This post is “FYI only” for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.
I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the “adult human female” dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and “civil disagreement” on the validity of trans folk.
I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to “sort it out through discussion and voting”. However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little “sorting out” has occurred. The posts remain in place.
At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.
I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.
I’m unsure what tankies really are and why people are so divided on them. Are they transphobic?
Some are, but not most (in my experience).
Way back in the day, the term was used as an insult to describe authoritarian communists. I know anarchists used it.
For today, my understanding is that ‘tankie’ still means authoritarians, but I’ve been seeing a bunch of people use ‘tankie’ as an insult to complain about any leftists.
None of this is at all pertinent to this thread, or to transphobia, or to Ada’s action, so it really didn’t belong here.
I have an irl friend who is a self proclaimed tankie and I don’t really know a ton about it. I’ve asked them before, and their take was “you know how you believe in all the far left freedoms and that stuff and anti billionaire morality? Well I’m like that too and believe it’s basically evil, but I just think it should be enforced with an iron fist and literal tanks. Don’t agree? Doesn’t matter. Fight against it? Dead.”
To my understanding, they very much just don’t believe in giving people the choice because people are stupid as hell and will try to corrupt it with bad faith, and so should be iron fisted in bad faith preemptively. Which, to me, is such an extreme and problematic stance. I just didn’t know if there’s some subtle anti trans stuff as part of being a communist/tankie or what, because when they and I talk politics, we don’t super agree on stuff because they’re kind of a sith absolutist about it.
The “literally tanks” part is where the word “tankie” comes from. So you do actually understand tankies.
I will never side with authoritarianism, because having supreme control over every aspect of life means that whoever has that control can and will abuse it.