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.
Obviously I’m not on blahaj, but I think the decision is pretty on point for the goals of blahaj.
It also makes me disappointed in feddit.uk. “Leave it to discussion/votes” is bullshit and just support for the behavior.
Edit: The admin responded elsewhere with “we want to make sure we comply with the law”.
My comment remains unchanged. Allowing this is support. Fuck your bullshit law. You’re explicitly supporting this bullshit by your inaction.
Right? Imagine if you said that about the rights for like black women or something? Like, come ON. It’s 2025, we KNOW these behaviors are bigoted, rules are way too chill with letting shit like that fly, and is part of the reason it’s so prolific now - it’s not being treated like the hate speech that it is, and people in power in certain places are like “no I’m not sure we need to discuss it again”. It’s just gross and horrible and makes me feel so fucking helpless sometimes when a space is dominated with shitties like that.
100%.
It’s nothing short of support for the behavior. Its why I constantly comment of Lemmy.world being trash, and why I say 196 mods are garbage and don’t belong on blahaj, long live [email protected].
Even suggesting that sort of vile nonsense is worth discussing/voting on makes them bigoted morons.
Edit: Sorry I sound cranky about it, but this “tEaCh tHe CoNtRoVeRsY” garbage puts me in a cranky mood.
lemmy.world is basically the fediverse version of Reddit from what I’ve experienced in terms of overall culture.
I still think that’s their tagline/site motto
Eewww
“meh, those things sound like work”
– feddit.uk admin
i tried to tell them it sounded more like cowardice than laziness but they just wouldnt hear it.
What’s “adult human female” referring to? Asking so I can keep an eye out for this in the future
It’s popular transphobic/conservative rhetoric. That’s it. It’s vague and a dog whistle.
A dog whistle is a euphemism for saying one thing that only your base clearly hears, like a literal dog whistle and how only dogs hear it because human hearing is like 20hz-20,000hz, and dogs go up to like 70,000 or 100,000hz or something.
It’s just a super shitty behavior in general, akin to passive aggression, in that it’s purely destructive with no constructive recourse, thus Ada’s swift decision and response (thanks Ada).
Adult human female is a dog whistle used by TERFs (and transphobes more broadly) to make it clear that they are specifically excluding trans women from the definition of womanhood; that is, it’s shorthand for saying that ‘adult human females’ are the only category of person that can be called a woman.
As a Brit myself, it saddens me how much hate is leeching from my country - especially towards minorities.
Thank you to the mods for making this community open so that people like me can lurk and learn to be better, while simultaneously protecting the people who depend on and need this safe space. Defederating was the right choice.
I won’t pretend I’m well versed in trans issues and struggles - I’m a cishet guy with no real skin in the game but I want to be an ally.
If anyone has good resources for someone like me to read so I can be better armed to refute and educate others who are being hateful, please let me know. The surge in hate after the recent Supreme Court ruling here in the UK has made it painfully clear being passive on the sidelines isn’t acceptable.
Huge apologies in advance if I’ve phrased anything hurtfully. I just want to learn.
And sorry, what is a terf? By context i assumed it’s a transphobe, but you also include transports.
No need to apologize for genuine questions! TERF stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It’s a very, very specific subtype of transphobe that started using the phrase as a dog whistle, and it eventually leaked out into the broader transphobe sphere. All TERFs are transphobes, but not all transphobes are TERFs.
I appreciate the response. Canadian, so apologizing is how we start conversations.
To someone who doesn’t know any better, "adult human female” sounds so innocuous. If the rest of the post or comment was carefully phrased, it probably would have gotten past me. Thank you for the clarification.
and that’s the true story of why they’re called dog whistles
Does it sound innocuous? Who talks like that unless they’re trying to say something very specific?
Stiff and formal, yeah, but it doesn’t give you the sense that hatred is the only possible interpretation.
It’s a transphobic dog whistle. Popularised by UK transphobes. The implication is that trans women aren’t women, and when you see it used, that’s what they’re really saying.
Thanks Ada. It’s exhausting (emotionally and spiritually) to try to keep up with the ways in which people express their hate for us, but it’s certainly essential for keeping ourselves safe, so I’m thankful to have learned something new.
Terf island strikes again!
Based for defederating from feddit
Cringe for another decision that effects all blahaj users without their consent without posting any proof.
Registration on this instance is clear enough about what this instance is about, and this move is perfectly in line with it. The post isn’t even for you.
Notice the 4chan based/cringe trope and they’re from .world 🎣
Scrolling through this thread, I don’t see any blahajis with less than full approval. If there are, they are more than welcome to show their disapproval by moving to a different instance.
I appreciate this sort of moderation. Imagine if somehow it was voted down: then people who don’t want to be federated with feddit.uk would have no options. “Posting proof” may have some benefit, but few of us want to tread through more transphobia, so that sounds like a net negative to me.
This is precisely how things should work. Way to go, Ada!
It’s pretty funny watching tourists who aren’t using blahaj (or even feddit.uk) crying out that this doesn’t fit their ideals. This instance is clear about its purpose, and this moderation is perfectly in line with that goal. There’s no need for hypotheticals, because like you said, this was received almost-or-fully unanimously.
Scrolling through this thread, I don’t see any blahajis with less than full approval.
As with all rule changes on blahaj, the consensus comes from the ones who weren’t banned…
Was anyone in particular banned for disagreeing with defederating, or are we just making up things to be mad about?
That’s wild because I’ve disagreed with Ada on multiple decisions and I’ve never been banned… I wonder what the people who got banned were saying?
What are the odds these “disagreements” are actually just transphobia wearing a mask? Plenty of us disagree with Ada. We’re still here.
Most disagreements are filed under “Gatekeeping” and banned by blahaj admins.
Most Gatekeeping bans are not for Gatekeeping, or for breaking any other rules.
Such deep insights about LBZ from a lemmy.world account! I’d love to see where you pulled these assertions from. Well, I mean unless you pulled them out of your ass of course.
You kick ass Ada. Thanks for all you do.
I’m not a blåhaj user, but I really hope the feddit.uk mindset on this doesn’t spread to other instances.
Why do divisive people have to care so much about letting people do what they want if it doesn’t affect them? What someone wants to do with their body does NOT affect you, but your open derogatory statements about them DOES affect them!
ada continues to be the realest MVP
This is a good move. I’ve reported a lot of tankie-like remarks on feddit that never get their comments removed and it’s concerning. Better to cut off any suspected tankie incubator than suffer the consequences
I’d rather my comm ban people that complain about ‘tankies’. It’s a useless term which can mean 100 things to different people, only serving really to divide the left.
They just mean anyone who doesn’t blindly trust western propaganda.
No, they mean people who blindly slurp up Chinese propaganda while denying the issues china has.
Make a post on hexbear or another ‘tankie instance’ about the issues of China in good faith and you will see many posters elucidate the flaws. We say ‘critical support’ for a reason, because we can support an action that may be good in the struggle against imperialism or whatever but still critique the source of that action.
M@te you’re on an anarchist instance. Why are you saying “we” for tankies?
According to most that would use the term disparagingly these days I would be a tankie, so I mean we as in me and other ‘tankies’.
It was a term coined by anarchists to describe authoritarians. You don’t have to accept a label someone else uses in bad faith.
Bubble, echo chamber, besieged fortress syndrome… Combined they make what Ada envisions the blahaj.zone to be.
I mean what the fuck, just ban the person you don’t like.
u mad bro?
it’s .ml ofc
Can you please link to specific offenses?
No. I won’t start a brigade against a specific user, even a transphobic one. And ultimately, the defederation is due to the feddit.uk admins approach to transphobia rather than the specifics of the posts.
One user upset you and the admins didn’t capitulate exactly how you wanted, so you’re defederating… You’re making way more drama out of it than anyone else. How do you handle any sort of difficult situation in your life?
Blahaj doesn’t allow transphobia, period. It is a safe space for those who don’t have anywhere else safe to go on the Fediverse. If an instance refuses to deal with its users being transphobic, then it gets defederated, simple as that. It’s better to defederate from problematic instances than to allow Blahaj’s userbase to have to deal with transphobia, both casual and direct. If its users wanted to be around that, they wouldn’t be on Blahaj. It’s pretty telling that 99% of Blahaj’s vocal userbase is supportive of Ada’s decision here.
The feddit.uk admins failed to remove transphobic nonsense from their instance and went silent when told how and why it was a problem by Ada including violating feddit.uk’s rule 1. Hence, defederation until they get rid of that transphobic nonsense.
They didn’t ban the people on their instance like you wanted so you shut out the entire instance. I love watching “liberals” discover disctorships in their own communities. It’s cute.
Neat opinion. Bye.
This is why no one takes y’all seriously. Expecting every interaction to be perfectly suited to you or you opt out. Guess what, life has adversity. Life has difficulties. But if you shut yourself off from everything that makes you slightly uncomfortable, you’ll never grow and develop as a person.
Who do you mean when you say “y’all”? Either way, I’ve faced enough adversity that I’ve overcome to laugh at your comment, and I bet people reading this have, too. Your comment might make you feel better about yourself, but it has very little to do with the realities of the people reading it. I’m sorry you’re not as insightful as you hoped.
If you keep othering people and making assumptions, you’ll stay as ignorant as you seem. That’s not a very productive way to be. I hope it gets better for you.
“You all”. It’s a gender neutral way to reference people. Are you seriously offended by that too?
Keep being insufferable and wondering why the world doesn’t bend to your will. It’s gonna be a miserable life for you.
