I'm gonna get real with you folks, we've had way too many of these posts recently. I've been reflecting on this topic a lot the past few days. For me personally, I couldn't care less about my gender identity. But just because that's true for me, doesn't make that true for everyone.
The beauty of the fediverse is that if you don't like the way a particular instance or community is moderated you can simply choose another to hang out on, or create your own.
Blajah has made it pretty clear by now they will ban anyone who argues against the validity of xenogenders, in order to create a safe space for those folks. That's fair enough imo.
Safe spaces should be respected, and Blajah's admins/mods do not deserve abuse for creating and maintaining those spaces.
I can completely understand why Blajah users don't want to have to constantly argue with external users about the validity of their chosen identities. Bans are one way Blajah has decided to manage that problem so that their users can experience lemmy in relative peace and safety. While it is a blunt tool and I have my reservations about preemptive bans, there are not many other options for @[email protected], other than defederation from most instances. That would be a terrible outcome for the fediverse as a whole.
In order to help Blajah to maintain their safe space, I would like to propose, if @[email protected] agrees and community sentiment is positive:
- that we no longer accept posts about this topic in this community; and ~~- we also remove previous posts on this topic from the community.~~
That's all folks, have at 'er.
Edit: thanks for all your feedback and comments. I think it's clear that the vast majority of people are fed up with this topic coming up repeatedly.
Summarizing the feedback, I'd say most folks would prefer to retain previous posts for the sake of posterity, and to serve as an example of why we don't want anymore of these posts. I'm happy to take that on board. For those folks saying I'm a PTB for intervening in this way, I'll just remind you that I haven't made any arbitrary mod decisions, and I've consulted with db0 and the community as a whole before taking any mod actions.
I think the way to move forward with this is to acknowledge that there's a bunch of queer and straight people who have a problem with xenogenders. Personally, I think that's a valid perspective and shouldn't sanctioned on our instance. But for Blajah, they've drawn a line in the sand over this and that's ok too. Our instance won't be blocking anyone over their opinions on the topic, especially in this community where free discussion is necessary and encouraged. But safe spaces should be respected.
A lot of folks mentioned I should more more specific about the "no more posts about Blajah's mod policies" rather than making it a sweeping and overly broad statement. I think that's good feedback. I will amend this to "No more posts in this community about the validity or otherwise of neopronouns, xenogenders, and bans originating from Blajah about gatekeeping or transphobia. This is in recognition of Blajah's safe space policy. You are of course free to discuss those topics outside of this community.
Note that this decision isn't about ideological gatekeeping, its about reducing the workload for our own mods and admins in trying to moderate this community, and to avoid iterating over the same old topics again and again.
Blajah isn't getting a "free pass" over YPTB posts - if you feel they are power tripping over other issues then feel free to make a post here. But if it's a post questioning the validity of xenogenders or about Blajah bans for gatekeeping then that will no longer be allowed here. Those folks deserve a safe space on Lemmy, even if it's not a mainstream opinion.
For those folks who feel aggrieved about being accused of "transphobia" or "gatekeeping" over their views on this topic, I completely understand just how hurtful it can be to be unfairly (imo) accused in this way. I've been in the same position, and I also found it difficult to deal with. I want those folks to know that our instance does not require you to support xenogenders in order to participate in our instance. However we do require that you use preferred pronouns whenever they are specified. That's been a longstanding instance policy on dbzer0.
Thank everyone for your feedback.