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 can say for myself that i have friends who are trans, leftist and who i still wouldn't recommend the site to simply because the vibe doesn't fit them at all. I honestly don't know if i would join if i discovered Hexbear now and hadn't gotten used to our culture since the last days of r/chapotraphouse. In spite of the struggle session i'd still say we've gotten better on things like irony poisoning, edgyness, misanthropy and debate pervertry, but the place can still be pretty crass at times and we tend to be extremely hostile to people who aren't part of our niche culture. That's just not something everybody vibes with. And in spite of our anti-sectarian stance, this is largely an ML space that can be hard to navigate for Anarchists, DemSocs, classical Marxists and Trots. It's kinda grim at times and not a space that's very welcoming to a lot of the most caring and sweet socialists i know.
I'm not saying that we should transform the site in a way that fixes these issues. I don't know if they even should be fixed, and i'm saying this as somebody who is herself firmly in the "Hexbear is a safer space" camp, who has blocked comms like the dunk tank and fakenews since forever, who largely stays out of struggle sessions and who only browses by local because i don't want to be part of dunkfests with the rest of the lemmyverse, or even interact with it in the first place. That's my stance, but i'm very aware that we have a sizeable userbase who sees all of these things very differently and is vehemently opposed to changing our site culture. And looking back at the last days, i think it's better when we find a synthesis here instead of forcing a transformation of the site.