The poor snoo look at its sad face :(

I don’t know. I’ve just always felt like it was weird to come up with a term for “normal” people. I don’t understand why it was necessary

Would you be fine with a straight person saying "I'm not straight, I'm normal" then?

Or would you realize that by choosing one aspect of the human experience to label as normal, instead of actually having a name for it, you are automatically labeling the others as abnormal — which means they're not just a naturally-occuring human thing, but something that's disordered or wrong or unnatural? If you decide to label being trans, but just call cis people "normal," then that's the implication.

Moreover, "cis" is a label for understanding a way of identifying regarding your assigned gender at birth, same "trans." I really don't see how it makes sense for it to be okay to have a word for one option — trans — but not the other. If it's okay to have a label for one option so we can accurately communicate about it, why isn't it okay to have a label for the other one, just because it's more common? That doesn't make sense. We have labels for all sorts of common things. Moreover, having a word that designates someone as not-trans is extremely useful for linguistic clarity: now instead of saying "normal" and having to infer from context in what respect the person is "normal", since that could refer to a million things, cis gives us a way of actually saying what we mean. Scientists label both common and uncommon options for things all the time.

Maybe it’s just me, and maybe I’m getting old, but I don’t understand the obsession with labeling everyone and putting them in a well defined box... Can't we all just be ourselves without the labels?

This talking point always hurts me deeply. Taking away the words and concepts we use to understand ourselves and communicate with others about that, find common ground and community and understanding, is the perfect way to erase us. That's why conservatives and TERFs so often say the same thing.

Unlike for conservatives, labels for the LGBTQ community aren't about putting everyone inside a well-defined box at all. Unlike conservatives with their traditional gender roles and expectations, our labels are actually not rigidly defined like that, they're fuzzy, socially constructed, often with multiple shades and versions of meaning and ways they can be understood. Neither are they supposed to be normative — if you associated with a label once, that doesn't mean you have to always do so (or have to have always done so), and if you don't perfectly fit a label, that's totally fine, you don't have to "live up to it."

(Except, I guess, in terminally-online Tumblr "discourse.")

And the fact that labels, at least how the queer community uses them, are not "boxes to put people in" is a function of how we use them: they're crucial tools to be able to communicate aspects of the incohate mess that is our experiences to others, and therein find community and solidarity with others, to know you're not alone because there are others that share those experiences, who can comfort you and even guide you, and so you can use those words that helped you make people able to finally understand you as a rallying point.

We need the words to describe ourselves.

Taking away our language, the language we need to explain some important part of who we are or the lives we life, is fucking horrible.

Do you know how painful it was to grow up without labels like trans and cis so I could understand what was happening to me and why I was different from others? The first moment I found a word that seemed to describe what I was feeling, even though it was a wrong one (crossdresser), I clung onto it desperately. And then, when I finally found the word to describe what I actually was, it was a watershed moment.

Have you stopped for a moment to listen to the queer people who will tell you that finding out there was a word to describe what they were going through was one of tbe most powerful moments in their lives? Remember, without words for things, its difficult to have concepts for things, and that means its almost impossible to think them.

🫂

As a trans woman it's really fun getting to be the minority that it's totally okay to just openly hate and dehumanize, the right's newest whipping girl ;-;

Key info:

Only 41% of Republicans say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable, according to Gallup. That is a 15% drop from 2022, the largest single-year change since Gallup began asking the question. Democratic approval also fell from 85% to 79%.

I've always said that ultimately the only people we can rely on are ourselves, the queer community.

I use Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger on top of uBlock

This article is also really good: https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-racing-discover-how-gender-transitions-alter-athletic-performance-including

It goes into detail on a real world athletics study (instead of studies on individual factors like muscle mass or grip strength that may not be representative at all of sport performance) in running that shows that after transitioning, trans women perform the same relative to their cis women peers as they did to their cis male peers prior to transitioning — i.e., same place in the distribution curve.

Are you considering making and moderating and equivalent community here on Lemmy? A lot of people here want to start communities or at least for those communities to exist but don't have the time or experience or mental health to moderate them ourselves, so moderators directly moving here from Reddit could make a massive impact!

I think it might for a little while but not for much longer.

When the influx started, the two oldest and biggest Lemmy instances, the ones maintained by the developers, and thus presumably the flagship instances, were lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml. Tankies are definitely overrepresented in those two instances, and since the devs themselves are tankies, there's a lot of moderation bias in favor of red fascist authoritarian regimes even in the nominally "neutral" lemmy.ml — such as them refusing to remove genocide denial or outright genocide justification, while also removing posts critical of China and so on.

You might argue that this doesn't affect you if you just pick a different instance, because the culture of that instance will be different and so will the moderation, but the problem with that is that if the vast majority of users on a network are tankies and are moderated by tankies then that's going to influence your experience of the network as a whole pretty much unavoidably unless you defederate with the largest instances and thereby intentionally hamstring yourself.

So even if you joined another instance, your experience of the site as a whole would be dominated by a tankie leaning culture via comments and posts, and that's where the reputation (deservedly) came from. And it probably did and maybe still does hamper the growth a little bit. It definitely made me, a trans anarchist, think twice about joining.

However, with the more neutral and professionally-run lemmy.world taking over as the second largest and flagship instance, and beehaw as the third (iirc), as well as the overall influx of a variety of users from Reddit, I think over time the dominance of tankies in how the network is experienced by users, even from other instances, will drastically decrease, especially as many instances defederate from lemmmygrad, and so the reputation will also fade.

I really want to exclusively switch to Lemmy, but as it stands I'll probably end up starting to use Reddit again as soon as the the vast majority of the blackout ends (I'm not gonna give in easily, but once it's mostly over, there's no point in me continuing).

The problem for me is that on Reddit even extremely niche communities had a substantial amount of members and activity, whereas Lemmy is smaller than Reddit, so everything scales down proportionally, meaning that suddenly communities that were niche on Reddit are infinitesimally tiny or even just absent on Lemmy. Like, there's no malazan community, elitedangerous and wheeloftime are dead, amiga is dead, and so on.

I actually got a ton of extremely high quality, positive interaction on the subreddits I was on, because I almost entirely stayed away from the really popular subreddits, and I'm losing all that moving to here, where the popular communities have higher quality interaction but the smaller communities have way worse interaction. Also, Reddit is a massive treasure-trove of useful niche information for me.

Exactly this. A long term blackout, especially a user blackout, is not feasible without a replacement place to go to.

I'm honestly very excited about Lemmy and Mastodon.

With federated and decentralized technology, I think there's a real hope of taking the internet back from the tiny selection of corporatized, monetized, sterile silos we have now, where everyone is forced to abide by the same compromise rules and everything can be co-opted or changed at a moment's notice without the userbase's consent, and giving it to smaller, more fun, radical, unique, and interesting internet communities, run by volunteers who really care, for like minded people.

I think it will lead to a much more diverse and richly textured internet, maybe even a more human internet, since each place you go will be a smaller, more intentional community which policies itself and can develop its own interesting culture and set of norms, while still being connected to everything else so the rot of pure isolation doesn't set in.

Technology — especially how it is structured — is never neutral, and I think for the first time in a long while, we've stumbled on technologies in federation and decentralization that actually tend towards good things. The inherent benefits of federation and decentralization to autonomy and resilience and diversity and resistance tocorporatizationn are stunning, and as long as we don't fuck that up by assuming that those benefits are sufficient, don't rest on our laurels thinking we don't need to maintain a culture that is consciously and intentionally oriented around preserving the things we want to see, I think we'll be okay!