Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
I know the person you are referring to, and I was able to confirm that they were busy offline and could not have been posting at that time.
I know this will sound unreasonable and I apologize, sometimes we're going to be unreasonable. I do not believe you. Not even a little, not for a second, not once. I feel that I have many strong reasons to disbelieve admin statements at this point and it will take a lot of work before I believe a word from any red-badge again.
Given this admin statement I will in the future refrain from making that specific accusation again. Feel free to purge the specific comments of mine in which I leveled the accusation. But I stand by it.
I don't believe it either. It's not even necessarily that I don't believe Lyudmila who may well be honest that that's what the mod in question said. But that doesn't mean I believe the mod in question. Of course she would say she was busy and offline and was not making alts to harass users when asked if that's what she was doing. There are several places in this chain where you can disbelieve what's being reported. I don't believe it for one second either. It's also telling that half of my question wasn't even acknowledged, let alone answered. To me, that's pretty much confirmation that not only is this mod that same banned wrecker from months ago, but that the mods are aware of this, accept it, and keeping it quiet.