I’ve seen a lot of instances of people on Lemmy saying you can get banned from Blahaj for forgetting someone’s pronouns. And then Ada has to come in and explain why they’re wrong in their interpretation of the rules. These people were banned for good reasons, they’re transphobes. But I think they misunderstand the rules of Blahaj for a legitimate reason.
It’s because Blahaj doesn’t have rules. It has two guidelines. Very subjective ones. People want to know what will get them banned, so they try to understand the rules of that subjectivity. The rules for what Ada considers to be empathy and inclusion. The rules of Ada’s psychology. Because like it or not, with highly subjective guidelines, Ada’s interpretation and understanding of that subjectivity is the rules.
And Ada didn’t write the rules of her psychology in the sidebar. So people have to speculate. And people are speculating wrong, and starting arguments about it.
I think a ruleset should be a transparent explanation of how a mod team thinks about acceptable behaviour. By not having rules, Blahaj is being opaque about how the mod team thinks. And the only way for people to deal with that is to practice amateur psychoanalysis. Which is unpleasant and creates division.
If people understood how trans people think about acceptable behaviour, they wouldn’t be transphobes. So the result of this system is that everyone who is banned for transphobia doesn’t understand why and needs it personally explained to them. If the sidebar explained acceptable behaviour in a way everyone can understand, they wouldn’t misunderstand it so often.
I think the current system is creating pointless drama.
I admin the place. Femininity and I have a strained relationship. It’s not something I’m drawn to, and when I perform it, it feels like a performance, rather than an expression of an internal need or desire. I don’t wear earrings, I don’t wear makeup, I don’t do my nails, and my legs go months without seeing a razor
Which is to say, the pressure you’re describing, the relationship with femininity that you see? For most trans fem folk, unlike me (and perhaps you), it genuinely is an expression of something an internal, a way of expressing something that they haven’t been able for most of their lives. Every culture, even subcultures, have their own norms, and their own ways of connecting and sharing. For the trans fem community, that often looks like joyous embracing of femininity. And finally, most trans spaces are biased towards people who are more recently out, for whom everything is new and exciting, and for whom, joyous embracing of femininity is new, and a chance to explore something that hasn’t been available to them until recently.
And for those of us that don’t really “get” femininity like that, navigating spaces that celebrate it can be challenging, but that’s just how it is. I’m no more going to stop people celebrating femininity than I am going to tell folks they can’t be butch. What we can do is create spaces and niches within the bigger spaces that make room for other needs too. If need to connect with other butch trans fems, make a community, and advertise it, and you will find us :)