Blåhaj Lemmy and its communities have certain rules regarding respecting of one's identity and their chosen pronouns. This extends to identities and pronouns you might not agree with. Those are the rules of that space. You broke the rules. The consequences followed. This is just basic stuff.
On the other hand, if you believe certain people to be trolling with their neopronouns, then engaging with the matter in any way, is kind of "falling" for it. So, just ... don't engage? This is the internet. People get to be (more or less seriously) humanoid animals, fantasy creatures and races, and if you can't get along with that, you can expect to get thrown out of a space that explicitly welcome anyone regardless of their identity or pronouns.
I'm gonna be honest, y'all kinda fucking dumb lmao.
Let's say drag is a troll. If so, then drag's wanting you to do exactly what you're doing now. You have taken the bait, hook, line and sinker. Congrats! You're helping drag cause problems! To avoid taking the bait, you gotta use drag's pronouns. Do that, and there'll be no drama for drag to stir up.
If drag isn't a troll, then you're just being a dick and intentionally causing drama when you could just use drag's pronouns. By doing so, you'd make drag feel happy and accepted; which would be very progressive of you.
Soooooo..... By posting this, at best you're just feeding a troll and making other trans people question whether or not their pronouns will be respected (no, really, when cis people start drawing lines for trans people, I get extremely uncomfortable; it's not your place to do so, fuck right off), at worst you're being a piece of shit.
Edit: the fucking entitlement of cis people telling trans people how to run their spaces is sickening. I thought Lemmy was supposed to be fairly progressive, yet once again I'm being shown that cis people believe they deserve a voice in something that has nothing to do with them. You don't get to call yourself an ally when you question someone's validity.
Why is it powertriping if you clearly broke the stated rules.
That’s like agreeing to a contract without any comolains and then complaining the contract is unfair if you break it.
Blahaj was never intended to be a free speech zone, it was intended to be the one place on the internet trans people feel safe, so they really don’t care what you think, it isn’t made for you.
The post clearly said “respect people’s pronouns, this rule will be enforced” and everyone getting mod action clearly states in response that they have read and understood the rules, but fully intend to break them.
There are absolutely ways to say “hey Ada, I think your judgement of this particular user is wrong and I am concerned about the damage drag does by engaging in trollish behavior” without also saying “but I plan to misgender people anyway.” The ones getting banned here fail on both counts.
drag is an asshole and I'm not exactly jumping in to help drag. But I do respect identities and pronouns and that's exactly what the admins were enforcing here. You don't have to agree.
And you may think it's silly but people will do shit like misgender/ridicule Musk by calling him a woman's name or using she/her when describing him because he's transphobic. When you treat identity as something that can be taken away or called absurd and ignored, you're perpetuating the same shit trans people like myself are trying to avoid or change.
Anyway, the rules are clearly stated and enforced around identity. YDI
goes to a trans meta sub about rule enforcement, breaks said rule immediately, gets banned. seems about right? like do you want people to enforce rules or not? I though this sub was about people who are doing whatever they want regardless of the rules, not for enforcing said rules.
When some users’ sexual identities are as dragons, “dragons aren’t real” is a lot like “all lives matter”: on the surface, a statement of fact so obvious and controversial that it doesn’t bear saying, except for the subtext, which is an attack.
I suppose I should thank everyone in this comment section. I was initially feeling a little like I might have overreacted to an admin making a decision that no one in their right minds would actually defend when I sadposted on 196 about leaving, but seeing the wellspring of support for dragonfuckergender, I now feel comfortable in that leaving Blahaj is, indeed, the correct choice.
Now that everyone has had a chance to argue all day about this, I'm gonna lock this post so you can go touch grass.
I agree that Drag is a massive troll and that user has been banned from many instances over the past few months, including this one.
Maybe try leaving it up to the folks at blajah to decide what they want to be called and maybe just play along with it, even if you find it weird. "Normal" is so fucking boring anyway. If you really can't cope with occasionally coming across an unusual pronoun and being asked to simply accept it without having a meltdown, you probably don't belong on blajah anyway. Just move on.
The "gatekeeping" bans seem like a BPR to me given the context in which it was posted. Having said that, I don't entirely understand the rationale for blajah's rule, since the effect seems to be that you either need to be 100% behind fantasy neo-pronouns and identities (including drag? dragonfucker??) or cop a ban, but if that's how they want things then that's up to them. Not every space is for everyone, and diversity of communities and instances is mostly a good thing.
As far as our instance (dbzer0) goes, malicious/intentional misgendering of users is not permitted, similar to blajah. However, like others in this thread have argued, I agree that someone who literally identifies as a dragon fucker does not deserve to be taken seriously about anything, and it's entirely reasonable to simply assume the choice of pronouns is just another form of trolling. The context and drag's extensive mod history (along with previous alts) are important factors here too.
It's also concerning to me that people are being attacked and reported for being "bigots" or "anti-trans" in the comments just because they have hesitations over what are effectively contentious edge cases involving neo-pronouns and an infamous troll. I know for a fact that many of the commenters in this thread are very supportive of trans people, trans rights and respecting a person's chosen gender pronouns. They just have a problem with this particular dragon-fucker, not because Drag is trans, but because Drag is a narcissistic troll and a community wrecker who thrives on all the drama.
I'm leaving the comments intact for the record, but will add a CW below:
CW: possible misgendering in comments below, at least if you agree dragon fucker is a gender
PTB. This has very much soured me on Blahaj Zone, unfortunately. Not a big loss for them, since I only occasionally posted there, but very saddening to me.
Some early gay advocacy groups in US history attempted to cozy up with the more mainstream institutions of the time by distancing themselves from the more 'subversive' elements of the gay community and publicly condemning 'flamboyant' or 'promiscuous' gays. This had the opposite effect of reducing both enthusiasm of gay rights advocates and acceptance of the gay community by the mainstream. This is essentially what you are doing when you condemn trans people who use neopronouns as attention-seeking trolls. You making a distinction between 'legitimate' trans people and 'trolls' will not cause bigots to make the same distinction.
You can do whatever you want... however, so too can they. I may or may not agree with either side (fwiw Drag is obviously trolling, though that also seems entirely irrelevant?), but I defend blahaj's right to do as they please on their own instance - which they pay for and maintain with little help from others on the Fediverse? - and the post "Neopronouns are not trolling" seems fairly clear to me.
My problem lies rather with how that is not communicated clearly to people. It is not linked in the sidebar, it is not pinned even on lemmy.blahaj.zone, it is in a community that I at first thought was Local-Only b/c it was difficult to find from Lemmy.World (b/c of the different display "Blahaj Lemmy Meta" vs. link-to names !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone) - although it also seems cross-posted to 196 (but why MUST someone be subscribed to that one?) - and especially: when you visit that (cross-)post from some other instance, let's say lemmy.world via this link, the only text you see on the sidebar is for c/196, not the sidebar of lemmy.blahaj.zone, or from this link the text for the Meta community is equally uninformative, plus most apps don't show any sidebar text by default anyway, either burying it behind several button presses or perhaps not making it available at all.
So if you just wandered into a post federated and therefore hosted elsewhere, you may have no clue what is going on there? This is exasperated further by the sidebar text of !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone or !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone stating "other rules" which links to Lemmy.World, even when visited while on lemmy.blahaj.zone!?!? And then that post says nothing whatsoever about neopronouns - the closest mention is "prejudice of any kind" is banned but this is definitely a more contentious issue that those 4 words do not next to nothing to clarify. Also I don't see much of anything in the Lemmy.World ToS that would apply - possibly the text about "misinformation" but again, that seems far from clear, and more for an issue where the admins of Lemmy.World and the admins of lemmy.blahaj.zone would need to come to some kind of mutual agreement or at least understanding.
The tools made available on the Fediverse to help guide people into understanding what the rules are are abysmally inadequate. Ada can run their own instance however they wish, though it sure would be good to find better ways to communicate the expected behaviors rather than "ban people" or "not ban people" after waiting for them to walk into this issue unknowingly. I guess there is also "defederate from lemmy.blahaj.zone" vs. "not defederate from lemmy.blahaj.zone" as well - though it sucks that no other options in-between have yet been presented here. Beehaw at least has its core principles statement, though it too is not linked to from anywhere unless you visit the instance explicitly in order to investigate it (except from PieFed, where a message is presented - that's fucking awesome!:-D).
Things like this are why imho the Fediverse is not at all like merely using emails. There you simply click "Send" and it goes off to wherever it needs to be, but to navigate Lemmy without being banned for some off-hand remark requires quite a bit deeper knowledge than that.
So like, if you had read the aforementioned post about "Neopronouns are not trolling", then YDI (which b/c people won't read the sidebar even in this community, stands for "You Deserved It":-D) for inciting drama? However, if you had not, I definitely see why it at least comes across as a BPR ("Bait-Provoked Reaction"), coming a day or two after that "announcement" had been made (which again, how were people supposed to have known that?). Therefore it is at least possible that you are both correct, and merely talking past one another, each not willing to find common ground with the other.
Cry harder, YDI. Why does anyone care this much? If you dislike them, block them. Don't cry publicly about how you don't wanna take .5 seconds to type something else.