Hi comrades, want to give you all an informal update on the discussions around the site’s misogyny problems that’ve been happening over the last several days. I wanna make sure you know that the admin/mod team has seen all of that discourse and we’ve been actively discussing solutions in the matrix mod chat. We’re taking this shit very seriously and acknowledge that we haven’t used a heavy enough hand on misogynistic rhetoric. As some of you saw we nuked that cheating thread from a couple weeks ago and handed out temp bans to the most egregious offenders. Idk how that was allowed to run it’s course but we apologize for that oversight. We’re going to do better.

We’ve come up with some ideas for how to improve this part of the site culture and we want to get suggestions from y’all as well, since the alarm was sounded on this by our beautiful c/traa posters to begin with. Our ideas so far include:

  1. A zero-tolerance policy towards any even remotely misogynistic/patriarchal posts or comments, as too much has slipped through the cracks on that, establishing a clear protocol for bans for violating rules against misogyny, and ideally tracking repeat offenders in a way that makes deciding a course of action easy when they reoffend.

  2. Uphold TC69 thought by starting up a book club (and hopefully more to follow) on feminist theory and encouraging mass participation, particularly from the he/him’s on the site. “The Will to Change” by bell hooks has been suggested by multiple people as a great starting point but please feel free to suggest any other works.

  3. Relaunching /c/menby with a trusted educated mod team and a specific focus on countering mainstream narratives about masculinity, relationships and sex that breed reactionary, patriarchal attitudes

  4. Encouraging [namely femme] participation in /c/womenby and taking steps to revitalize that sub as an excellent source of discussion on feminism and intersectionality

  5. Holding another mod drive to get more folks into mod positions in our communities who can help weed out reactionary attitudes

  6. Encouraging users to use the report button often on any post that seems even remotely sus, with the promise that no one’s going to be punished for “report abuse” for reporting posts in obvious good faith

Please let me know your thoughts on the above or any other ideas you have for making the site better, safer and more inclusive for our femme comrades. Once we’ve fully hammered out plans and updated policy we plan to make an announcement post highlighting these changes for the whole userbase. Thank you all for being here and being who you are feminism trans-heart

  • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    26·
    2 months ago

    I guess I assumed that /c/womenby does already include all enbies and not just “femme enbies”, so then does the creation of /c/menby require an exodus of “masc enbies” to a different comm? Why are we doing gender segregation for enbies?

    Why would it “require” an exodus or do gender segragation? It’s not as if anybody is running a secret database of the AGAB of neopronoun users on hexbear and bans them for posting in the wrong com (not to mention that pronouns aren’t surefire indicators of gender). I know a lot of transmasc enbies who get massive dysphoria from being lumped in with fem people, being treated as “women light” etc. A lot of transmasc nonbinary people are very close in gender identity and presentation to men, if they do not downright use a label like “nonbinary trans man” for themselves, not to mention that their lived experience is usually much more marked by struggles with toxic norms of masculinity than with (trans)misogyny. Over here in Germany, whether transmascs even want to be included in the FLINTA acronym (women, lesbians, nonbinary, trans, inter and agender) is a recurring point of debate in trans spaces because the label in practice is often used as a more inclusive form of saying “women only”.

    ofc individual attitudes to this can vary a lot. A lot of the transmac nonbinary people i know are staunch feminists, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they feel at ease in a “no men allowed” space. I think it’s a good thing when they have the option to discuss masculinity with other transmascs and cis men, and i think many of them have valuable perspectives that cis men could benefit from.