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.
What's "adult human female" referring to? Asking so I can keep an eye out for this in the future
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.
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.
<3
As an American, I understand.
I've had "trans bodies, trans selves" recommended to me for this several times, so I went and bought it. It's a whopper of a book though, 700 pages, but it gives an amazing background and insight for cis people (like me).
Thank you for the recommendation!
Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex are excellent books not exactly about trans issues but go into how much bullshit is spread that is unscientific about gender and hormones etc.
Thank you for the recommendation!
Sure, we are happy to help!
Thanks for the explanation
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.
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.
The best part about it IMO is that they're the ones who started calling themselves that, but once it gained a negative reputation (for obvious reasons), they started claiming that it's a slur.
T ransgender
E xclusionary
R adical
F eminist
So, somebody who thinks they're doing good for women, or espouses the image.... But ultimately, is not and excludes trans people from their push for rights. Often, their "rights" are exclusively just anti-trans sentiment or push for legislature.
So a terf may be somebody who wants feminism, but not for trans women; or also like those people who claim to protect women's sports by just excluding trans women from it. Those people are most often just tradwives or straight up misogynists.
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).