cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/25042034
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.
The general public are a subjective take, and also, dumb as fuck.
Yeah, sex is related to gender, but it’s not the same thing.
If its your colloquial necessity to objectify women, then I don’t know, be equal and objectify the trans girls as well.
But if you don’t, then it’s gonna be preferable to address them as “women”, not “females”.
If you’re purely referring to ‘female’ as a noun, I do have a similar intuition about ‘female’ (noun) vs. ‘woman’, but it has little to do with objectification and more to do with ‘female’ generally being used in a biological sense, specifically non-human animals.
As an adjective, ‘female’ is pretty neutral, though.
Yeah, it’s to refer to biological sex. But language doesn’t have exact rules, it’s descriptive more than prescriptive.
Most people don’t understand that sex and gender are similar, yet distinct concepts.
But it’s implications aren’t always. I used to think that as well, but unfortunately language is a cooperative thing and if the person you’re talking to doesn’t consider it neutral, then it isn’t.
And if a police was giving a description of a trans girl, they probably wouldn’t say “male”, would they?