Now that everyone has had a chance to argue all day about this, I'm gonna lock this post so you can go touch grass.

I agree that Drag is a massive troll and that user has been banned from many instances over the past few months, including this one.

Maybe try leaving it up to the folks at blajah to decide what they want to be called and maybe just play along with it, even if you find it weird. "Normal" is so fucking boring anyway. If you really can't cope with occasionally coming across an unusual pronoun and being asked to simply accept it without having a meltdown, you probably don't belong on blajah anyway. Just move on.

The "gatekeeping" bans seem like a BPR to me given the context in which it was posted. Having said that, I don't entirely understand the rationale for blajah's rule, since the effect seems to be that you either need to be 100% behind fantasy neo-pronouns and identities (including drag? dragonfucker??) or cop a ban, but if that's how they want things then that's up to them. Not every space is for everyone, and diversity of communities and instances is mostly a good thing.

As far as our instance (dbzer0) goes, malicious/intentional misgendering of users is not permitted, similar to blajah. However, like others in this thread have argued, I agree that someone who literally identifies as a dragon fucker does not deserve to be taken seriously about anything, and it's entirely reasonable to simply assume the choice of pronouns is just another form of trolling. The context and drag's extensive mod history (along with previous alts) are important factors here too.

It's also concerning to me that people are being attacked and reported for being "bigots" or "anti-trans" in the comments just because they have hesitations over what are effectively contentious edge cases involving neo-pronouns and an infamous troll. I know for a fact that many of the commenters in this thread are very supportive of trans people, trans rights and respecting a person's chosen gender pronouns. They just have a problem with this particular dragon-fucker, not because Drag is trans, but because Drag is a narcissistic troll and a community wrecker who thrives on all the drama.

I'm leaving the comments intact for the record, but will add a CW below:

CW: possible misgendering in comments below, at least if you agree dragon fucker is a gender

come on blahaj, yall are better than this.

PugJesus, Israel defender, now transphobe. Now I know why they bothered me. Piece of shit who hates anyone not like them.

Cry harder, YDI. Why does anyone care this much? If you dislike them, block them. Don't cry publicly about how you don't wanna take .5 seconds to type something else.

I'm still not sure if drag is a troll. They're definitely attention seeking though.

Some early gay advocacy groups in US history attempted to cozy up with the more mainstream institutions of the time by distancing themselves from the more 'subversive' elements of the gay community and publicly condemning 'flamboyant' or 'promiscuous' gays. This had the opposite effect of reducing both enthusiasm of gay rights advocates and acceptance of the gay community by the mainstream. This is essentially what you are doing when you condemn trans people who use neopronouns as attention-seeking trolls. You making a distinction between 'legitimate' trans people and 'trolls' will not cause bigots to make the same distinction.

YDI.

The post clearly said “respect people’s pronouns, this rule will be enforced” and everyone getting mod action clearly states in response that they have read and understood the rules, but fully intend to break them.

There are absolutely ways to say “hey Ada, I think your judgement of this particular user is wrong and I am concerned about the damage drag does by engaging in trollish behavior” without also saying “but I plan to misgender people anyway.” The ones getting banned here fail on both counts.

Did the first post about this not go well enough for the transphobes? You had to try again?

It's really fuckin easy, if someone says, "these are my pronouns", you use them.

You can do whatever you want... however, so too can they. I may or may not agree with either side (fwiw Drag is obviously trolling, though that also seems entirely irrelevant?), but I defend blahaj's right to do as they please on their own instance - which they pay for and maintain with little help from others on the Fediverse? - and the post "Neopronouns are not trolling" seems fairly clear to me.

My problem lies rather with how that is not communicated clearly to people. It is not linked in the sidebar, it is not pinned even on lemmy.blahaj.zone, it is in a community that I at first thought was Local-Only b/c it was difficult to find from Lemmy.World (b/c of the different display "Blahaj Lemmy Meta" vs. link-to names !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone) - although it also seems cross-posted to 196 (but why MUST someone be subscribed to that one?) - and especially: when you visit that (cross-)post from some other instance, let's say lemmy.world via this link, the only text you see on the sidebar is for c/196, not the sidebar of lemmy.blahaj.zone, or from this link the text for the Meta community is equally uninformative, plus most apps don't show any sidebar text by default anyway, either burying it behind several button presses or perhaps not making it available at all.

So if you just wandered into a post federated and therefore hosted elsewhere, you may have no clue what is going on there? This is exasperated further by the sidebar text of !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone or !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone stating "other rules" which links to Lemmy.World, even when visited while on lemmy.blahaj.zone!?!? And then that post says nothing whatsoever about neopronouns - the closest mention is "prejudice of any kind" is banned but this is definitely a more contentious issue that those 4 words do not next to nothing to clarify. Also I don't see much of anything in the Lemmy.World ToS that would apply - possibly the text about "misinformation" but again, that seems far from clear, and more for an issue where the admins of Lemmy.World and the admins of lemmy.blahaj.zone would need to come to some kind of mutual agreement or at least understanding.

The tools made available on the Fediverse to help guide people into understanding what the rules are are abysmally inadequate. Ada can run their own instance however they wish, though it sure would be good to find better ways to communicate the expected behaviors rather than "ban people" or "not ban people" after waiting for them to walk into this issue unknowingly. I guess there is also "defederate from lemmy.blahaj.zone" vs. "not defederate from lemmy.blahaj.zone" as well - though it sucks that no other options in-between have yet been presented here. Beehaw at least has its core principles statement, though it too is not linked to from anywhere unless you visit the instance explicitly in order to investigate it (except from PieFed, where a message is presented - that's fucking awesome!:-D).

Things like this are why imho the Fediverse is not at all like merely using emails. There you simply click "Send" and it goes off to wherever it needs to be, but to navigate Lemmy without being banned for some off-hand remark requires quite a bit deeper knowledge than that.

So like, if you had read the aforementioned post about "Neopronouns are not trolling", then YDI (which b/c people won't read the sidebar even in this community, stands for "You Deserved It":-D) for inciting drama? However, if you had not, I definitely see why it at least comes across as a BPR ("Bait-Provoked Reaction"), coming a day or two after that "announcement" had been made (which again, how were people supposed to have known that?). Therefore it is at least possible that you are both correct, and merely talking past one another, each not willing to find common ground with the other.

Why is it powertriping if you clearly broke the stated rules.

That’s like agreeing to a contract without any comolains and then complaining the contract is unfair if you break it.

Blahaj was never intended to be a free speech zone, it was intended to be the one place on the internet trans people feel safe, so they really don’t care what you think, it isn’t made for you.