Two hours ago I made a post to [email protected] about US politics. I had previously had a good relationship with the head moderator of this community. They’ve encouraged My political posts, and he’s removed comments by people that misgendered Me, and reminded people of My pronouns, like in this thread two days ago:
However, an hour ago in this new thread, the same moderator who was telling people to respect My capitalised pronouns uses lowercase pronouns to address Me:
And he has left up earlier comments which also seemed to misgender Me, and which I specifically pointed out:
Even as some users in the thread gender Me correctly:
I’m making this thread in the main community because since the mod has banned Me, I can no longer report the comment or leave a reply correcting the pronoun. I would like to gain the attention of @[email protected]
Misgendering trans people and banning Them at the same time so They can’t do anything about it is not the kind of thing I expect to see on Blahaj. This mod is clearly 100% aware of My pronouns, and made a choice here. I suppose they could be using the general “you”, but it just doesn’t look like that, what with banning Me, telling Me My post isn’t welcome, and telling Me to go to a different community. I used to have a good rapport with this mod, they said several times that they valued My posts. I posted something he disagrees with, and now all of a sudden respecting trans people’s pronouns isn’t a priority anymore. He’s misgendering Me and they’re leaving up comments that also misgender Me. It feels targeted.
EDIT: I cannot seem to embed images. Every time I hit edit and fix the image links and press save, they change to some kind of aussie.zone image proxy link. For now I have left them as links without embedding them.
Well, this is some terminally online bullshit if I’ve ever seen some.
Listen. I understand that we all want to be inclusive and I completely support this. I use this instance for a reason. But at some point, we have to draw some sort of line in the sand in cases like this. If you look at OP’s history, you’ll see that this is not a moderation problem, this is an attention seeker problem.
I’ve said it before in a comment that the moderation removed two days ago. Actually, it was removed for misgendering OP, I believe (didn’t capitalize the pronouns), BY THE PERSON OP IS CALLING OUT HERE, too! So accusations of transphobia against that person are ridiculous, but anyway, I’m going to repeat it here: This isn’t the first time I see this user post something, and I can’t help but notice a pattern of aggressively dictating the way people should act. Not only this, but OP’s already tried to pull something similar on Beehaw.
This has been on my mind ever since I first read the initial post a while back and I’m finally going to spill it. OPis literally the only person I’ve ever seen use “capitalized pronouns”. And I mean, on it’s own, that’s not a problem. Lots of people have their own special pronouns, whatever. No, what I question here, is the motive. Because here is the thing: OP identifies as a god. This isn’t coming from me, this is quoting from Grail’s Medium profile. “Nonbinary Goddess” and there isn’t even more details in this post. And I mean, yeah, that carries a ton of baggage, no wonder people had a problem with these pronouns.
Can we stop pretending that people are being transphobic because they question the fact that someone is self-identifying as a god, please? Let’s all be honest with ourselves here: Being inclusive is not the same as enabling entitlement. And making accusations of transphobia for something like this is quite frankly disgusting.
Some of you need to log off, because transphobia is real thing. You can’t just throw around this term like that. A few days ago, I was at a memorial surrounded by fellow trans people, grieving actual victims of transphobia, people who died for simply being who they are. Some of us are dying, some of us are being kicked off from their family, some of are being actually discriminated against, some of us are being harassed. This is what transphobia looks it. I’m sorry for being dramatic here, but come on!
If it can be explained by: “I’m was more focused on making my point and forgot to capitalize the pronouns”, then I’m sorry, I refuse to call that “transphobia”.
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Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Growing up in a deep red area I could talk at length about the discrimination (transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc) I’ve seen first hand and the scars (both physical and emotional) that myself and people I know have from that experience.
I won’t here because ain’t nobody want to hear that shit.
OP really needs to step away from social media for awhile and cool off. Social media isn’t what your life should orbit around, at most it should be a little seasoning on the banquet that is life.
Jesus fucking christ.
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NGL I feel the exact same way
Shit I didn’t even know “Bi” was an option until I was an adult and I’m freaking Bi lol
I didn’t meet many queer folk growing up (grew up in a hella red area) but there were a few and us discovering who we were together are memories I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.
Just to make it clear, I’m not siding or sympathizing with the OP in any way, quite the opposite
I feel OP really needs to log off for a few weeks to touch grass and cool off
They’ve got a bad case of a parasocial relationship with that mod
Not to mention looking at their post history seeing how they feel about queer people not being politically active (and how those people shouldn’t be welcome) yeah they’ve got a bad case of being way too online.
They’ve got a bad case of a parasocial relationship with that mod
That and the hyperfixation, and a bad case of “My thing is the most important thing” would make me guess more than some logging off is in order. But it’s a good start.
*TheyThere were quite a bit more than just the “they”
And they were easy to miss
I think I nailed them all though
Thanks
38 upvotes. By Zeus and Hera! What on earth possessed 37 people to upvote this transphobic nonsense. “Man, I hate gen z with their silly nonbinary genders, being friends with LGB drop the T TERFS was much better for my cognitive development.” I see your home instance and I’m in shock. Why haven’t you been banned? Wouldn’t you fit in better on Truth Social or Diagon Lemmy?
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Hey, let’s give OP the benefit of the doubt. We cannot pretend to know what They feel, so let’s just assume these pronouns really make Them happy in the same way as she/they for me. Because there’s other aspects to take issue with…
It’s the implied power dynamic and special grammar rules I don’t like. Capitalizing pronouns, especially since OP says They’re a goddess, feel is like lifting Them up above me, which I don’t feel is fair to me or anyone else. Then I also need to give Them special grammar rules, like they/them, my default gender-neutral pronouns, no longer being neutral? It feels like capitalization should be orthogonal to pronoun choice, but now everyone needs to relearn grammar. Most neopronouns are just learning a new word, not upending grammar. I’ve even noticed it changing how I’m reading replies in these threads, because the capitalized pronouns catch my eye like they’re the start of a sentence or a name I should take note of, they tricked me! I guess the only nice thing for me is it seems to more easily differentiate when a pronoun is referring to inanimate objects or a capital pronouns user.
Assuming OP is genuine (as you probably should), I think the main issue is the undue burden of everyone having to lower ourselves under our capitalized goddess. Should we be required to use a signal that implies You’re above us? When I switch to she, “she” doesn’t change the power dynamic between me and someone else, but if I said my pronoun is “master”, I think people would rightfully refuse. It doesn’t matter if OP sees this as a power thing, because most other people will and so forcing them to use it will bring up that feeling. Yes OP, I don’t want to make a trans person suicidal, but I also don’t want to make everyone around them feel lesser; and as You said, it doesn’t matter what others think, it matters what the person feeling it feels.
I did want to be respectful, and I think I got all the pronouns correct for OP, but it did make me uncomfortable for the reasons described above. In this thread I’ll try to capitalize pronouns as a show of respect, but I’d rather leave it in this thread to respect myself.
Surely you mean Jesus Fucking Christ, because OP knows several magical people who have used their magical powers to confirm Jesus also uses He/Him with capital letters.
Is this bait?
I think this is the third or fourth time I’ve stumbled into this instance and every post has been… eye-opening for me. I believe it’s all perfectly genuine though.
No, it’s a trans person existing and wanting not to be misgendered. If you find that enraging, leave this instance.
After reading the community’s pinned “Rules Breakdown” post, I can easily see how Your post violated their rules. 🤷♀️ And as another poster in this thread points out, it appears You’re just on a time-out, not a perma-ban.
Also, I will capitalize “you” for You as an act of politeness, but I very strongly disagree with characterizing this as “misgendering”, even after reading Your “Introduction to capitalised pronouns” post. Yes, grammar is socially defined and arbitrary. For example, the only reason African-American Vernacular English is labelled “improper” is because so many (white) people with power say so — there’s nothing inherently worse or better about it. However, it’s still necessary to reach consensus on the meaning of words, else no one could be understood.
Capitalization of Your pronoun is clearly very important to You, and it would be thus be unkind of me to refuse to accommodate You when it’s pointed out, but English is not a language where every pronoun is gendered. The capitalized version is an honorific form of the same pronoun, not a different pronoun altogether. And generally speaking, the use of honorifics (“sir” and “ma’am” being the most common ones) is becoming far less common these days. Perhaps it’s because honorifics are most frequently used to establish dominance and subservience roles, whether that be in customer service roles (“yes, sir”) or governing roles (“yes, Your Honour” or “yes, Your Majesty”). To borrow Your own example, even many Christians now refer to their god as “he” rather than “He” in written language. And of course, those of us who totally reject the notion of gods certainly don’t. Your insistence on capitalization as respect for Your divinity makes me genuinely uncomfortable as someone who doesn’t believe in divinity at all and certainly shouldn’t feel subservient to You.
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I want to make it very clear, I completely respect Your pronouns and am working on resolving this issue.
I gotcha Fam for those embedded pics
In order:
I’d assume that the mod in question (being a mod) sees a ton of posts and comments from a ton of users and simply didn’t check Your profile before making the comment there.
Or hell it could have been their autocorrect dropping the capital (which mine does pretty often)
But from what I can see it’s also a single comment. Don’t assume malice when ignorance can easily explain it.
And that mod is really quick to ban people, hell they banned me last week less than a minute after I made a comment on one of their posts simply for saying that dems and the GQP weren’t the same (their post was implying that they were the same). The reason they banned me was for being a “liberal”.
Personally I’d recommend a solution to help weed out transphobia vs ignorance: put Your‡ pronouns at the end of your username so that it’s easy for people to know and talk to you how you’d like. This is fairly easy to do on Lemmy as flairs at the end of usernames don’t really exist around these parts.
‡ I literally had to go back and manually change this to a capital Y after my autocorrect changed it.
Edit: Missed some caps.
And that mod is really quick to ban people, hell they banned me last week less than a minute after I made a comment on one of their posts simply for saying that dems and the GQP weren’t the same (their post was implying that they were the same). The reason they banned me was for being a “liberal”.
That’s fucked up mod behavior.
The best part is that being a “liberal” isn’t against their rules, and my comment wasn’t even rude.
Definitely tempered my expectations about that community.
Story Time if you're curious
Basically it went like this:
“Huh, neat a lefty community. I wonder if this one is going to be a chill one I can hang out in.”
Immediately sees a “both sides” posts
“Well that’s missing some much needed context”
Makes comment and carries on
Gets ding in inbox after loading up another community
BANNED for being a “liberal”
“Well that answers that question”
The mod’s behaviour is on full display in the post as well.
The comment that got me banned
Edit: Formatting
Blue MAGA
Yep, that sounds about right for this guy. He’s a transphobic troll trying to induct Lemmy users into a suicide cult where they abstain from voting and let Trump kill them because voting for a liberal “feels bad”, and we all know some rich asshole’s feelings are more important than the millions of people living in the West Bank.
Being an effective leftist means that practicing starategic voting is a must.
No one is a perfect candidate, no one will live up to what you want your politician to do all the time, they just have to be better than the other guy and be viable to the average shmuck.
And participating in politics is something you should do. Not just going to protests but reaching out to your politicians, talking with your neighbors, participating in open house discussions, etc. You can’t do it all the time (no ones got time for that) but do it when you can and encourage others to do the same. The more people who do it the more coverage of the variety of things that you can participate in.
When ever I see massive protests in the streets I can’t help but think “If even 1% of these people showed up at City Hall meetings even once a month there would be some real change real quick.”
“I’m in this picture and I hate it” moment
Kinda funny is going back and rereading my comment here I noticed I missed quite a few and even OP didn’t catch them. I mention this because OP called out one of my comments where I was saying that they “need to touch grass” by simply correcting a single bungled pronoun.‡
That really highlights how easy it is to miss and how much OP is way overreacting here.
‡ Most my comments are fired off during down time at work so proof reading is sometimes not a luxury I can afford.
Weird, I can’t see the embeds in your comment either. Maybe aussie.zone just doesn’t support them. It doesn’t support a very long display name either, maybe I should change instances.
I’ve been posting to Liberty Hub every day for around a week, and this mod has been responding to a lot of My posts. They seemed to have a firm grasp of who I was every other time they commented on one of My posts. And the post they commented on here, it was a link to My blog, so if they read it, they should know who I am, right?
Here are some of their other comments on My posts:
https://imgur.com/8cWH9WY.png - https://aussie.zone/post/11567153/10314640
https://imgur.com/s2gYmSM.png - https://aussie.zone/post/11497681/10240630
He’s never not known who I was before, he’s always used My preferred pronouns. If this is a coincidence, it’s a bizarre one, and it’s one I can’t fix without making this post, because the day he suddenly misgenders Me is the day he bans Me.
I wouldn’t call it a bizarre coincidence at all. Typos happen literally all the time to everyone.
A single error doesn’t make a trend, a pattern of errors does.
And again that mod shoots from the hip on bans. I’d say seize the opportunity to take some time off and cool off.
Getting banned from a community can really make someone salty at the moment it happens and taking the opportunity to chill is the best course of action for one’s mental health.
Even if it was a mistake, maybe Blahaj shouldn’t have mods who shoot from the hip and end up banning trans people they accidentally misgendered. Maybe the position of moderator should entail some more responsibility to trans users. If it was a mistake, it was preventable.
Mod abuse goes as far back as the history of online moderators, that ain’t going to be fixed any time soon.
But I really think You’re looking way too into a missed capital letter and a ban for violating the rules of a community.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason that he missed the capital in that comment is because he copied it from another comment he made or because writing that response has become so automated for him that he didn’t think about changing pronoun. It’s not an excuse but it’s more likely than it being intentional misgendering.
That community gets overrun by people saying to vote for Biden or defending Biden’s actions so it’s a lot of work to remove all those comments (there’s a lot of space on blahaj to voice those opinions and in my experience not much space to voice critique outside of libertyhub so I’m in favour of banning those comments there in order to elevate opinions that get suppressed elsewhere). It means that mistakes are easily made, and to make it themselves easier the mods there probably ban people for comments that they consider to be in a grey area because it reduces the workload.
If being the only anti-biden community on Lemmy means misgendering trans people then maybe there shouldn’t be an anti-Biden community. If somebody is going to host a community like that, it should be someone who can do so without transphobia.
That’s not what I wrote though.
It’s kinda what you did tho.
there’s a lot of space on blahaj to voice those opinions and in my experience not much space to voice critique outside of libertyhub
Absolutely false. You can voice any opinion you like in most communities here. Including blatant transphobia, according to what I see in this thread with the people hating on OP. Liberal Hub is the only place that bans people for any remotely left-wing opinion.
I would like to resolve this issue, please contact me on Discord (username: kittenzrulz)
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have you ever talked with LOC or are you just this mad for parasocial reasons?
It’s very simple, language is for the benefit of communication. Ain’t nobody got time to fuck with hyper-specific pronouns. They/them is a well understood way to reference people; capitalizing that shit is confusing. Learn to get along with people, OP. Sometimes other people compromise for your, sometimes you compromise for others.
Capitalized pronouns.
This, folks, is how you delegitimize an entire movement in one easy step.
OP is mental.
I’ve never heard of using capitalized pronouns, would You mind sharing a bit more about why You use them?
No pressure at all, You obviously don’t have to explain or justify Yourself or Your identity to me or anyone, but I’ve done a bit of googling and the only references I can find are to deities and i genuinely would love to know more
Four years ago, I realised I was goddessgender, and My goddess-mother suggested I try out capitalised pronouns. They felt right, so I kept using them. The inspiration for Me to try out the pronouns came from My divinegender identity, but I don’t think of the two as equal. I think the statement “Gods are referred to with They/Them” is about as true as the statement “women are referred to with she/her”. I have met women who use he/him, men who use she/her, and enbies who use everything. But if your friend is coming out as transfeminine, it’s a good idea to suggest she/her, right? I think it’s the same with Me. My pronouns and My gender identity are not the same thing, they just happen to align, as most people’s pronouns and gender do. I hope that people can respect My pronouns without having to believe everything I believe about My gender. I think the reason we use someone’s preferred pronouns can just be “They like it”, and it doesn’t have to entail any kind of acceptance of a belief system. Likewise, I would immediately respect the preferred pronouns of any two-spirit or Bissu I met, despite not being a member of either religious system.
I wrote a couple of articles on the subject more broadly: https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/introduction-to-capitalised-pronouns-f5140e722b48, https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/on-spiritual-genders-b4152c4503cb
On My Discord server, The Outside, capitalised pronouns are the default for everyone and everything. We use the change to our language to provoke a change in thinking. It fills the air up with magic, which is very useful because it’s an occultist server. And it has the handy benefit of getting everyone used to capitalised pronouns without starting a fight. The rate of transphobia in the server is much lower than other queer spaces I’ve been.
This is the worst troll attempt I’ve seen this year.
Either that, or it’s the silliest thing to come out of a bong this decade.
It’s gotta be the drone rights guy, they both were narcissists and drone rights was known to have multiple accounts where they pretended to not be the same person until put under pressure. I am amazed at how accepting people are of this person.
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Honey, I ain’t reading more of your blog
You have made comments 4 months ago using lower case pronouns, care to explain?
When I join a new space, I usually closet about My pronouns and other aspects of My identity on a hard or soft basis until I’ve made a decision to come out of the closet. Misgendering Myself is a safety measure to prevent harassment and abuse. When I am open about My pronouns, there are certain people who will decide to grill Me about every little perceived inconsistency to try to “gotcha” up an excuse to call Me a fake trans person. I usually only gender Myself correctly once I’ve decided to accept the risk of running into that kind of person.
Aside from judging a space to see if it’s safe, in some spaces it can help to introduce Myself closeted and then come out, rather than start out being honest about My identity. There’s a lot of people on sites like Lemmy that will call a new user who uses neopronouns a troll. Only being honest about My identity after I’ve proven I’m no troll is safer.
Do you care to not question trans people about Their pronoun usage like you’re fucking Sherlock Holmes? “care to explain” tf does that mean? Have They sufficiently explained the daily struggles of being trans to you or do you need a DNA and fingerprint test?
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That’s awesome! Thanks for explaining.
Thanks for taking the time to explain :)
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The mod log shows the ban was for violating rule two of the community (both for the post and user). Seems like there were others who had comments removed and were banned for 6d as well around the same time. Perhaps the mod didn’t realize who You were and was banning on autopilot to clean things up in the community?
Also, FWIW, in my client (Alexandrite). and from what I can see in Your screenshots, pronouns aren’t showing up next to Your username where the comment is. I’m absolutely not defending anyone transphobic, but not everyone is going to click through to the profile to see is pronouns are in the profile. I wanted to let You know about that incase that’s some setting on aussie.zone or something that could be fixed and make things better.
The word “capitalised” brings My display name over the character limit, so the best I can do is “They/You”. I can’t even change it to “They/Them/You”
Do different instances have different character limits?
I did some tests on a couple of my alts and “Grail (They/Them/Caps)” fit on all of them.
Maybe try that?
They do have different limits.
capitalised pronouns are on a fundamental level as valid as any other gendered pronouns. fucking up can happen but not accepting OPs pronouns because they are unusual is shit
i’m still blocking OP tho because no gods no mastershonestly deities are also fundamentally ok. just dont be a cunt, but thats true for everyone.
i personally find the words god and deity a bit loaded with superiority, but thats on me
I can’t even begin to imagine the daily mental gymnastics required to reconcile thinking of yourself as a god and also claiming to be an anarchist lmao
No gods no masters all the way.
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Cool, thank you for the pronoun support and also I’m reporting you for saying My gender identity shouldn’t exist. Your comment is simultaneously very inclusive and not at all accepting.
https://lemmy.world/comment/11279958
I don’t really believe in binary gender. I think being men and women is a phase that everyone will grow out of one day.
So Just To Clarify, Someone Thinking Your Gender Identity Doesn’t Exist Isn’t Okay, But It’s Fine For You To Do So To Others?
I’m Also Curious, Are Capitalizations Necessary In Spoken Word To Gender You Correctly As Well? Or Is This An Online Only Thing?
That thread was removed by a community mod and I can’t find any examples of deliberate misgendering in remaining posts.
I will action deliberate misgendering, but in this case, the posts have already been removed.
@[email protected]’s post doesn’t show up in the modlog as removed for being transphobic. It wasn’t technically removed. I can see it on his profile from lemmy.ca and from Blahaj zone. You can remove it for misgendering if you click on his profile. And you should, so there’s a record of the fact that he’s a transphobe who only believes in trans inclusion for his merry band of suicide cultists.
Can you link me to the post on blahaj.zone please?
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/9761984
I don’t expect you can remove it by clicking on it as the post it’s in reply to is removed. You’d have to either do a direct API call or just access the comment from his profile. Or maybe you could restore the post to make the comment visible, remove the comment, and then remove the post back out again.
The moderation actions weren’t federated to aussie.zone, you can read the comments in the thread from this instance. https://aussie.zone/post/11840603
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I’m sorry I’m not able to moderate the community all the time, however that doesn’t mean that it deserves to be banned. I’m genuinely trying and doing what I can.
It deserves to be banned if Linkopenschest is in charge of it. Go make your own non-transphobic community, or kick this guy out of the one that already exists.
I do not have the power to remove him, if he willingly chooses to step down I will continue the community (in a less restricted manner). Until then I will continue doing my job of trying to reign in the worst parts.
That’s pretty blatant transphobia on the part of the moderator.
Check out the modlog, he calls you a genocide supporter in it just for agreeing with OP’s post. He’s transphobic scum.