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.

  • Ivysaur [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    9 days ago

    Logging back in from my break — hell of a time to return — just to to tell you this is very felt. I see your posts in the disability community mega. I never liked the "its just online, u can log off" rhetoric because, yeah, you sure can, and I do, but niche forums like this are (usually) more than some meaningless input-output feedback loop and whether we like it or not this is a space of human beings with lives and names we can recognize and that is called socializing, wow! I similarly do not have many means to "touch grass" because the grass touchers keep making the air toxic and doing nothing about it while telling me I'm the fucked up one. Whenever people say this (call me uncharitable, idgaf) I assume they haven't thought about COVID at all since '21 just like everybody else in the backwards goddamn world we live in now and that tells me all I need to know about who I ought to listen to. This old post I made sums up the "just organize" mentality, a thing I have done & attempted much more and for far longer than most here have even been "leftist":

    My wife works in this little crappy Chuck E Cheese knockoff arcade downtown- pretty much the worst place to be all things considered, but we don't have any other choice for income and it pays well enough of any minimum wage job we've ever had. She's been there for a year and has never once taken off her N95 indoors or around other people for any of her eight hour shifts (and her combined three hour commute to and from the building). She has been the only one to do so. When she describes to her coworkers, the wonderful working class of the United States, that she does it to protect me, an immunocompromised person in her family, and when she describes the dangers, shows them the data we have surrounding current Covid trends, they will all say "yeah wow that's bad"- and then we offer them a mask from our personal supply of N95s and they go "no thanks" without hesitation, every time. They have mandatory "safety meetings" every few months and we've brought Covid and masking up at every one of them in addition to casual conversations with her coworkers. There is no plan to change policy. There is no plan for them to bother themselves for the sake of others, or even themselves, at any level of the social ladder, institutional or interpersonal. One of her coworkers talked about driving to Seattle a few weeks ago for a concert with someone who tested positive for Covid, but that they weren't worried because "it was probably a false positive". One of her coworkers complains that she started a couple weeks ago and has been sick twice. My wife has been sick that much the entire year she's worked there, because she wears a high-quality and well-fitting respirator at all times.

    Last year we wanted to go to an event nearby and asked the organizers of what was planned to be about 40-50 people if they would require masks because I was an immunocompromised person and wanted the best chances to avoid infection as much as possible while still being able to participate. In their messages they sounded sympathetic, assuring me that they would and that those who saw what I said would wear them for me that weekend. We were two of maybe four people in masks there. They didn't do anything for us, and people who said they would mask were not wearing them. So we left.

    sure wish I could go volunteer at my Communist Org For Building Communism like you and all your badass friends, except they (and probably you too bitch) are all carrying airborne death and won’t do anything about it. Fuck you.

    So, like, yeah, it is just a website. But the real world has fucking abandoned me, and us, and at least I can say Hexbear was a spot where I didn't have to listen to anyone talking about COVID who would also pearl clutch about presinald trunt, or any number of other inane liberal bugbears, if they talk about it at all. It's at the very least a sanity check in times that are simply incomprehensible.

    • DeathToBritain [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      9 days ago

      thank you for sharing this. for many people beging forced to log off and shouted down to go touch grass basically means 'socially isolate yourself for a time away from your core socialisation'. I get extreme bouts of anxiety at times that make going outside hard; I am lucky enough to have people in my life who can deal with my anxiety and help me, but before them? being told to 'log off and touch grass' just meant sit in your room alone for me