Transfem
A community for transfeminine people and experiences.
This is a supportive community for all transfeminine or questioning people. Anyone is welcome to participate in this community but disrupting the safety of this space for trans feminine people is unacceptable and will result in moderator action.
Debate surrounding transgender rights or acceptance will result in an immediate ban.
- Please follow the rules of the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance.
- Bigotry of any kind will not be tolerated.
- Gatekeeping will not be tolerated.
- Please be kind and respectful to all.
- Please tag NSFW topics.
- No NSFW image posts.
- Please provide content warnings where appropriate.
- Please do not repost bigoted content here.
Posters may express that they are looking for responses and support from groups with certain experiences (eg. trans people, trans people with supportive parents, trans parents.). Please respect those requests and be mindful that your experience may differ from others here.
To make such a request, at the start of the body of your post, not in the title, the first line should look like the this: [Requesting Engagement from _________]
Some helpful links:
- The Gender Dysphoria Bible // In depth explanation of the different types of gender dysphoria.
- Trans Voice Help // A community here on blahaj.zone for voice training.
- LGBTQ+ Healthcare Directory // A directory of LGBTQ+ accepting Healthcare providers.
- Trans Resistance Network // A US-based mutual aid organization to help trans people facing state violence and legal discrimination.
- TLDEF's Trans Health Project // Advice about insurance claims for gender affirming healthcare and procedures.
- TransLifeLine's ID change Library // A comprehensive guide to changing your name on any US legal document.
- Gender Spectrum // Resources for youth, parents and family, educators, mental health professionals and faith leaders.
Support Hotlines:
- The Trevor Project // Web chat, phone call, and text message LGBTQ+ support hotline.
- TransLifeLine // A US/Canada LGBTQ+ phone support hotline service. The US line has Spanish support.
- LGBT Youthline.ca // A Canadian LGBT hotline support service with phone call and web chat support. (4pm - 9:30pm EST)
- 988lifeline // A US only Crisis hotline with phone call, text and web chat support. Dedicated staff for LGBTQIA+ youth 24/7 on phone service, 3pm to 2am EST for text and web chat.
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I do understand why this decision was taken, but I think this could become very messy without some explicit method of requesting (or rejecting) engagement. Lemmy is a very big place, and its unlikely even the most well-meaning individuals will check the sidebar for every single community they enter when they only want to contribute to a post. This is just exacerbated by the subjective, loosely defined requests for engagement as the system stands.
Even aside from outside users, I can imagine it creating issues when moderation is enforced. We've already had enough drama around this instance regarding the way we protect our users and defend our right to exist, the best thing we can do moving forward is make such protections as clear, unambiguous, and explicit as possible. For the safety of our transfem girlies and the health of our community discussions.
I would definitely vote for a set of community agreed tags in post titles to state engagement preferences, where any post without a tag should be assumed to encourage engagement from any reader.
I’m not sure I understand your angle here. Drama around blahaj protecting trans people is not on us, but on the people that are ignorant on the need for such protection. I see a lot of ignorant, sometimes mildly transphobic comments from other instances that flood any trans points of view here and I think that our top priority should be to prevent that and create a real safe space, not to cater to those instances where those comments stem from. I think any action to make this space more exclusive to trans(questioning) people is a good move. And I honestly don’t care if some ignorant people start creating drama around it.
I’m not sure if this change is a real solution though (it would require very proactive moderation) but it’s worth a try. Imo the best solution is to defederate from huge offender instances (.world for example)
From the admin perspective, defederating is challenging on lemmy, because instances can hold communities with different rules and audiences. .world for example is the largest source of blahaj users subscriptions for example, because there are many communities over there that offer value for the blahaj community.
The broad rule of thumb I use is that I will ban transphobic users or communities in a heart beat, wherever they're based.
I won't defederate from entire instances though unless the admins of that instance are actively transphobic or otherwise bigoted. As long as they act on egregious transphobia (which the lemmy.world admins do), then defederation isn't on the cards
Me and Ada are both very active in this space. I check this community throughout my day every day and try my best to stay on top of moderation issues. We'll never be able to pre-empt all violations of post engagement requests, but I think a good number of people will respect the requests without need for moderation. Where and when disrespect for post engagement requests appears, we will remove comments accordingly.
I've observed many cis people engaging here in ways that haven't been nominally rule breaking but that I could also tell were making posters uncomfortable or feeling disengaged from their own posts. Up till now, I have given a fair amount of leeway to commenters I think are engaging in good faith. The implementation of this new rule expands on my ability to limit such comments. It's small, but I've also recorded a section of the sidebar to less ambiguously reflect my intentions with this most recent change.
So, yeah, I guess we'll see how these new changes are in practice and whether or not Ada and I are able to handle the additional workload and mod response time frames. I don't see it being a problem, but if it did become one, I'd be open to considering an additional moderator.
As for defederation, that's, of course, beyond the scope of what i can implement with regards to this community. I don't think this is being considered at the moment, but I wouldn't know either way. Might be worth mentioning on blahaj meta?
I honestly appreciate the effort, and I hope that it does indeed help. It’s reassuring to know that you guys are trying to solve the problem.
I agree, and think what you're proposing is worthwhile in standardizing how such requests are made. Having title tags was what I initially thought of as well. There are some considerations, like the fact that engagement requests are kinda open ended. As of now, we don't have a set list of permissible engagement groups in mind. But even just adding a tag to post title with the engagement request may work out, with the closed square brackets format.
Also totally get what you mean about blahaj routinely levying criticism for how the admins protect the interests of the users here, and I anticipated this implementation might draw some of that criticism.