And apparently, also when you think that ‘They’ is a perfectly serviceable gender-neutral singular pronoun, but are willing to use other pronouns if asked to.
EDIT: Other removable offenses on Blahaj now include questioning mod/admin decisions and quoting the modlog as a reason why you’re leaving.
It’s impossible. That’s part of the issue. Whatever boundary you want to draw, there are going to be difficult areas at the borderline or in the extreme cases.
For me, it’s transparently obvious that the dragon person is either taking the piss or suffering from mental illness. Someone else might look at the same situation and say that I’m being ignorant and hateful if I think that. Sure, they can think that.
The thing that makes it hard is that we have to be able to talk about it. Both of those opinions. If I ban the person who thinks I am wrong, they can’t stick up for drag. Bad stuff. If they ban me for saying my feelings on it, saying that they have a right to determine that those feelings are not acceptable to be spoken, then to me, that makes the whole operation and network into a stupid and pointless endeavor.
Part of the whole point of tolerance and open society is that you learn to rock and roll with the people you don’t agree with. I don’t think there’s anybody who will survive for long on the main instances who will be openly racist, transphobic, or anything like that. If you start looking for the most minor of transgressions or differences of opinion, and then shutting out that person because now they’re “bad” and can’t even be spoken to, I think you’re actually interfering quite a lot with your own acceptance in the wider society.
Not everyone is going to think like you. It’s okay. Back in college, I knew some communists who were widely accepted, even by conservatives and “normie” society, because they were firmly in the mode of “this is my stuff, and I’ll tell you about it, but I have 0 expectation that it needs to be your stuff, too.” The ones who had major issues were the ones who had elaborate restrictions on how people needed to see things, how they were allowed to be spoken to, things like that. They wound up isolated into their own pretty small social circle. They didn’t wind up building the wider enlightenment in society that I am guessing they were wanting to do by making the restrictions.
I can see special situations where you really just want your own space safe from people coming in and laughing at you or whatever. I get that. But most of the time, I think setting this super-restrictive model of how everyone needs to talk to you and how they need to look at things in order not to be “bad,” does more harm than good and builds a lot more insincere “acceptance,” than it does genuine understanding about what’s going on with you and your people.
“We have to be able to talk about it” is absolutely the core problem. Even if a policy is and will always be ‘just do it, or else,’ we need the ability follow ‘okay’ with ‘but what the fuck?’
If you are dictating how I act, even if it’s just how I act toward you - I have concerns. You are involving me in your thing, and my participation is not always yours to demand.
Can someone declare they are only addressed in iambic pentameter? Or alternating caps? Or without vowels? One could scoff that those aren’t pronouns, and I would say that neither is a fucking lizard. For a word to have meaning, there must be things it does not include. There is always a line.
When the admin genuinely insists ‘you will call that person an attack helicopter, or else,’ then it’s not beyond the pale to ask what happens when someone speaks normally to a self-identified merry little elf who only answers riddles. If the response is ‘I am in bangs but not guts, or else,’ that is drawing the line well beyond what most decent people will participate in. If they can’t safely tell you why - neither you nor they can learn anything.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I get what you’re saying. I just lean more towards that the space doesn’t have to be for fostering acceptance or understanding by outsiders, regardless of outcome. The best example my morning brain can come up with is: swingers generally don’t get together with the purpose of interacting with the non-swinger public (unless they’re exhibitionists with a poor grasp of consent) or improving their image; they get together to fuck. The metaphor breaks down in that lemmy is a bit more public, but one can still get kicked out of Hedo for not following the rules even if it’s upsetting or gives you a bad experience with the scene. It would be a pretty awful place for swingers if nobody enforced rules that made it a safe place to be naked etc. even for “ugly” people, even if that becomes the image generally. Ok, this metaphor is getting worse and worse, but hopefully it’s good enough to get us to shore.