2y ago

I find blahaj accusations of users here not being queer akshually very hurtful

I was kicked out of rentals multiple times for being visibly queer. I was scared out of some more by people who even moved after me, but made my life a living hell just for being queer. I was driven into near daily crying during highschool by my peers and sometimes even teachers. I was regularly spat on in public with no reaction from other people. I had a car full of tank top wearing men stop with the intention of beating me up when I was in middle school because they thought I looked too much like a "f*g". To see people, some of whom apparently so privileged they don't even experience systematic queerphobia as per own admission, claim us here aren't queer is so hurtful because it feels like it dismisses my entire lifetime of queer pain. Sincere fuck you to the people who make those claims. Maybe you are the one who isn't even queer and just sows discord amogus.

153 comments

I saw that comment while lurking.
Ngl seeing the meltdown, raging chauvinism and ignorance around minority struggle/liberalism/weird NATO stanning over there kinda informed my decision to make an account here.
I've tried a few trans spaces in the past both irl and online that I ended up leaving because of THAT energy.
Besides you lot seem to be the most trans supportive instance (nobody is erasing people's queerness here because they got confronted on their idiocy) and are actually politically/economically/historically literate.
If I had a comically large newspaper I'd hit them with it is what I'm saying.
Hello everyone 👋
Hope you feel better soon OP
- Besides you lot seem to be the most trans supportive instance (nobody is erasing people's queerness here because they got confronted on their idiocy)
  We had an early struggle session about whether or not it was okay to misgender Caitlyn Jenner for being a reactionary piece of shit. In true tankie fashion, dissenters were purged.
  (I’m an anarchist btw)
  
  Omg you have purges too?!
  Wow you really have everything here 😍
  Nice to meet you comrade 🥰 loving the left unity here btw, very based and not cringe.
- Sorry, only comically large spoons are available for discipline. Get to it comrade.
  
  I accept my comically large spoon with honour comrade.
  Now if you'd be so kind as to direct me to the village toothbrush?
- Yay new friend! Hoping that if defederation does happen some of the other cool people over there, however many they are, decide to make the same switch. Liberal queer people just depress me. I sort of get psychologically how one can get temporarily attached to the idea that the only salvation for queer people is the Democratic party (or whatever the equivalent in their country is). But the reality is, like i posted elsewhere, there is no queer liberation under capitalism. And NATO and neoimperliasm in general uphold the neoliberal capitalist world order.
  Welcome, comrade.
  
  Yeah I found myself getting genuinely quite upset to see the vitriol over there. I've lurked long enough to know half the accusations over there are abject lies.
  Yeah its tricky, its not like any of us are born with class consciousness and I know my journey out of liberalism was an awkward affair but even at my most lib-pilled moments I didn't go round crying about "the tankies".
  Lazy politics is in right now though and to confront the failings of our own systems is a bit of an existential crisis moment when you realise just how silly things really are.
  It's understandable, just not acceptable anymore. I mean how can these people see the erasure of women and queer rights under the dems or (equivalent neoliberal party, looking at you Labour party) or any of the other insane transphobia coming out of the west and possibly think these people have their best interests at heart? Cognitive dissonance doesn't even cut that level of sheer denial.
  Like didn't the dems delay the gay marriage bill specifically till after the midterms to drum up support from the lgbtqi+ crowd or something? I can't remember the specifics but like imagine thinking a party that weaponises your fucking rights to manufacture support is on your side.
  I'd tell these people to log off but I've seen them derail enough irl queer groups that honestly it's nice to see them contained to a weird little Liberal echo chamber.
  Lmao sorry I'm venting now.
  Nice to meet you too comrade 🫡
  
  same. i sometimes wonder if they never had anything bad happen to them and have a rose tinted view of the world, but obviously that isnt always true either. whats the point in trying to be nice to people that wanna rip your guts out?? ill never fathom it beyond calling it stockholm syndrome
  its also just... they believe this flowery shit that gets trans people killed in foreign countries. how do they not care?!
- we're here for you fam
  
  I have made the long pilgrimage and have found my home
- welcome home
  
  It good to be home gang
- Welcome! We're glad you're here
  
  Hello 👋 thank you for tolerating my inevitable weirdness
- Ayyyy welcome! You'll see me around a lot. I like to be silly and keep things light here.
  
  Sounds like a honourable mission 💪 i'll do my best too!
assimilationist queers are not your friend, tokenizing yourself to appease your oppressor does nothing but harm your community.
Yeah it's incredibly awful. Why the fuck would anyone say that?
You think people here have been secretly pretending to be queer for THREE FUCKING YEARS just to infiltrate your new queer space? Come on. The left has been doing queer politics a hell of a lot longer than liberals have.
Be gay. Do crime.
it also just straight up makes no sense. hexbear has had a queer majority long before federating with anyone. we were posting about being trans and gay for 3 years to trick who exactly?
- literally before some of these people knew what lemmy is, and if theyre young enough (which is likely given its 196), probably before they even knew they were queer
- We were playing the long game.
It's because none of these people seem to have ever seen an actual safe space in their lives.
Of course "nobody" uses neopronouns in general society. We all know what would happen if we did. Shame, ridicule, and violence would follow. And we're very attuned to reading online spaces for transphobia as well. Despite what a lot of people would like to think, many online queer spaces are NOT inclusive and safe.
I was an old-school redditor, and I browsed the trans subs for a few months. I saw so much hatred there. The general spaces erased all identities that didn't fit the "mtf" experience, so the trans men stayed away in their own space. Both their space and the general ones were OPENLY hateful of non-binary people for years.
This is one of the first spaces I've ever seen online that is truly inclusive. The neopronoun options are already there, you don't have to ask for them. Everyone is forced to show their pronouns, none of this "well mine are normal" garbage. There is a culture that promotes repressed voices.
And when some people see this, they can't even fathom it. To them, being "an ally" means allowing trans people to wear a pronoun pin and respecting those pronouns so long as they are "normal" enough, then carrying on with life as normal. If queer discussions ever start taking place in the open, they get uncomfortable because they're not used to it. If someone who uses any pronoun besides they or she or he, they get uncomfortable. This is transphobia. They just don't recognize it as such.
- It's because none of these people seem to have ever seen an actual safe space in their lives.
  Of course not, why would anybody let rabid transphobes wander into a safe space?
Lemmy liberals explaining why calling NATO imperialist magically makes you cishet:
yea these claims are very malicious. their default assumption is that 'this person is tankie therefore not LGBTQ+'.
the default assumption should be to believe that the person is saying they're gay in good faith.
- Liberals don’t believe that communism can progress in its views. It’s why you have so many people baffled when they meet non white and non straight people who are communist, and pull out some historical figure or event from the 20th century that was bigoted as some gotcha. Of course, they’ll want you to believe that liberal democracy has always been accepting of racial minorities and LGBT people. I mean, after all, black and Hispanic people are praising Alexander Hamilton. How could they be racist? And no, they will not consider adopting Cuba’s constitution.
The entire "how can you have that many different pronouns" discourse is by far the dumbest thing i've seen since the start of our federation, and it isn't just painfully cringe and ignorant and a clear sign that these people lack any and all experience with queer spaces unless you count r/196 and the trans category on pornhub, it is simply outright, open transphobia to deny peoples' gender identity. That's the very core of transphobic sentiment, to deny us our right to gendered self determination.
It's sad to see these reactionaries have now also extended their attacks to other parts of the queer community, but it isn't surprising. These people always start with what they perceive to be the easy targets, but it's part and parcel of reactionary persecution campaigns to expand the outgropups they go after. This, besides the moral imperative of solidarity, is the strategic reasoning behind "an injury to one of us is an injury to all of us."
We cannot tolerate such attacks on our queer comrades anywhere on lemmy. The perpetrators should be hunted down wherever we find them, and we should make it a cross-instance effort to make lemmy a safer space for queer people, and an extremely unsafe space for queerphobes of all kind. I propose that federated instances share blocklists of queerphobic users so that eventual bans can be extended to other instances preemptively. In a day and age were our community faces the worst attacks since the AIDS pandemic, we must look out for and protect each other.
- One guy told me he "doubts any online community would be that gender diverse" which is just a new flavor of the early aughts attitude of "there are no girls on the internet". But yeah its also REALLY telling that they have no interacted with queer communities before. The majority of places I interact online I'm outnumbered as a cis man.
  
  just shows he mostly hangs out in spaces that are openly permissive of transphobia, which unfortunately is most spaces. just hexbear's moderation policy is reason enough we constantly draw in trans people and eggs that will crack shortly.
  
  That was the "Everyone but me is a bot" guy right? Or was there another with the same
  ?
- These people always start with what they perceive to be the easy targets
  Just point me at them and I'll go ham
  
  Nobody hurts my trans comrades
  
  Ngl, we need chud hunting licenses for the dunk tank
It is heartening to see in the followup thread they asked us not to participate in that there's a bunch of Blahaj users supporting us and pushing back against stuff like that.
My entire family disowned me after I came out. If I hadn't already been working a pretty great job that allowed me to be fully self-sufficient I would've been homeless for sure. And in the time since, I've met some incredible people. I've loved and been loved by, helped and been helped by, and had my world enlarged and enriched by some of the most beautiful people in the world. Anyone who would think to negate that because I would like to see society improved somewhat is welcome to take a short jump into a deep mineshaft.
It is extremely hurtful. I live in fear every day because of homophobia and hate crimes, yet I'm a fake gay because I don't share the same beliefs as a westerner? What the hell?
Do gays in the global south/third world not exist to them? Do I have to become some comparador for the west to be gay? Why would I even do that when South Africa legalised LGBT rights before any of the western nations they are from? Despite all our homophobia and bigotry, we still managed to legalise LGBT rights before them. How does this work. It sounds like they're doing the whole LGBT is western decadence shit, but unironically.
There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism. There is no queer liberation under capitalism.
- Assimilation is eradication
Western ally behavior is so selfish. Once it gets uncomfortable for the "ally" or they have their beliefs challenged, queer people become much less human in their eyes and need to be discredited somehow.
It makes me furious how few online spaces are truly safe for the community, don't doubt that there are tons of cis comrades who see you as completely valid with no strings or nefarious bullshit attached.
I'm still a baby budding imposter feeling queer but fortunately I was also raised a cis het man so when someone tells me that I'm not queer I have the socialized energy to say "how dare you tell me what I'm not!"
How dare anyone tell any of my comrades, queer, trans, or otherwise, what they aren't. You are who you are whoever you are. You're all heckin valid. We're all heckin valid. Send those bad beans to me I'll smash em if they tell you otherwise
- I like to repeatedly yell "WEEE WOOO WEEEE WOOO THE GENDER POLICE ARE ON THE SCENE"
- gonna be honest -- "how dare you tell me what I'm not" is a hard place to get to for a lot of trans femmes. it's remarkable how fast social conditioning snaps back the other way.
  so: you're valid
listen jack....errrr you're not queer if you dont vote for me
- If you don't want the U.S. to bomb innocents in the Middle East are you even gay?
Yeah fuck blahaj tbh, that thread was depressing to read, there is no benefit to association with those people
- Honestly like I made that big post about cooling it to avoid defederation and while I still think Ada is working in good faith the fucking 196 mod is just a complete radlib "anarcho"-mccarthyist pos, like leaking DMs is such a dick move, I'm kind of split between disliking some of the users for pulling shit like that and a degree of respect for the head mod for trying to build some trans solidarity despite all the shit she's had to put up with from her users and many of the more dunk hungry users on here
  
  Yeah I really appreciate what Ada is doing but the 196 mod seems determined to do the opposite
  
  leaking DMs?
It's been removed by the mods now fyi.
- Good, but the people who spread those can make up more shit and rig perceptive with votes. It's highly uncomfortable that such an opinion arised in the first place and didn't warrant much response from their own community, even had a positive vote ratio and AFAIK they do have downbears.
  
  AFAIK they do have downbears.
  Actually I'm not sure about that. I don't have an account but if you go to https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/ I only see an upvote button.
I love my queer comrades
Its kinda fucked they didnt ban that user, maybe theyll get to it
Running into comments like this has been my least favorite part of federation, it's just jarring how open transphobia sits around in other parts of the Internet, and then we're not even allowed to comment on it because its in the meta thread of on blahaj
- eh fuck that, bigotry is to be opposed everywhere by any means available. rules like what you're talking about are for maintaining pleasant discourse, but the existence of bigotry renders that same discourse impossible.
  
  Yeah I know I'm a
  for not wading in, but it just feels like a no win situation. I just wish they would defederate without trying to make us feel it's our fault first. (or stay federated and purge the shitheads)
The one in the new thread was removed but they weren't banned and haven't apologized
I wouldn’t be too much of a stones throw to say those people are
s who have had economic privilege that has negated some of the difficulties other queer people have faced. I say that because why else would they hold on to lib values.
In what I've read (in the newest blahaj thread) our queer solidarity is the most cited reason to keep our communities together. I'm sorry for the unnecessary pain you've been through.
Please stop calling me a lib, that's malarkey. I'm ackshually a bidenomics maga communist [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲̅)̲̅$̲̅]
accusing hexbear users of not actually being queer is fucking deranged, what the fuck is wrong with libs
- Literally would not have realized these things about myself without talking to all our queer comrades here.
It honestly makes me feel kind of sick? I already have imposter syndrome and basically went back into the closet wrt being nonbinary because I was being harassed a couple years ago
- don't listen to those fucking people. just think about it: they have an actual toddler's understanding of politics. they know less about your gender than they do about that. if you cracked open their heads you'd find nothing inside their skulls but cotton candy
  every trans person thinks they're the one true exception, the fabled Fake Trans. you're not. no one is. don't ever let any scumfuck shitlib tell you otherwise.
- you're valid friend
- you're valid
I got banned from one of their comms for mentioning transmisogyny. Can't even talk about issues affecting trans women in the comm about trans women ¯(ツ)_/¯
policing who is & isn't queer is literally cop behavior. gross.
- We hate out cops dont we folks
  
  Omg it's beloved all round American hero Chris "Rogue justice" Dorner 😳
I went into the defederation post on blahaj last night and I saw some of those sentiments, it really was upsetting to me. I haven't experienced much abuse because I'm not "visibly queer" but that shit is such a braindead take and it definitely hurt my feelings and made me feel angry for everyone here who has experienced abuses like yourself. Fuck em

153 comments