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.
Gatekeeping other people’s identity is unacceptable. The defederation almost occurred in part because of the dismissal of a users identity. It doesn’t magically become acceptable when we do it.
Do not gatekeep other folks identity.
End of story
As a trans person, I feel the need to say this for the cis so that y’all don’t need to tiptoe around it or keep quiet:
Trans people are not immune to being awful people. You may not know if someone is really trans or not. But you can tell with much greater certainty whether or not they’re an asshole. So stick to that instead of getting baited into bigoted language.
Asshole is gender neutral. 👏
Hot take. Just defederate from Hexbear and never mention them at all in any way shape or form.
both lemmy.world and lemmy.blahaj.zone are defederated from hexbear??? hexbear has also blocked lemmy.world no investigation = no right to speak
Then let’s do the second part too perhaps
Unless Hexbear was defederated by everyone as a whole, or squashed out of existence I don’t feel like discussions about it are going to stop any time soon, which kind of sucks because they do get annoying, but I do know they are important since those things haven’t happened and hexbear is still out there causing problems, it’s important for people to be aware of it, especially when picking instances.
Oh, I didn’t know this! Might have to consider moving to blahaj … although at this point I’ve blocked enough individual hexbear accounts (and the hexbear instance itself, though this is far less effective) that I rarely ever see them anymore.
blahaj.zone (and to my understanding, lemmy.world) is already defederated from hexbear.
Then let’s do the second part too
It’s relevant in this context, and given that mods have been active on this thread, I think they consider it relevant as well.
You’re right, denying the reality of who a person is is a shitty thing to do. I dislike Hexbear as an instance and as a collection of individuals, they’re often appallingly behaved and I want nothing to do with people who routinely deny or attempt to justify mass murders because its politically convenient. However, who they are is who they are and I see no reason to assume that if they say they’re trans, they’re not without some actual evidence.
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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?
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.
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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.
From a trans person, you put this perfectly, thank you.
No, thank you! I try my best, but it’s nice to get approval from trans individuals as well, especially because I’m still learning how best to support trans individuals.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Majority of the hexbear admin & mod team are trans.
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This is the most drama, free Lemmy instance.
Ah, you think drama is your ally? You merely adopted the drama. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see serenity until I found out I wasn’t a man, by then it was nothing to me but boring!
Honestly, I thought about joining over here but uh, nah. I don’t need all this drama.
Reposting these two comments specifically about the person in the screenshot and the comment from a cis lemmy.world user I was responding to because the comment I was responding to got removed for transphobia
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.
If a hexbear user said the shit that the user in the screenshot said but about blahaj they’d have their comment removed on the spot and would be banned from the comm at least, if not banned from the site. We moderate far more harshly than blahaj zone does and that’s what made us a notably trans positive space years before this Lemmy instance was created. I had two cases of chasers in my replies from this instance in the short window that we were federated and both of them only had their comment deleted with no additional measures taken, on the other hand, about two weeks ago I had the first chaser in my dms I’d ever gotten over two years on the site from another hexbear.net account so I reported it and within less than an hour he’d been banned site wide and had his account removed with no option for appeal despite his account being an entire year old.
Second comment:
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.
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.
We moderate far more harshly than blahaj zone does
I disagree. Hexbear wasn’t willing to defederate over this issue for example, and you’ve still got users that regularly accuse me of transphobia. We clearly do things differently, but it’s not only Hexbear that takes it seriously.
The issue is more to do with staff numbers and community size.
The issue raised here for example. I never saw the comments firsthand, and by the time I saw a report on them, they’d already been removed. For comments on non blåhaj communities, reported by non blåhaj users, I never even see the report, even if the comment is from a blåhaj user. So in cases like this, until a blåhaj user reports it, it will often slip under my radar completely.
More users means more chances for a report that I see before I randomly stumble across it myself.
The point about community size is fair enough, and that’s on me for not considering it. It’s worth noting though we actually had programming.dev removed from our white list so that hexbear users couldn’t see their posts for previous cases of unmoderated transphobia but for some reason the mods decided to readd it at some point, idk why
It really shouldn’t have to come to posting estradiol every time some lemmy user tells me I’m not trans.
I can afford them but a that’s not something that can be said for all trans people. We are over-represented when it comes to living outside and without social supports and as a result don’t tend to have access to decent medical care. Being poor doesn’t invalidate anyones trans identity.
Part of building a space we can actually participate in means building a culture of showing no quarter for questioning peoples identities like that. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with them politically, it’s totally unacceptable to deny them who they are.
I agree, even if someone is a horrible person gender identity isn’t something that should ever undermined or invalidated. Gender identity and sexuality are things you don’t try to undermine or make fun of, no matter how awful of a person they are, because it sets a precedent for justifying that awful practice.
If we want gender identity to be seen as valid, it should be seen as unacceptable in all cases to invalidate it.
Hexbear users are assholes, and some of them may even push for things harmful to trans and gender-diverse people, but they still are the gender they identify as, and that should be acknowledged and respected, even if you don’t respect them as a person and/or they aren’t respectable because disrespecting gender identity indirectly hurts many other people, not just them.
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I fixed your post so it looks more sincere.
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They’re allowed to be assholes, I can be a raging removed when I need to. I sincerely doubt the goal of anyone there is ‘convincing them to hate the trans identity’ and if a person they interact with is at the point of hating all trans people because someone was rude to them online that sounds like they already did, and were looking for an excuse.
I just highlighted it because if someone’s going to say bigoted things because they got ‘baited’, that reflects poorly on them, and them alone. If they are incapable of taking criticism from minorities they interact with, that’s a fault on their part, not the minorities for not being ‘nice’ enough.
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You’re speculating that because minorities are being annoying about standing up for their humanity that they must not actually be interested in their rights at all… because in the process it might turn off people who get offended by rude behavior. For a lot of trans people the rude behavior is the lesser offense.
If that’s the case, then Hexbear, you guys can go fuck yourselves. I saw what you said about me.
I’m not going to mince words because I just posted about the issue with tone policing minorities raising issues. If you want to look sincere in the context of all these other interactions I would suggest trying to steer away from gendered language to refer to a whole group of people which we just established includes a significant potion of non-cis people.
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the incident that made this occur was them going out of their way to be offended at being misgendered as “them”, as if they had the upper moral hand to get angry at force of habit.
That’s not what happened. The admin did it once by accident yes, but after being corrected, he doubled down and blamed the user for being offended in the first place… which you’re now repeating.
I said good on you for owning up to your bad take, but I’m starting to think you’re not really sorry about saying what you did, you’re just sorry someone shined a light on your behavior.
Hexbear is a mixed bag. Thats all you should know.
A mixed bag of differently-shaped assholes.
I understand why you’re upset and I agree this isn’t okay. We can only know this little bit about people online and we have to trust that they are giving us that information in good faith - if they claim to be trans, we need to accept them as the trans person that they are.
Whether the users of Hexbear are trans or not IDGAF
They could literally be a bunch of sea lions sea lioning (one of the things that they love to do) and I wouldn’t care
They’re (in general) a bunch of assholes and trolls who enjoy bullying any person they slightly disagree with (or hell if someone phrases something poorly and they take the least generous interpretation of what they said (which is also common))
And their methods are to literally dog pile and sea lion until someone snaps
The healthiest engagement you can give Hexbear users engaging in their favorite pastime is to not engage, report, then block. Repeat the steps until things improve.
👍
Wait what? What happened to programming.dev???
The entire situation should be in one of the recent posts in !meta@programming.dev , its been handled though
Ah ok just saw the instance post i see now
