then of course you will regularly find them.
People spout transphobic, gender-critical language and arguments constantly. I'm describing transphobic bullshit that I regularly read. They have lines of arguments that would come straight out of JK Rowling's mouth.
As someone who's a mod for a few LGBTQ specific comms on blahaj and is in the blahaj mod chat (keep in mind that I'm not an admin btw) I can confirm that there's been some brigading of specifically this instance and it's users (because it's tied for position with hexbear as biggest trans focused instance on the lemmyverse, it's widely federated so more visible to transphobes, and the users on hexbear are basically psychotic so anyone wanting to harass trans people tends to go for the squishier target of trans people here rather than go to hexbear and get dozens of replies telling them to post pictures of their dick, sending them pictures of a pig shitting itself and calling them a "hitlerite KKKracker" that deserve to be executed by firing squad and then being off and on harassed by the bears for the next two weeks) by transphobes in the past but normally it's just one or two people doing it at once across a load of alts and they pretty quickly get banned. Also since the admins are in Australia, sometimes it takes a while for accounts to be removed and get site wide bans because admins are asleep when trolls from Europe and America are active so the transphobic comments get seen by more people before they get ban hammered.
At one point there was a pair of tiny instances that had open sign ups and literally no moderation that accounts were just being made on with the specific purpose of harassing trans users on here but they got defederated. By now, most of the overtly transphobic people have gotten bored though and stopped doing it.
There's also the occasional problem with the sort of "i'm just asking questions" transphobic gender critical stuff the person you're replying to was mentioning, but because that mainly comes from people using their actual long term accounts and not just trying to drive by harass users here, once they get banned they usually don't tend to come back; since Lemmy's growth has slowed now, a lot of the bad gender critical people have been banned by now and there's not many new ones coming in.
TL;DR: there's been problems with overt and covert transphobia in the past but it's mostly been dealt with by now but we still get the occasional thing every now and again.
Thanks foryour thorough answer. I and I'm guessing manyothers experience lemmy as a very leftist space. Therefore I was a bit surprised when the other person claimed that transphobia was"rampant".
the main kind of transphobia we see on lemmy kind of takes on a different skew than in most places bcs of the left wing nature of lemmy, so we don't really see any overt conservative types anymore bcs they all got bullied off but what we do see is that a lot of the time now, transphobia (at least of the gender critical type) comes from users who are life long committed dyed in the wool older democrat supporters or whatever who dont really agree with trans stuff or whatever but just accept it because they think everyone deserves to live their life and they oppose Republicans attacking us. So they'll make some faux pas about transness, be corrected by a trans user but then double down, get into an argument and then at some point just start being openly transphobic. So for instance a while ago i saw someone who kept saying he was really trans positive and woke and he didnt oppose trans rights at all, briefly make a shitty joke saying that on lemmy it was always the "leftist pronoun brigades" having shitty takes in the news threads, get (tbh kind of agressively) told what he said was transphobic, which he replied to by doubling down, and then a few replies on and he was saying that he accepted trans people but nonbinary people were all
[CW for transphobia:]
'mentally ill basement dwellers appropriating the trans struggle to cancel people for not accepting their made up pronouns'
but yeah, transphobia is a lot less noticeable on lemmy than reddit imo, but it is still there and some of the more right wing instances aren't particularly good about banning their transphobic users if they just use dogwhistles instead of being outright anti trans
ok. I guess I've been hanging out in a bit too radically based communities to experience that. That's some seriously shitty stuff I really didn't expect on lemmy.
Thanks for explaining that stuff. I'm seriously sorry for all the trans folks who have to endure that shit. I'm gonna be a bit more vigilant in the future.
I talked to an overtly gender critical person like, a week or two ago?? A thing of the past? Crazy.
Calling gender critical people "soft transphobia" is such a huge misnomer. They're not transphobia-lite, they're STRONGLY transphobic but they are very skilled at crafting arguments in a way that don't appear transphobic to people who aren't versed in the rhetoric.
what i meant by that is blahaj is no longer being explicitly targeted for harassment and we don't see as many gender critical types as we used to, not that they're gone. The problem with moderation is that we can only ban someone for transphobia once we've seen them being transphobic which means other people will see it too, also if someone never interacts with blahaj we're less likly to see them to ban them in the first place, so comms on instances other than blahaj are more likely to have transphobes on. There's also some limitations in the mod tools because mods can't forward users to the admins for instance wide bans after giving them comm bans so we have to use a matrix chat to message the admins asking them to ban them which is clunkier and occasionally some people slip through the cracks.
Out of curiousity what was the username of the person you had an argument with and what comm was it on? Because if they still haven't been banned or just got a comm wide ban by mistake I can message the mod chat to get them permanently banned instance wide.
But also yeah, the "soft transphobia" thing was badly phrased on my part, you're right, i'll edit the comment.
That person ended up deleting their account, I don't recall their username. And I'm pretty sure they weren't in blahaj.zone, but thanks for offering to look into it.
I hear you that mods have worked to curb transphobia on blahaj.zone, unfortunately I still see it around in my general experience using Lemmy and people like this other commenter unwittingly (or wittingly) fail to notice the red flags.
I don't know man, honestly, just pay attention. Especially articles about trans women in sports - that's a lightning rod topic for the transphobes.
What are you trying to accomplish here? Don't actually answer that because I don't care.This is exhausting. Being questioned and disbelieved about what I have seen as a trans person is not surprising but it's exhausting and it's frustrating to see your dumb ass comments about stop being so negative and making assumptions. That shit is so infuriating and absolutely patronizing to tell a member of a marginalized community, or anyone at all really.
Fuck you.
I am not debating you, I am telling you about my experience. You disbelieving me and giving me the third degree about this is a you problem.
Like - I'm genuinely sorry if that's your exprience. I really am. And I'm not trying to question your experiences.
However: would you please adjust your fucking tone? It was an innocent question. I didn't have the same experiences and was trying to get some info which communities house the people you're talking about. I'm mostly on anarchist and linux communities which are usually quite welcoming to any lgbtq issues.
Also, as I'm assuming you didn't notice: that was my first comment in this thread.
The expectation to not tell someone just asking a simple question to fuck of is not what I would call "tone-policing". But there I go, expecting people on the internet not to be fucking rude. Silly me, I guess.
I didn't tell "someone", I told you... did you mean to post this comment from an alt account?
I didn't say "looking for excuses", I said "looking for reasons". There's a difference, and I used the word I meant. "Excuse" implies that the basis for the anger is illegitimate, and I am not saying that, it may very well be legitimate.
There will always be a reason to get angry, but getting angry is a choice that you make. You can make different choices.
If you just live in a state of outrage, you interpret anything that isn't overtly positive as critical or "transphobic", and you take that as support for your impression that "There is rampantly unchecked covert transphobia", but this is confirmation bias. This point of view lacks nuance, it divides everyone that you interact with into a binary good/bad category.
The someone thing was about me, learn reading comprehension, self referential third person is a common phrasing asshole.
No, I am taking views that see trans women as potentially dangerous as being transphobic. Views that trans children shouldn't get healthcare. That's a far cry from "not overtly positive". You're disgusting in your attempts to minimize the situation.
You can make different choices??? Fuck you. I could choose to ignore transphobia, sure, but that would be morally lazy, morally painful, and directly impact me and my loved ones. I'm not looking for reasons to be angry, you're looking for reasons to delegitimize trans people.
If the only way you see transphobia is if someone is literally saying slurs, you're missing a lot and you're either dumb as hell or a covert transphobe yourself.
Your comment did not leave space for the possibility that what I am saying is true, and you did the basic thing that privileged people do where you tell a minority they're just getting angry over nothing. You think I live in a state of outrage?? You live in a state of willful ignorance.
🙄 you are probably just a transphobe tbh lol, idk who else would persist so hard at denying that transphobia exists, or persistently try to undermine someone bringing up real issues.
As you can see, I have not gained any love or adulations for bringing up transphobia on this platform. And if I did, would that make it wrong? Greta Thunberg gets called a hero, is her cause wrong? What a dumbass idiot thing to say.
Adults care about what happens in the world - it's not a storybook, it's real life and the discussions we have impacts voting, laws, and people's rights being taken away. Have the shittiest of lives.