As posted about recently in [email protected] and [email protected] it seems that @[email protected]'s stance on transphobia has not changed and his apology only seems to be that he was sorry he got caught and that someone leaked the DM. This is concerning for an admin of Lemmy.ml and the leader of the project. I don't think this means we should stop using Lemmy, it's open-source and even if they embed donation links, they can be stripped out in our fork. But it does make me wonder if we should consider defederating lemmy.ml on that merit. Since if they hold such views on trans issues, it's very likely they won't have any desire to act on that type of transphobia being expressed on their instance.
I know that Lemmy.ml has and does handle overt transphobia well, but I can't speak to their ability to handle less overt or thinly veiled transphobia, and this incident doesn't inspire much confidence either.
Edit: Since some people haven't seen the original. I decided to include it here. Warning, it contains transphobia, if you don't want to see that, don't open the spoiler.
CW: Transphobic talking points
I'd really like to hear Feedback from Blahaj's local community on this, I'm not as interested in outside opinions here so please try to refrain from top-level commenting if you aren't from lemmy.blahaj.zone (I will ignore them if you comment anyway from a remote instance).
It's the first time I see the transphobic original message, and honestly I'm not surprised to see it within ML community. In general, they and the ideology is already rather cultish given their beliefs and the shunning of "wrongthink", but there's a smaller subsection of ML's who genuinely believe in this kind of reactionary chauvinism that's a complete bastardization of Marxism.
There's probably no one on this specific community who goes "hmm maybe there's some merit to that statement", but in case there is:
Trans people exist, and much like proletarians, their experience is shaped by our society and material conditions. They suffer through medical gatekeeping, discrimination and state violence among other things, all of them stemming from structures of capitalist domination, and just because occasionally some bourgeoisie opportunistically exploit these issues to garner support/profit from rainbow capitalism and the like, doesn't mean you should go full reactionary.
I keep hearing people say that beehaw is filled with reactionaries, does that hold any merit?
First time I'm hearing of that but no, it's mostly liberal progressive types here.
Liberals, sure.
Progressives?
You can get away with all kind of reactionary nonsense as long as you're polite about your bigotry and run around JAQing off.
Good, as I suspected world users are... Well they're world users