171
Could we please refrain from doing exactly what nearly got programming.dev defederated?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Blåhaj Lemmy is a Lemmy instance attached to blahaj.zone. This is a group for questions or discussions relevant to either instance.
Dysmorphia =/= dysphoria.
Gender dysphoria is what trans people have. Body Dismorphia is the mental disorder where you think you're ugly when you're not. They have similar names, they can be confused for each other, but they are very different. It's an important distinction.
Ah, I see, thank you. I was relying on spellcheck to identify the word without knowing much about it. I'll edit.
Assuming you mean dysphoria, this sounds suspiciously close to transmed/truscum rhetoric.
Could you expand on your point a bit?
Simply that a perfectly healthy cis person will sometimes get online and masquerade as a trans person, in an attempt to act poorly and otherwise further their goals of increasing transphobia in the world. And they find the process itself entertaining, having fun by hurting people is actually probably the primary goal, with the political agenda being secondary.
Thanks.
I don't disagree that there are bad actors that exist to defame trans people, but they're probably not not using established accounts from places like hexbear or blahaj.
You might be surprised sometimes. It's not some one-off thing of kids-will-be-kids. It's organized campaigns where an individual will manipulate a community somewhere into serving their interests.
Like, I could write a guide on how to do it, publish it somewhere, and then share that to 4chan or discord or something. It would be received as very funny by some, and a very small percentage of 4chans millions of users could possibly start attempting it. That small percentage is still in the hundreds or thousands of individuals though. And they're high-energy, passionate, and capable of learning through experience.
4chan takes a very militaristic approach to things sometimes, as a sort of poster child for toxic masculinity. So, they are capable of organizing sometimes. Or at least used to be, my experience was from a lot of years ago, before /b/ died of cancer.
I'm sorry, but I doubt people would start a lemmy instance, immerse themselves in leftist theory, and pretend to have a large amount of trans users for years prior to the reddit migration just to troll on lemmy instances starting 6-7 months ago.
It's just not coming from hexbear. In fact I doubt it's even close to happening at this scale anywhere on the fediverse for that matter.
No, they would not go through all that work, you're right. They would take something else someone has established and try to infiltrate it later.
I guess? But regardless of your point of view, hexbear acts in defense of trans people. Even if you don't agree with their methodology, they're always on the side of trans liberation.
What does 'bad faith trolling as a trans person' look like to you?
It's circumstantial. Could be calls for violence, exaggerated requests for inappropriate empathy, general unreasonableness? The mechanism of action for real life effects is a stubborn hardening of everyone's positions and a general breakdown of willingness to engage in serious dialogue in the long-term.
Those things could also be associated with lack of faith/trust in and general apathy for our current avenues for real social change.
Trans people calling for more materially effective strategies to enact trans liberation shouldn't be seen as trolling simply because one disagrees with an attempt at change outside of the established systems. It's not a problem with trans people, it's a problem with the people who take issue with attempts at circumventing the status quo.
Hexbear generally disagrees with respectability politics because they do nothing for the material conditions for trans people, which is why they appear brash. Whether or not you agree with their methodology does not diminish their arguments.
Culpable deniability is a critical cornerstone of conservative methods. All their behaviors must be explainable as potentially innocent, otherwise they are a very low-quality troll, likely to be detected and overall be ineffective. But still, they can learn from experience and grow in skill.
It would be very appropriate for you to question whether I am trolling right now, though a quick perusal through my history should illustrate I'm a fairly classical liberal that ultimately believes in freedom and equality. In my case, this has evolved into a belief that people should have freedom to transition, if that would make them happier, so I do support trans rights.
Bringing this back to methodology, I do not think trans people, being so small in number, have very many realistic options for progress outside "civility politics". But that is simply my opinion, I can agree to disagree on that one.
Maybe I'm misreading it, but it seemed like that user was implying there's a 60% chance that all of Hexbear isn't trans, like the whole instance is one great big LARP. I don't have an account, but I've lurked Hexbear every now and then, and I've never seen someone "break character". That would be an incredibly impressive feat if it were true.
No they're not 100% trans, but their cis users aren't pretending to be trans during these interactions like the user is insinuating.
Sorry, more what I meant was that they were implying that none of Hexbear was trans. I do understand that not everyone there is, same as is true here on Blahaj too. That's a ridiculous accusation to make, I've never seen anyone there "break character". There's like 2K active monthly users and 25k total, a conspiracy like that is bound to have become apparent at some point before now if it were true.
Ah my bad yeah, that was how I originally took the inciting comments.
Yeah, I fully agree, that's some truscum-level stuff for sure. It reeks of "you're not being trans correctly" respectability politics.
Trans hexbear user here, here's the estradiol I bought as a bit so I could extra convincingly fake my dysphoria for years to troll the liberals or whatever the fuck you think is happening
I personally know many of the trans users on the site and have met a few of them irl (genuinely, if you give me a name I can probably personally confirm that they're trans), they've given me a great deal of support in helping me transition and advising me on different methods of hrt, relative costs, etcetera. Even the site's few cishet users have been unflinching in their support of trans rights.
For someone who I've seen no indication is trans to imply that the instance with the most trans people on lemmy is actually primarily just conservative cis larpers who went 3 and a half years pretending to be trans to each other in an echo chamber and taking hrt and doing fundraisers for trans charities and holding weekly reading groups of queer theory and banning any suspected transphobia on the spot just to make cis liberals feel bad by calling them out for misgendering and not giving a shit about how transphobes feel is just completely transphobic in of itself.
Look at this post from my old hexbear account where I was talking about the increasing realisation that I was probably trans (with several of the trans people you and the blahaj user in the screenshot are claiming are probably just cis people faking it in the comments, CDommunist actually wrote out a short poem for me that I still have saved to this day because it meant so much to me during my transition) from about a year before hexbear even federated and long before fucking redditors (who have seemingly endless patience for bigots, but none for actual trans people) came to lemmy, and then tell me that I'm just "faking it for attention" or to troll or whatever
This is a massive exaggeration and mischaracterization of what I said. I was describing a possibility, and think it is likely that some not most or all people fit my description. Are you attempting to imply there are zero cis conservative larpers on that Instance or something? That would be surprising to me, given this is the internet, but I will admit that it is possible.
Please note, I was not attempting to insult your community. But I do think awareness of conservative methods makes it easier to fight back against them where and when they appear, and nowhere on the internet is actually fully, permanently safe.
Hexbear has existed for years and from the moment of its creation was basically under attack from /pol/, users of thedonald (there were some hexbear users that made a practice of finding Nazis on the Donald and doxxing them plus getting them fired by sending copies of their online footprint to their employers, so thedonald retaliated) and also what would later establish itself as the MAGA communist / patsoc movement (think people like Haz, Caleb Maupin, Jackson Hinkle, Midwestern Marx, etcetera - Haz actually made an account on hexbear back when it was called chapo.chat and very quickly got banned) though at the time we all called them stupidpollers because iirc they had a pretty big overlap with users of r/stupidpol, we also had one nazi called silver legion who kept harassing users and pretending if any of them left that they were actually secret silver legion agents leaving to decrease the morale of the site, also he kept doing holocaust denial and kept getting banned and making new accounts. During this time the site was repeatedly ddossed, users were doxxed and harassed in their DMs by Nazis (trans users were especially targeted), and a form of trolling that was called Kerry posting at the time became common (repeatedly posting very large images of the 2004 Democrat nominee for the presidency John Kerry to slow the site down - in retrospect this one is pretty funny ngl and has become a core part of site lore nowadays).
Basically we've had far more experience with sniffing out people trying to infiltrate our spaces than any other instance on lemmy, so I'm willing to say that I don't believe there's a single conservative person pretending to be trans on our instance. We've had two over the last half year or so and both of them got called out and banned in a bit over a week.
But to circle back around to the specific claim the person in the screenshot made that you're backing up, they're saying that there's a 60% chance that none of our users are trans and that we're all just pretending, also implying that the users in the programming dev thread that started all this drama specifically were themselves faking being trans to make the mod feel bad. I'm going to go through the thread and check each username but from the ones I recognised all of them I personally know to be trans.
Ah, I see. If true, then the screenshot I was defending was the real troll, trying to sow distrust. Or it remains possible it was all a big misunderstanding. Thank you for helping clarify this for me.
I do understand now that the admin of this Instance has their own idea for how to combat even the best of trolls, and I think it's something worthwhile that should be attempted. Extreme, radical inclusion, basically. Not without its own challenges, for sure, but it might prove very beneficial overall.
On the whole, this has overall been (a little ironically) educational for me, so thank you for your patience. It is appreciated.