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'm sorry, but if people are garnering resentment for "the [he/him] demographic" at the mod/admin level, that's a failure of having pronouns on this site, no one should be reading posts and judging them based off of the poster's pronouns unless they are engaging in misogyny or something else where pronouns would actually be a relevant factor, also you don't know whether these [he/him]s are cis or not, that is extremely reactionary for a leftist website
How do you know this? There is not a cis box next to the pronouns, there is not a race box next to the pronouns, there is not a sexuality box next to the pronouns, people are just assuming this about other people who have not made this clear? That's kind of a fucked up thing to do, I'm not personally assuming whether any user is cisgender or not, or is white or not, or is hetero or not, based on how they post unless they explicitly mention it.
If this was going on on a widespread level some serious self crit needs to be had.
Honestly, NGL, that does give me really weird bioessentialist and non-intersectional vibes, too.
Despite this site having a large portion of trans users, I still am not wholeheartedly convinced that many users on this site, even some of whom are trans, have completely dealt away with their bioessentialist brainworms.
These kinds of pronoun-based judgments can absolutely be reactionary, cisheteronormative, and harmful. This site as a whole actually needs to understand that complaining about cis men from a more systemic "I'm tired of male privilege making them act like dicks" perspective can easily diverge into statements that seem suspiciously and needlessly harmful to men of color and trans people (and that includes both transfem and transmasc people) if these bioessentialist, cisheteronormative, and reactionary brainworms are not properly dealt with.
The fact that this site's userbase fails to realize this is a part of the reason why I feel uncomfortable as a POC, as it's just one of the site's more plainly obvious demonstrations of not really being considerate of intersectionality.
Yeah I'm definitely more on the side of there being some bioessentialism brainworms at play, instead of it just being a "miscommunication"
iirc, on the site polls, the site was overwhelmingly white, and almost all of the he/hims who responded to polls were amab.
I really don't think that excuses anything personally, unless you know the specific user's sexuality, gender, race it is fundamentally reactionary to assume what they are
At that point you are quite literally profiling people based on their pronouns
Pronouns aren't gender, nor should they tell you anything about somebody's sexuality.
I feel like the mod team probably has similar demographics to the rest of the site tbh