TL;DR I'm resigning as an admin of Chapo effective Sunday, January 24th, 2021.
So what's up, TCFunnySexNumber? Why are you resigning?
Well, let me break it down for you.
I'll start by saying the amount of messages I've received since The Great Pronoun Wars saying they would have left if there wasn't trans representation on the admin team has been not insignificant. It's a huge pressure and that shouldn't be what it takes to keep someone there. I'm tired of feeling like the Guerrilla GlueTM that's barely keeping this screaming metal death trap barreling down the highway. I'm not trying to jerk off my own efforts on site, but it's not hard to see.
But more than anything I'm tired of feeling like a pawn who exists to look pretty and give the illusion that we're a trans positive space.
We tell people to set pronoun tags to have a shred of solidarity with trans comrades.
Cissies throw a fit.
We tell the community we will be analyzing downvotes to see who is creating a hostile environment for trans people here.
Cissies throw a fit.
We remove the downvote button to stop people from using it as a means of shitting on trans people without actually saying anything.
Cissies throw a fit.
We ask people to put content warnings on posts with transphobia so not all of us have to see it or engage with it.
Cissies throw a fit.
Trans comrades leave the site and drop messages about how cissies have zero solidarity with us and don't actually give a fuck to learn about our issues or support us.
Cissies throw a fit.
We start banning people for being hostile when we bring up that the community is actively hostile towards us.
Cissies throw a fit.
We try to do literally anything to combat the reactionary environment.
Cissies throw a fucking fit.
I'd be hard pressed to look at all of that and say it's a trans positive space. Furthermore, I feel like it's fine that I exist as an admin so long as I don't stand up to any dudebro armchair leftists who vocally don't give a shit about us and genuinely want us to leave so they can have a pretty vaporwave Reddit 4chan hybrid without guilt or being told their "efforts" as "leftists" aren't good enough.
It's not difficult to see how the community has grown increasingly hostile toward us over the last few months. And for months the thought of snapping, going rogue mod, and banning everyone who has alienated us has crossed my mind infinitely more times than I'm willing to admit. I've seen calls for change get reduced to minor policy that eventually fizzles out and amounts to nothing and I'm tired of watching it happen and I'm drained by the amount of pushback and outright denial from the userbase that there is anything wrong in the first place.
Sure, the announcements of policy change could've been handled better, I'm willing to admit that. But to outright deny there are issues in the community and to make calls for admin elections in response to us saying we're banning people for perpetuating the hostile environment that's causing the site to hemorrhage trans people is fucking bullshit.
I'm tired of this community being like every other fucking lib space on the internet where it's just cis people meaninglessly shouting "trans rights!" into the void without any realistic understanding of what that means and without actively listening to us on how to be better allies.
I'm tired of us being talked over. The amount of times I've seen my argument of "go to !TEL and look at the first few pages and see the downvotes" repeated by cis users and be taken more seriously than others have taken that argument from me is fucking disgusting and I'm sick of it.
After Cass left and Confabulously posted about how she's thinking of leaving too, I just let the hatred that's been building up inside of me for months completely wash over me and started banning dissenters without much thought. My only regret is that I didn't ban more cissies during my purge spree.
I've dumped hundreds of hours of my life into this project. I'm grateful I did otherwise I wouldn't have met so many great people let alone all the trans cuties, but it's horrible that the aftermath of the most recent struggle session literally had me thinking about walking away from everything and starting my own record and coffee shop combo and living out the rest of my days as an NPC.
Over the next two weeks I'll be handing the other admins the keys to what I had done with the accounting software and files I'd been doing for us pro-bono but never really got around to finishing as a result of various scheduling conflicts, any accounts and passwords I made for various side projects here, and whatever else they need before I fuck off. I wish them all the best of luck. Maybe one day things will be different and I can return but I just can't see a clear path forward for myself here - and I definitely understand that this is a breakup cliche.
I left trans spaces because I fucking hated their politics and felt like I didn't fit in but now I realize I should've been trying to radicalize those trans spaces this entire time instead.
congratulations on liberating yourself from being an internet cop
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If we found a way to make the place less hostile before you leave, would you stay? What do you think we could improve? You obviously shouldn't have to put up with this shit.
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I wish I was smart enough to think of something because I don't want this to be a place that's hostile to trans people.
Maybe i'm super optimistic, but I get the feeling what's been happening the past few days is maybe the worst of it? Like, it's been simmering for super long and now it's boiling over. To me, whenever there's "drama" that just means stuff that's already been here is just exploding out for everyone to see, it's messy but it also means it's suddenly more visible and it can be addressed.
I think some kind of automated tools for moderation (an automod) once the backend rewrite is done would be an enormous help and would free a lot of time for all admins and mods. There's some kind of community-led effort that needs to happen on top of it. I've already seen a visible shift in behaviour and perspective since confabulously's post, people are more ready to ignore or dunk on concern-trolls, at least from my very limited persepctive as a mostly-lurker.
I've been thinking, could some kind of regular data/summary of what the mods have been doing help? So a daily/weekly "how many people/posts were banned" to show the bulk of the mods' work, maybe a summary of "ban reasons" or a compilation of the kind of stuff that gets removed. Other people have mentioned it but a big part of the problem is that most users/lurkers just never really see any of the moderation work and have a position that's maybe more of a default "mods are cops" instead of one of solidarity. Could be fun and some learning experience to have a semi-regular "here's the kinda shit we ban, here's how much of it there is". Could even be kinda automated and just dump cool data from the modlogs directly.
I'm still very hopeful for this place, and every drama to me feels like problems boiling over but also becoming fixable when they do, like an opportunity to clear the air. Also now the mod team seems to have had a ton of very valuable learn-by-doing moments and, from what I've seen, has been able to reach a better understanding of how to do things (uphold Rebr0 thought, etc).
Obviously you gotta do what's best for you, and it's fairly common for projects like these (online OR irl) to rely too much on a few motivated people who then get burned out, then crash hard. Wish you the best in your other projects, I hope you'll still be an active user here at least ! :heart-sickle:
No more doomer posting, we got transphobes to burn.