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.
This is the first sensible post to come out of the admin team since the start of this insanity.
Still a lot of room for improvement - not sure that “associating behavioural trends with pronoun tags” is a route we should ever go down, to be honest.
But after the past few days of being entirely baffled by whatever the hell was going on with the rest of the admins, this is a step in the right direction.
Iunno. Dudes do stay on hella bullshit; especially white dudes-- but it’s so much of a worse look when a mod staff that’s frankly always given some hWhite tendencies (no, I will not forget the 🦝 discourse and how I nearly had to fight that mod fight twice) starts hitting everyone, not just the white dudes with accusations of having “cishet white dude” mentalities over shit that rly doesn’t matter that much. Reads as friendly fire but cranked up a couple magnitudes; y’all just spraying into a crowd with that.
When I say ‘white dudes/white gays are the weakest link’ it always has something to do with formation-building, with interpersonal relations in organizations and the moments of action, et cetera.
…This is a shitposting forum; is shitposting suddenly the sole domain of cracker men? If so, we’d all have to leave except the he/hims.