This post is "FYI only" for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the "adult human female" dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and "civil disagreement" on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to "sort it out through discussion and voting". However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little "sorting out" has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
Wasn't this a recent court ruling in the UK? Which isn't great.
I don't know all of the terminology, but the entire argument over it just seems so stupid, how does letting trans people exist bother you in any way?
I believe the court ruling was the legal meaning only. When a legal text says "female" it implies biological female (as sex, not gender) which is understandable. Same for medication notices etc..
I’ve not checked though but the main source of fight is whether we’re talking about sex or gender. There are two sides, the ones that assume "female"/"women" refer to sex by default and the ones that assume it refers to gender by default.
Yes, but the best thing is that it's not, like they are claiming, law. It is merely an interpretation. It doesn't stop us from doing anything we were doing previously though ultimately a lot of transphobes and business will inteprate it that way, sadly. Plus there is some whisperings of it meaning certain legal things but it isn't that yet. The Equality Act needs to be updated anyway and if it was this would make the supreme court's ruling null and void.
Even if it does mean new laws most of us will probably break them anyway as unjust laws are not worth paying any attention to.
For a positive perspective on it the equality act doesn't stop you including more groups than it specifies. So society can advance without needing the government to keep up, as long as enough of society agrees that can allow putting pressure on businesses when they don't keep up.
Good point! Thank you!