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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.
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.