cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/26211900
[Transphobia Warning] Nutomic’s Stance on Transgender People
The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised.
I don’t intend that to be snarky, more jokey. But, yeah, it’s pretty much common knowledge. Not the first time they’ve expressed unpleasant opinions on the subject, though not quite this bluntly. There was a minor kerfluffle over it not too long after the reddit exodus.
And it isn’t unexpected tbh, that’s a pretty bog standard tankie take, if perhaps a tad more trope filled.
To me, lemmy is kinda like a less important version of the Apollo missions. You put up with someone unpleasant because they can get the job done, until things get to the point it can be done without them. German scientists, tankie devs. Yeah, yeah, von Braun wasn’t a “real” nazi; whatever.
At some point, either lemmy gets enough movement to get a less extreme team on board, it gets forked, or something else comes along.
I’ll keep posting about Sublinks as long as Lemmy is primarily developed by people whom suck
How is Sublinks development going? Are they getting close to Lemmy as far as features go? Any stable instances yet?
I’m aware of the project, but haven’t been following it closely the past few months.
I’m on the Matrix space, things are still moving.
No release date yet, and it’s summer so people are on annual leave
Genuinely curious … what exactly is the problematic stance here?
Is it that they think the boxer was a biological male and therefore trans female? Or is it referring to then as a biological male (which seems justifiably politically incorrect to me but not heinous in trying to point out that the Olympic/bougousie can’t be that transphobic, could honestly be a language problem).
Or is it the statement that the bourgeoisie aren’t trans phobic?
The idea that trans rights are some kind of bourgeoisie conspiracy.
I personally don’t see that in the statement … at all actually. Maybe they believe that, I don’t know … but I’d need to seem more to believe that.
From the context of the conversation, it seems more like the inversion, where they doubt that transphobia is some kind of bourgeoisie conspiracy given that trans-rights are getting support from enough parts of mainstream society.
Which IMO, as I’ve said in other comments, is a rather superficial angle on the whole thing (from both sides of the posted conversation). There’s undoubtedly a lot of transphobic energy in mainstream society, with plenty of influential people being shitty people about it, but whether it is or isn’t some conspiracy or whatever doesn’t seem like a helpful way of looking at it.
I could of course be wrong and ignorant. It just seems to me like the malice v incompetence dynamic, where most people can be vile for pretty base reasons, without culture playing a big role but without it having to be some conspiracy or organised effort (as the person nutomic was responding to was claiming)
I know that I shouldn’t, but…
Off-topic: why Nutomic's comment is idiotic
It’s a big false dichotomy.
As a class, the bourgeoisie only cares about staying in power. Everything else from its PoV is fluff, to be situationally used or opposed.
And that applies to the trans cause. The bourgeoisie is weakly opposed to trans rights because they get in the way of reproductive labour (trans people are less likely to have children, so they aren’t pumping out as many new proletariats as cis people do). However that opposition is not strong enough to make the bourgeoisie ignore pink money, since pink money is still money and money is still power under capitalism.
It’s also worth noting that the bourgeoisie doesn’t just compete for power with the other two classes (proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie) - it also competes internally. And for that, different factions within the class will seek external support from different groups, and align their discourses to those.
In that situation, what do you expect to see? The bourgeoisie flinging back and forth between lip service towards LGBTQ+ people+communities, and a transphobic discourse. Rainbow-wash something today (it’s a cheap and effective marketing tactic!), go transphobic tomorrow; business A plops up a trans flag, business B tears it down. Flush, repeat.
And, well, it’s exactly what you see here.
I also encourage specifically Trotskyists to read this text, as it explains way better than I could how the transgender agenda and class struggle are not orthogonal in nature. (Stalinists: be warned that Sybil Davis rambles quite a bit against Stalinism.)
And… on a moral level, let’s be frank - you need to be inconsistent like a puddle of jelly, to be a communist but not defend trans rights. At the end of the day, what a good communist should defend is freedom of oppression; and what are those LGBTQ+ activists saying, if not “we don’t want to be oppressed based on gender, sex and sexuality”? It’s all about human rights dammit.
On-topic: I think that the “forums side of the Fediverse” (nowadays mostly Lemmy and Kbin/Mbin) would benefit immensely from additional platforms; that’s why I’m excited for projects like PieFed and SubLinks. I am grateful for the Lemmy software but I can’t help but see the people in charge of the project as a liability.And they would still be a liability even if they had any skill building a healthy community (they don’t, they suck at it). Relying on a single platform is like putting all your eggs within the same basket, once that basket goes down everything breaks.
It’s also worth noting that the bourgeoisie doesn’t just compete for power with the other two classes (proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie) - it also competes internally. And for that, different factions within the class will seek external support from different groups, and align their discourses to those.
And if someone were to ignore that and view them as a single-minded monolith it can easily be explained as divide & conquer tactics.
This too - even monolithic agents can play both sides, or do lip service for one side while supporting the other from the shadows.
And they would still be a liability even if they had any skill building a healthy community (they don’t, they suck at it).
I agree with you here (and generally the whole post, glad to have found it here). While I think they do suck at community building (and might even admit to as much or defend the need for it) I would add that from my perspective the amount of reflexive dog-piling and harsh criticism hurled their way just for or triggered by their being communists/tankies has probably made it pretty difficult. And unfortunately and problematically so I’d say. Now such may just be the way things are and it had to be navigated if they were ever to build a better community … sure. And being open communists may then as just a matter of practical reality hinder their community building capacities. But I feel like it’s worth acknowledging.
Also, their position of opposing a somewhat consumeristic culture of having a demanding relationship with open source developers is also worth recognising. I wasn’t receptive to those arguments in the past, but have since come around to it TBH.
And, the way they’ve approached federation and presenting their own instance has enabled the lemmy-verse to not have a single monolithic community or culture. They chose before the migration to not push their instance as the flagship and never seemed to want that. They always promoted other instances, and have always federated their own instance fairly widely. So in a way, they’ve ensured that they didn’t have to be the primary community builders for the lemmy space, and I think that has paid off rather well given the relatively small user size here (apart from lemmy . world being too big).
I don’t rule out that a lot of the complains are motivated by red scare, instead of saner stuff. And I’m also genuinely grateful for not making
mlthe flagship instance, it would’ve made any problem worse.However I think that, to be a good open source developer, you need to be at least decent at community building. Because a good part of that development is to gather support so other people can submit you code.
Because a good part of that development is to gather support so other people can submit you code.
Yes, for sure … totally agree. I think I saw desalines even acknowledging that they’ve dropped the ball on this somewhat. TBH, from their perspective, I imagine it’s hard to see through the red scare stuff though.
That it’s rust also creates a barrier to entry (I actually started a community for learning rust to help with this and it’s gone ok so far).
But yea, I think they could do with a community manager of some sort. Nutomic in particular seems to have difficulty with engaging with the user base (this post’s source included).
This is the best stated argument I’ve seen by far for alts for Lemmy. Still, I don’t see anything wrong with the statements made being neutral. Not everyone is going to be an ally, but that does not make them an enemy. This post smells like someone trying very poorly thought out psyops instead of simply making their own thing. Lemmy is written in the benchmark of coding languages. The alts appear to target the least secure convenient high level languages. Based on what I’ve seen, I would be quite hesitant to run my own instance on one versus the other. I’ve seen a ton of whining here and there, but I haven’t seen anyone that has an answer to why they have not submitted pull requests for Lemmy. I find that most concerning. There appears to be a desire to steal Lemmy. I find that deeply disturbing. I left for awhile once before because of similar nonsense. If some one can do better, great, go prove it on your own. If your confidence in your abilities does not exceed envy of what already exists, I already feel completely uninterested in the alternative. There is a lot of nonsense about politics that ultimately have nothing to do with the platform. It feels like deeply destabilizing drama that makes this place toxic.
There is still thinly plausible deniability about the psyops nature of this post, but it is too strong of a pattern for me to ignore as chance. The original message chain was not posted. One side of a conversation proves nothing whatsoever and making conclusions about intent without full context is a fool’s folly. The consistent jump to Lemmy alts in comments shows a decided intent and bias.
For context, here’s the original message chain. The discourse conveyed there isn’t just neutral, it’s dismissive - in that chain Nutomic does play down the trans issues and needs.
While we could argue that the original user is jumping at the gun to some extent (and falling into the same idiotic false dichotomy as Nutomic himself), it’s hard to claim that she’s psy ops, after a quick glance of her profile. She simply sounds vocal about the issues that she cares about. I think that it’s the same deal with the OP of this thread, it doesn’t look like psy ops for me.
I ain’t no programmer, so take what I say with a grain of salt: while performance is important I don’t think that it’s the whole deal. One of the benefits of Python is that a lot of people know it, can read its code for issues, and can contribute with the project. (This is not a dichotomy, though - I think that an alternative coded mostly in Python, with Rust on critical parts [to address performance and security] would be the best of all worlds.)
But even another codebase in Rust would do great in my book. Besides the whole deal of relying too much onto a a single basket, every new alternative would bring on new ideas, and try to tackle the same problems in different ways. Kbin for example tried to mix microblogging in. And oddly enough it would be a great way to shut up all those “waah devz r commiez!” complains (“ah, you don’t use software made for commies? Use [alternative] then.”), while still allowing them to reap the benefits through federation and open source.
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Yeah, this is just manufactured drama. The screenshots showing what preceded his comment show the whole thing to clearly be bait for the purpose of creating drama.
Funny how when others are called transphobic, it’s all hands on deck, no taking a moment to reconsider the facts or the context.
But for some reason, this particular example requires caution? If you know Desalines, or the lemmy devs themselves, you’ll know that transphobia is just the tip of the iceberg of their extremism. Have a look for yourself: !meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works
It’s quite possible those tankies are the very same people excusing his transphobia, they already simp for Castro and Che, who rounded up gay people and put them in “totally not death camps” for their “mandatory service” where they were starved and worked and beaten to death, and they totally excuse him for that, too.
Yeah yeah, “later he said he was sorry he had all those gay people killed in concentration camps.” Uh huh.
i mean they love stalin who genocided the Ukrainians. soo
Che wasn’t involved in those camps at all. And not only did Castro apologize, but ended up helping push some of the most liberal LGBTQ laws on the books in any country, including the US.
You excuse the US for all sorts of stuff, I’m sure. Reagan ignored a pandemic, all your founders were slave owners, hell, your current President is helping with a genocide and I’ve seen people excuse that all over Lemmy.
And for the record, even the tankie communities on Lemmy, like hexbear, disagree with nutomic’s comments.
Bullshit. BULLSHIT. The context is “hey this tool helps keep trans people safe, any chance we can integrate it or make the platform work with it?” And the response was that its made up. Fucking. That’s not baiting. That’s a feature request
I’m wondering if the people upvoting Anon have actually seen the context. There was no baiting involved. Only an explanation on why the feature was wanted.
I just got banned from !linux@lemmy.ml for posting that screenshot
Welcome to !linux@programming.dev
I will be joining in :)
Linux doesn’t seem like the correct community for it but it could’ve been deleted it’s so weird they would ban you for that
I mean to say that I posted the screenshot from the original post
Update 2:
I thought you mistyped PixelFed lol. Good to see there’s another Lemmy clone like sublinks.
I think they’re responding to a transphobic comment and not being transphobic themselves. I think they’re addressing a far left, socially conservative conspiracy of saying “trans people r bourgeoisie inventions for culture wars to distract the public from the class war”. This person is saying that this is a far fetched idea.
I’m correct in understanding this, right?
Gonna give you the benefit of the doubt. You are not understanding right.
Oof. Tankies rlly r weird, huh
Still not clear on what’s so trans phobic here (having read the context, which is a private message TBC).
It seems like they’re saying that major coordinated transphobic misinformation from the bourgeoisie is unlikely given that there’s also clear pro-trans activity. Whixh is superficial IMO as such doesn’t discount multiple activities but it certainly isn’t defunct logic I’d say, where there are clearly transphobes and plenty of transphobic energy in mainstream culture at the moment.
But I don’t think they’re saying transphobia isn’t a problem. The first rule of the instance they admin is against transphobia, for example. It seems to me all they’re saying is that it isn’t a major mission by the bourgeoisie. Which compared to making corporations and capitalism happy is maybe not unfair.
That’s not the situation at all.
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Bourgeoisie means the middle class, it’s frustrating that term has become incorrectly popularized as “those in power” or “the upper crust”.
Not quite. Bourgeois were the merchant class which was the middle one during feudal times. But now they have become the ruling class and the term has started changing in meaning, but the old use still Is valid
I’ve heard the argument, but we already have more accurate terms like “capitalist”.
I’m not saying people are going to stop using those terms, I just find personally find it silly.
It’s like calling a truck a bicycle, and then having to explain every time that you understand a truck isn’t really a “bicycle” but you have to call it a “bicycle” because everybody else calls it a bicycle.
Marxists tend to get stuck in definitions that were used in Marx’s time, so I always try to interpret things in that way as well when talking to one to see if it makes sense and avoid misunderstandings. I prefer to talk about the actual issues than to bicker about definitions
I get that.
I feel like if it’s small enough that there’s no ambiguity about what you’re talking about and you can move past it, that’s the way to go.
I feel like a lot of the time though, people are using different definitions consistently specifically to evoke certain context clues in an efforts to avoid defining exactly how relevant their comment is to the issue ostensibly being presented.
So in a real-life c Toyota onversation, I’ll usually clarify what they mean first, and if it’s close enough to what we were talking about, we move on and keep talking.
Often with internet comments, I receive “no, I only mean this phrase or word, this is an equally valid definition”, that means that we aren’t even talking about the same thing and there’s no point in pursuing the matter since they’re focused on putting on a performance for dinner ulterior motive instead of making a point.
Goalposts and all that
Next time someone asks me what Lemmy’s like, I’ll just refer them to this post.
“And see? That’s my comment down here with the gif.”
Honestly seems dumb to me. The vast majority of lemmy is not like this at all. It all depends on what you subscribe to.
That there’s always some background radiation of Fedi drama … yea I’d agree with you on that … sad to see TBH. IMO, some just want to create drama and get tribal without actually doing anything positive.
A rant on social issues, a spin on development, and a nonchalant passive-aggressieness… Nah, that’s a lot of Lemmy. If the profile pic was a fursona, that’d be 💋👌
Hell, just look at these comments lol. You’re in denial or you’ve gotten good at ignoring it.
You’re in denial or you’ve gotten good at ignoring it.
Maybe. I’m plugged into my fair share of Fedi drama around the fediverse I’d say.
A big difference I suspect is between those who scroll All and those who rely on subscribing.
Otherwise, I don’t think this is a lemmy thing, it’s a fediverse thing. Even BlueSky. A sad trait amongst people has been exposed by alternative social … people are meaner to open source voluntary devs than big corp extractive owners.
So, for context
- this is one of admins of lemmy . ml.
- that instance’s first rule is
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- This person is also one of the core devs of lemmy
Because, IMO, fedi drama is almost always overstated and overblown, especially when it comes to specific “incidents” … because we’ve gotten addicted to social media drama/rage …
I’ll provide my own impression without any context, pretending I’m a relevant moderator
- it seems they’re challenging the notion that the same culture can be both pro-trans and anti-trans at the same time.
- which seems superficial unless it’s about a specific incident
- they seem to think that the Olympic boxer that’s caused an incident is actually born biologically male but is a trans female, and cite as much as proof that the west is not wholly anti-trans
- my own impression is that the boxer being biologically male is mostly rumour and accusation, but I’m not close to the story at all and can understand how someone not following the olympics would conclude that they’re trans
- without context I’m not sure I could conclude whether this is transphobic, at all actually.
- Probably misinformed, but I’m also not informed on that issue, which also seems to be a moving “story”.
- The user’s perspective is also relevant here, where being a known communist, they’re likely to think anything the west does is flawed and always boils down to class issues.
- so given that it’s a sensitive topic, I’d follow up the comment with an attempt to frame the sensitivity of the issue and ask the author to consider editing their comment or reconsidering their stance just to flag the potentially transphobic reading of the comment.
Here’s the killer though … this seems like it’s a private message in response to a query … in which case I’m not sure there’s any moderation to be done and without more I’m not convinced this transphobic at all.
