A small group of people were offended by a joke that unintentionally came across transphobic, and as a result this persons account was blacklisted. Even after getting the account reinstated, there were lasting complications with the state of the account (these probably technical issues) and the account was basically lost for good.
The 9th paragraph is where the incident is discussed.
What do yall think of this?
I’ve definitely been misunderstood myself, and it kinda sucks to think that my account could be lost for good due to a few reports, hasty banning, and some bug in the software.
This guy wrote a long-self pitying blog post about how he has been victimized due to not having got the memo about T------ being a slur. He claims to have been acting in good faith but misunderstood. It is extremely boring cataloguing various accounts and how he has been mistreated everywhere. He narrates his participation in communities where by his own accounting, he plainly does not understand the topic at hand and was being argumentative and trollish. Apparently he received bad vibes from this which I think is meant to evoke sympathy.
Eventually we get to the conflict (such as there is any) in the story when he makes a weird fetishising comment containing a slur. From the context provided I don’t really get the impression that it was a place where sexual comments were probably on topic and I am guessing it would still have been creepy if he expressed a similar thought without using a slur.
The author uses the unredacted slur throughout the post. There is nothing resembling evidence that he has taken any time at all to attempt to learn what the “misunderstanding” was.
Just to show how easy it is to find, here is the wikipedia which is shorter than this comment1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranny
He concludes with what I think due to the formatting is a ?poem?. You do not have to read any of the rest of it you will understand everything from this:
Welcome to this corner of the Fediverse.
You can move all your followers, in theory.
Your censor is not a black-box Algorithm, but a community of fallible, groupthink-infected people. Beware the tyranny of the majority.
Your new overlord is not some evil corporate Billionaire, but an entirely like-able nonbinary Jewish Gay hacker who is a wise idiot at UC Irvine.
- By “the majority” he means 5 accounts who reported him as using prejudicial language and 1 mod who banned him. So that would be 6 people. Out of an n of ??? 7 billion ???
- What do jewish people have to do with this?
- Ditto to UC irvine
- and non-binary people make no obvious appearance in this story
- But really what do jewish people have to do with this? do you think that makes you look like not a bigot?
- Calling people “groupthink-infected” and “idiots” when you are being willfully ignorant
He is assuming the reason why people disagree with him is because they are stupid and manipulable rather than because he is wrong. He is complaining because he accidentally called a group of people by a slur and was shown the door as a consequence. Because he has failed to take the opportunity to learn anything from the situation, he is unable to engage with the issues. So most of the “argument” of this post consists of more name calling.
In summary, I disagree with the title. This is not interesting.
1 - pot calling the kettle black when it comes to being longwinded here :D
Meh. I like the calckey instance I’m on. Maybe OP should have given his “joke” a bit more thought. I can’t count the times I’ve written a post that was cracking me tf up at first, but after considering other people’s feelings, I wind up deleting the draft before posting.
The issue was the use of a specific word, that is now uncouth, but with which OP identifies. They claim to not know the word had fallen out of favor. Other than the word itself, I don’t think there was anything wrong with the comment they left.
@nightauthor@kbin.social I don’t think you followed the story here.
The issue was the use of a specific word, that is now uncouth, but with which OP identifies
The author of this post is not trans. A trans person is someone who is assigned a sex at birth (usually based on apparent genitalia) who as they mature, feels this to have been incorrect. OP provides the following personal context and maybe this confused:
I was a bisexual male who was programming computers and having having gay sex in 1984, when most of the people online today weren’t even born yet. I was wearing makeup and dresses in public, before the Calckey crowd had even heard of the word “drag”.
He describes himself as a bisexual male. He feels the need to substantiate this by mentioning a specific time(s) he had sex with another man, in 1984. Being bisexual does not give you a free pass to stop learning for 40 years.
He then starts talking about drag. Drag is an exaggeration of gender characteristics and display for the purpose of entertainment. Drag happens in a show, a performance, on a stage. While there is overlap between drag cultures and trans people, trans people do not really appreciate being thought of as “in drag” because they are not putting on a show, they are just going about their lives. He describes himself as cross dressing as a way to sort of give the impression that he should be permitted to use in-group slang. He also goes on to mention that in the past he has read comments on the internet using this word as self description. Which for someone who thinks they are such an independent thinker, standing up against group think, the rationalization of “I read it on the internet” as an excuse for anything really is pretty weak shit.
Sounds like when he was a young person he experimented with feminine fashion styles but wasn’t motivated to keep at it. Lots of cis (non trans) guys wear a dress, eyeliner, nailpolish etc on occasion, especially in youth. It is irrelevant to the question at hand. Probably it served to reinforce his masculine identity. A lot of people try something like that out and go “nah, not for me”. Even some cis men continue with cross dressing as a recreational activity over the years, but without any desire to transition to female in their day to day. Those guys are also not trans.
Later, he justifies the comment he made as
a playful suggestion of my sexual openness towards transsexual people.
Was anybody asking if he was sexually open to trans people? From how the original context is described, I do not see any indication that the sexual attractiveness of trans people was a topic of conversation. The original meme was a picture of someone’s front lawn.
As a general rule: It is not considered polite to bring your sexual thoughts into public conversation. I disagree that the comment would have been innocuous if he had used different language. From his own description it sounds like he was making a gross, creepy comment.
I’ve definitely been misunderstood myself,
This person wasn’t misunderstood. He does not understand. And from the evidence presented, he doesn’t care to. He replied to a post containing 3 words. 2 of which he didn’t understand. And there is nothing to show any curiosity whatsoever. The crux of his argument seems to be that young people are always wrong.
He also seems to think it self evident that he is too old to learn. Hard disagree from me on that one too. Lots of old people keep learning right up til their last day on earth. Even older than he is. He is making a choice because it reinforces his self-image of being a contrarian without any effort. I kept expecting some sort of nuance to appear in the article because the page was so long but I don’t think there is literally a single sentence int he whole thing that even suggests he used his brain for anything other than feeling sad for himself.
This is a little scary. You can find yourself banned pretty easily. All it takes is to annoy someone with nothing better to do than dig through your post history, and find something old that you wrote hastily which might break a rule. I know because it happened to me.
Back in my Reddit days I got banned twice - once from a subreddit and once a site-wide shadowban (which got rescinded when I appealed, amazingly) and both were random bolts from the blue where I didn’t actually break the rule I was banned for. In the shadowban case I happened to belong to a subreddit that was apparently in the midst of brigading another subreddit I was reading, and when I upvoted a few comments I guess I triggered some kind of anti-brigade filter. In the case of the subreddit ban, there was a guy being downvoted who was complaining about it and I explained to him why I thought it was likely that he was getting downvotes. That subreddit had a “no downvotes allowed” rule and the mods must have figured that since I was explaining why the guy was getting downvotes I must also be downvoting him. On Reddit there’s no way to actually tell who’s downvoting who.
Here on the Fediverse it’s both a bit more scary since every instance can have whatever standards of care it wants, but it’s also less scary because every instance can have whatever standards of care it wants. I can just create a new account at a different instance if the one I’m on turns out to be run by yo-yos. Hopefully the account migration features get implemented soon to make that even easier.
from what i gather in the blog post, this person actively seeks out spaces which are “run by yo-yos” then complains about it.
