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Could we please refrain from doing exactly what nearly got programming.dev defederated?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
People don't stop being trans because you disagree with them politically. I despise Jenner and other high profile trans grifters but I'm not shitty enough to deny their identities.
Do better. As a user of both sites this shit is genuinely upsetting. Despite how you may feel about hexbear, how can you claim that they bait people into revealing their internalized transphobia and then turn around and make shitty claims like this? I don't give a shit if you call me a tankie or red fash or whatever, but I'm trans whether you like me or not.
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.
I have no skin in the game, lemmy.ml is federated with both blahaj.zone and hexbear, plus I'm cis. However, I do think it's worth looking at the situation as a whole:
A member of blahaj.zone is insinuating that the majority of self-proclaimed trans individuals on Hexbear are cis troll accounts attempting to be hostile and confrontational.
Personally, I am in the camp that thinks that this is at best ignorant, as there's no proof I've seen of this, and at worst transphobic. Again, it's worth noting though that I myself am cis and as such I will not pretend to speak for the experience of trans people.
Overall, I do think it's reasonable to ask people not to assume someone claiming to be trans isn't trans merely on the grounds that they are unpleasant to interact with or even actively confrontational. The mere fact that they are acting confrontational should be enough to disengage, but their identity shouldn't be also called into question.
The user claimed "40%" as the likely "true" number of trans users. 60% is definitely a majority. I believe it's 100% possible that there could be "false-trans trolls," though I also believe that doubting someone's trans identity on the grounds of being unpleasant or confrontational is transphobic and identity erasure. People's self-procclaimed identity is the only identity that matters, if you have to judge everyone on whether or not you're a "true-trans" that gets into transvestigation territory, only in the opposite direction. It's harmful to actual trans individuals, a sort of "guilty until proven innocent" rhetoric that I personally don't agree with. Again, I myself am cis, so the actual lived experiences of trans individuals, and thus their perspectives and views, may be completely different.
I do disagree about horseshoe theory. People being far-left vs far-right are similar only in that they passionately believe in radical politics. The actual views, however, are staunchly different. Leftism is fundamentally anti-hierarchy, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalist, whereas rightism supports and upholds hierarchy, Imperialism, and Capitalism. These are extremely incompatible and dissimilar ideas, one side rejects racial hierarchy while the other upholds it, one side supports trans liberation while the other demonizes them. Horseshoe theory is nonsense.
Your final point is completely divorced from the topic at hand as well. The claim by the subject of the OP is that people on hexbear "white knight" trans identity and use it as a shield, despite being cis, on the grounds of being confrontational. This is a claim without evidence, just vibes. Regardless of how unpleasant a troll may be, their identity should be respected, even if they are trolls that should or should not be blocked. A trans troll is both trans and a troll, their identity shouldn't be called into question because they happen to be a troll.
I think you are missing my point. It is not their political views that are similar, but how they treat others in relation to their views.
Dehumanisation of opponents, antagonisation, false flags, discrimination, etc are all part of the playbooks for both the extreme left and extreme right. While the extreme right has racism, the extreme left does 'reverse racism' (basically another brand of racism). Same with gender, the extreme rights have misogynists and the extreme left has misandrists.
Remember we're talking about extremist circles here. Obviously in wider society, one side of the whole discrimination issue is a much bigger problem than the other to the point where it's practically disingenuous to compare the two.
This is true, I have no evidence. The only thing I've said is that I can believe it, and the reason I can believe it is that I used to run in alt-right circles in the past and have a friend that used to run in extreme left circles. Their playbooks and tactics are shockingly similar, and dishonest enough to the point where I would not be surprised if there was a contingent on Hexbear pretending to be trans in bad faith. It is entirely consistent with what alt-right trolls would do.
With that said, you are also correct in that we cannot just no-true-scotsman away the fact that there may actually be some trans people involved in these trolls. There is a lot going on for a lot of trans people in communities with little acceptance, and you may have some that are trying to project an image or are in outright denial to themselves, just like how some gay people were when homosexuality was the big taboo. Or heck, they may actually feel the way they say they do, and want to lash out against a society that didn't accept them. I certainly couldn't blame the latter group tbh.
Yea, you've lost me. First, this is beyond the scope of the original convo, so I wouldn't be surprised if these comments got removed for being off-topic. Secondly, you're just wrong on many of these subjects.
"Reverse-racism" does not exist, same with extreme-left misandry, at least to the degree that it is even in the same realm as far-right racism and misogyny. Leftism is founded on ideas such as rejecting racism and misogyny, and you're implying this is taken too far in the opposite direction that it is somehow equivalent to actual ideologies built on racism and misogyny as core values. That's like saying that trans people take their trans liberation too far and are violently anti-cis, that's a made-up problem and trivializes the very real and active threat that transphobes pose on trans individuals in the real world.
Again: you're implying that taking the stance of "racism and misogyny are bad" to the extreme is comparable to "racism and misogyny are good and natural" to the extreme, it's utterly ridiculous and dismissive towards women and people of color who are genuinely struggling against patriarchy and systemic racism.
For the latter paragraphs, I'm not sure we disagree at all. There certainly could be false-trans individuals on hexbear, my point however is that it is nobody's job to judge or investigate this as it creates an atmosphere of transvestigation and "trans purity" testing that is ultimately transphobic.
You did not read what I wrote
I literally said this. To quote myself:
And Islam is founded on ideas of peace. Christianity is founded on ideas of being virtuous and kind to your neighbours, even if you have differences. Feminism is founded on the core concept of equal rights.
Didn't stop people finding ways to bastardise them, often to the point of going completely against the original messages. Jihadists, WBC and TERFs are all things, after all.
I'm not arguing leftism as a whole is taken too far. I'm arguing that there are contingents in every group who take things too far.
Except I have done nothing of the sort. You're taking a wildly different message away from what I wrote. So I'll try to explain again.
Every group, no matter how originally well meaning, eventually has an offshoot that bastardises the original message into an excuse for hatred.
Sometimes they stay a small group of salty little bastards. And sometimes they get big, sometimes big enough to hijack the whole thing. I would argue this happened several times over the centuries with conservatism, when hatred and subjugation became part of the 'traditional values'
I would agree, it is not our job to try and judge who is who.
I did read what you wrote. You painted the far left and the far right as strikingly similar in terms of dogmatism and action, as though antiracist action is just as bad as racist action. That was your entire "reverse-racism" point, that radicals must be evil if they are radical, which is false. Being radically against transphobia is far better than being radically transphobic.
You can claim you weren't trying to claim they are as bad, but you certainly seemed to be painting a picture that radical leftists are just as bad as radical rightists, because radicalism itself is bad in your eyes.
I'll give you an example: if the two stances are "racism bad" and "racism good," being radically in the "racism bad" camp is a good thing.
If that's your takeaway, then you have zero clue what radicalisation looks like. The radical left isn't 'radically against' transphobia, etc. It is just a different kind of hatred. See FDS for an example.
Nah, the radical left is definitely radically against transphobia. The "both sides" narrative is just dismissal of left wing values, generally.
Stop moving the goalposts. The conversation topic is about the extreme ends, I haven't said shit about the general left.
Actually it's pretty clear you aren't arguing in good faith so I'm just gonna stop here.
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.
The autism community has had that issue for a long time on the Internet too.
The good ol "I have Aspergers" as an excuse for being assholes in every discussion and as support for pretending they have a high IQ.
But then TikTok came around and you have people pretending to have Autism, Tourette and other disorders, not as an excuse to be assholes or do/say things that are frowned upon, but as a vessel to make bank. People posting hyper stereotyped videos pretending to have one of these disorders, simply because it gives them views and makes them money.
God, as an (actual) aspie, this shit really pisses me off. Even chewed out an IRL friend for pulling this shit. Only second to the people that want to sell shit by pretending they have knowledge of a cure/cause of autism. One even suckered my dad in and it was hard to control my temper at this point.
That phenomenon caused me to reject my original Aspergers diagnosis because I didn't identify with the people I saw stating they had Aspergers online at all.
Then the more I learned about the actual diagnosis, I saw how full of shit 99.9% of those claiming to have aspergers or another spectrum disorder were.
Wasn't easy to get to that conclusion either as for any sensible person, pretending you have what we have to deal with every day is outright insane.
There is so much misinformation out there that it makes an already complicated topic so much harder to understand.
I think most of the people that pretend have no idea what we go through, or they wouldn't touch the subject with a 10ft pole. They think it's just being Sheldon Cooper, hilarious, quirky, etc. They don't understand how lonely and miserable it can be. And that's before I get into audio sensory issues or those that just cannot handle change.