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.
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.
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.
blahaj.zone (and to my understanding, lemmy.world) is already defederated from hexbear.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
