this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Censorship. All the major subreddits became political echo-chambers. Reddit was founded on free speech and open discourse, especially when it was really uncomfortable. I'd love to see the same for Lemmy. Over the years I've seen authoritarianism creep into the moderation policies of most major subreddits. Today, even posting on the wrong subreddit is grounds for being banned from dozens of major subreddits. Even having a polite disagreement about, for example, anything to do with "trans," is grounds for being banned.
Anything to do with "trans"?
I'm sorry I'm not sure how else to describe it. Trans people are those who believe their sex doesn't match how they feel inside.
I am aware of the concept of being transgender I am just wondering what your "polite disagreements" are with it
I'd say that a fairly debated topic related to transgender people, which isn't just transphobes attacking people trying to live their own life, is the presence of transgender athletes in competitions. Some will take it as a personal attack whether you take a side or sit on the fence. I'm not looking to start that conversation here, but yeah. It's definitely possible to hold a polite conversation about this while disagreeing on parts of the question. In a healthy space.
I disagree, that isn't a "polite disagreement" and is, absolutely, "just transphobes attacking people trying to live their own life" as you put it. Every time that "Argument" happens it's openly done in biologically unfounded ways by people who simply don't understand how our bodies actually work- yet those arguments get mass upvoted by people who also don't understand how biology actually works and who believe that trans athletes get some insane, unfair advantage.
If you want to pass laws to restrict trans people from sports, then you want to pass laws to discriminate against trans people. That's not really up for debate IMO, it's a straight up fact; it's what you're doing when you advocate for laws that are not founded in science, that are specifically targeting a tiny minority for the chance that one of that tiny minority might beat cis athletes in an "unfair" way, you're advocating for bigoted laws.
Such arguments are also inevietably filled with people misgendering trans people, deliberately calling trans women "men" and hiding behind the "I'm talking about biology" argument to do so.
Replace the word "trans" with "black" and you'll find that people are making literally identical arguments to those against desegregating professional sports leagues 80 years ago. Literally word for word.
The thing I don't understand around it is that the people who are making the argument "trans people shouldn't be able to participate in sports" are usually also people who are not interested in the sport at all. As in are they upset because someone on the telly told them to, but they really don't care about the sport except in this very niche aspect which impacts a very slight minority of participants. I mean would half the US public be very interested in the deep technicalities of competitive high-school running?
Same with HRT. Why do I even have to know about it? It's a niche medical treatment for a comparatively small amount of people suffering from some very specific conditions. I can barely understand what the difference is between ibuprofen and paracetamol, and I'm sure most people are even less informed. Why is it not the sole interest of people affected by gender dysphoria (IDK if I'm even spelling or saying it right, sorry for my ignorance), and their doctors?
The thing that actually grinds my gears is that this culture war stuff takes over places and trans people have to get defensive over their existence, and a forum on fricking Bionicle gets full of trans memes. Don't get me wrong, if you're a trans person, or a Zulu, or IDK what niche minority, and you've made a Bionicle that uniquely represents you, I'm going to upvote that shit so hard since it's frickin awesome. But having the whole place be full of low effort "trans people are people" memes is about as funny or interesting as having the whole place full of "the sky is blue" memes.
People are getting outraged about what some socially disadvantaged minority is doing with their lives instead of actually contributing to society, because some idiotic grifter TV host told them to. Fucking lemmings.
I think that after HRT the difference is not that big. Trans athletes may even be at the disadvantage since there are some cis woman that have higher than average amount of testosterone.
In the long shot I think it would be for the best to abolish gender based separation altogether and replace it with something more like weight categories.
Consider two 5'6" 65kg athletes, one man and one woman, are you saying that the man doesn't have an advantage?
I used to believe the same until I saw the recent Women's Premier League in Cricket. They had to reduce the size of field and the weight of ball. Even with that, the fastest bowl in the tournament was 130kmph while that speed is considered a "slower ball" in men's cricket.
Now some of these female cricketers earm more than any Pakistani male cricketers. Which is fair, bigger market, bigger payout. But female cricketers don't stand a chance against the male cricketers
Here is a surprise for you: HRT actually does things to your body. I don't think this should have been that hard to find on your own, but I can't judge your circumstances.
Transphobes always make the same tired arguments about "biological differences between men and women" and then scream and run away when you bring up actual science, because they don't care about the science. They care about being bigots, and using science to make their bigotry look legitimate.
Mitochondria is the powerhouse of cell. I donβt think this should have been that hard to find on your own, but I canβt judge your circumstances. (You see, I can respond to things you did not ask as well!)
How is your comment a response to my question? I was replying to your comment of
which practically means stopping women from participating in sports
What does an athlete that's a man have to do with trans people
There are things that don't completely change with HRT (particularly when started after puberty.) Height, bone density, lung capacity, hand/foot/limb size etc. do not vary significantly after HRT and depending on the sport can make a huge difference (eg. Hand and foot size or lung capacity in swimming even where the two swimmers are the same height.)
Then we should allow people to access gender affirming treatment earlier, no?
Okay thanks for the input
All good! Sorry for the paragraph. I'm just bad a writing short messagesβ¦ π
Are you genuinely interested or just looking to start a fight? I know recreational outrage is a thing on Reddit and I had hoped to leave it there.
No I'm genuinely interested to hear your perspective and why it was a point of contention
@[email protected] this is exactly why tone policing is bullshit moderation policy.
Your modteam is allowing this transphobic screed to exist, and has in fact unbanned the user that posted it despite the very very obvious fact that they are a transphobe doing concern-trolling and "just asking questions" style veiled bigotry, while simultaneously banning everyone that has reacted to their behaviour by rightfully calling them the names they deserve to be called.
This policymaking is what results in people in the left calling someone a terf or a fascist getting banned while the fascists and terfs roam free. The site will be taken over by this and the left will slowly be banned and pushed out by it. The fact that the team can't seem to get into their heads that trans people might get a little fucking heated when bigots are allowed to exist and clearly defended by some of the incompetent members the modteam is another part of the problem.
You should get some trans people on your team to keep the rest of the idiots on it making these shit decisions in check. This nerd should absolutely be rebanned and every other person that copped a ban over this shit should be unbanned.
I'm not gonna lie, when someone calls out about censorship and not being able to talk about trans I'm inclined to think they're not people that have interesting to say.
But your comments is exactly how we should discuss a subject, thank you
Although I think that in an enormous community like reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc. the moderation is necessarily a bit aggressive since it takes time to analyze the real intentions. And with the army of bots, and trolls organizing, or masking their intend behind falsely neutral point of view, it's easy to start blasting.
Still, I agree that lots of mods, drunk on power or following the subreddit trend was abusing and just censoring.
Ps: sorry my comment is not really a response to this one specifically haha
This comment is well researched and helpful! Thank you
What the hell is this? Trans person here. This is not the thread to start concern trolling about trans issues. If you really want a space to talk freely about your concerns you can start a community or even your own instance.
Someone asked me, repeatedly, about my position. I asked them if they were sure they wanted to read the answer. Why are you accusing me of derailing and not the person who pressed for an answer?
I understand that on Lemmy you are able to block users. I suggest you block me so you won't have to see this comment. That seems like an appropriate response for a comment which offends you.
They were brief, another user asked for a longer version. The user even intro'ed their comment with "my reticence to speak freely", and then went ahead explaining since the other user seemed genuinely interested.
In a way this whole episode including your participation is very relevant to "avoid as the user base grows". I also don't think concern troll fits here, or maybe we use different definitions.
Personally, I wish people could get along with each other despite having different points of view. That's one major, major value I see in platforms like this. I want to be exposed to views challenging my bubble.
He was asked multiple times to answer questions.
Yeah, this is just run of the mill transphobic sealioning. They even complain about reddit having been run by tankies and repeated the "current thing" conservative reactionary trope. I'm totally fine if this kind of person doesn't feel welcome here.
He's literally responding to a user who said
So he explained his perspective. Concern trolling lmao.
If you want a space where you don't encounter other perspectives, there are plenty of spaces like that both in the real world and on the internet.
I hate to say it but they were asked - what they have to say may be unappealing but someone did tell them to say it.
You're saying you haven't found any evidence and that proves there isn't improvement but it's impossible for any properly done study to prove any changes to those categories. The simple reason is there is no environment that has existed for long enough to do a comparison. It's impossible to conduct a proper study on the life expectancy of trans people if they transition at 12 years old or 20 years old because the treatments have not been around long enough and people can live a long time. Even a study that tracks suicide rates over 5 years based on treatment type takes much more than 5 years.
The only studies that can be done need to use historic data and we can't change the past plus retroactive comparisons are super dicey and very prone to bias. Remember how dead patients were added post-moterm to that COVID trial published from Egypt which totally skewed the results? That study lead to large numbers of people taking ivermectin and fueled the antivax movement worldwide https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/93658
The absence of research studies can not be used to prove or disprove something and should not form your opinions based on this. As least people aren't trying and doing it poorly then people write catchy articles about it and it creates whole industries (I'm looking at you, nutritional science).
This is pure comedy β
Others please note I did not see the above message, but instead it was already removed by a moderator.
I am completely appalled at this instance right now for allowing this absolutely vile comment to persist on here, but since some reactionary admin decided your disgusting falsehoods should remain up, allow me to provide an extremely easily-found data point you "couldn't find" in your search:
Regret rates for sex reassignment surgery are among the LOWEST for ANY type of surgery OF ANY KIND. They're even lower than the complication rate! (Yes, really!) How's that for hard data?
Given the fact that this was incredibly easy for me to find (a single Google search pulled it up easily), I can only conclude that you "couldn't find" evidence that transitioning is beneficial because you weren't actually looking for it; you were looking for evidence of exactly the opposite point.
If this comment is indicative of things you said to your relative who took their life, then you should absolutely feel partially responsible; this kind of patronizing pseudo-concern BS is exactly the kind of toxicity that makes trans people feel that they will never be accepted by the people in their lives.
They're probably simply overloaded right now. Traffic has shot up several fold over the course of a few days and many of the people don't understand the rules yet. From my recollection, these sorts of comments would usually be removed fairly promptly. For a comparison of mod teams, /r/moderatepolitics has 18 moderators (plus bots) compared to this community's 3. Likewise, the instance has 7 moderators.
Exactly. Removed it now. Sorry for the growing pains.
@[email protected] please reconsider reprioritizing civility fetishism, particularly in defense against transphobia. The course of events here was extremely uncool and is tantamount to making this space systemically transphobic.
All it will take to drive trans people off is for you to ban them when they defend themselves against transphobic hate. And all it will take for transphobes to make that happen is for transphobes to harass people here until they react. This pattern has happened many times on many platforms and I'm surprised if you're not aware of it.