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.

  • stray@pawb.social
    2·
    8 hours ago

    Women penguins only sounds weird because that’s not the normal word for it. They’re girl penguins or lady penguins. “Woman” feels too formal and human.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 hours ago

      And why isn’t “women birds” the normal word for it? And do you think scientific studies call them girls or ladies?

      Nah.

      You can, but it works because it’s essentially joke-y, because clearly female penguins aren’t women, but female.

      Kinda like referring to a granny as “young lady/miss”, even though everyone knows they’re not.

      • stray@pawb.social
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Scientific studies also use male and female in reference to human subjects’ gender identities. Woman and female are both incredibly old terms which have been used interchangeably as there was no widespread concept of gender identity in the English-speaking world until recently. We had to invent the term “gender identity” to separate gender from sex because they’d previously been used to refer to the same thing.

        You seem to be saying that a trans man is female because he was assigned the female sex at birth. Have I understood that correctly?

        Sources:

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex–gender_distinction

        https://www.etymonline.com/

        Small sample of studies using male/female to refer to gender:

        https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6748626/

        https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10685922/

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 hours ago

          You seem to be saying that a trans man is female because he was assigned the female sex at birth. Have I understood that correctly?

          Well, sort of. I know sex isn’t as black-and-white as people make it out to be, but since we’re already having troubles explaining gender being a spectrum, I’d thought I’d leave out the more nuanced bits in favour of succinctness.

          We had to invent the term “gender identity” to separate gender from sex because they’d previously been used to refer to the same thing

          I mean yeah, the word gender, meaning “male or female sex” is from as early as 15th century, but only came to be the more common word for “sex” as “sex” started getting erotic connotations.

          The “male-or-female sex” sense of the word is attested in English from early 15c. As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for “sex of a human being,” in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous. Later often in feminist writing with reference to social attributes as much as biological qualities; this sense first attested 1963. Gender-bender is from 1977, popularized from 1980, with reference to pop star David Bowie.

          https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender

          Edit whops I posted before finishing writing just a moment

          As I was saying language nor gender identities are never as black and white as we’d like them to be. So yeah, you are right in that in different contexts, scientific studies like you say, may as well use female and male to refer to subjects. As in male for trasnmen and female for transwomen. As it should. If they’re not like studying uteruses, I don’t see why them being trans would matter.

          Trans women are women. Trans men are men.