Gatekeeping other people's identity is unacceptable. The defederation almost occurred in part because of the dismissal of a users identity. It doesn't magically become acceptable when we do it.

Do not gatekeep other folks identity.

End of story

As a trans person, I feel the need to say this for the cis so that y'all don't need to tiptoe around it or keep quiet:

Trans people are not immune to being awful people. You may not know if someone is really trans or not. But you can tell with much greater certainty whether or not they're an asshole. So stick to that instead of getting baited into bigoted language.

Asshole is gender neutral. 👏

Hot take. Just defederate from Hexbear and never mention them at all in any way shape or form.

You're right, denying the reality of who a person is is a shitty thing to do. I dislike Hexbear as an instance and as a collection of individuals, they're often appallingly behaved and I want nothing to do with people who routinely deny or attempt to justify mass murders because its politically convenient. However, who they are is who they are and I see no reason to assume that if they say they're trans, they're not without some actual evidence.

::: spoiler Reposting these two comments specifically about the person in the screenshot and the comment from a cis lemmy.world user I was responding to because the comment I was responding to got removed for transphobia

Trans hexbear user here, here's the estradiol I bought as a bit so I could extra convincingly fake my dysphoria for years to troll the liberals or whatever the fuck you think is happening

I personally know many of the trans users on the site and have met a few of them irl (genuinely, if you give me a name I can probably personally confirm that they're trans), they've given me a great deal of support in helping me transition and advising me on different methods of hrt, relative costs, etcetera. Even the site's few cishet users have been unflinching in their support of trans rights.

For someone who I've seen no indication is trans to imply that the instance with the most trans people on lemmy is actually primarily just conservative cis larpers who went 3 and a half years pretending to be trans to each other in an echo chamber and taking hrt and doing fundraisers for trans charities and holding weekly reading groups of queer theory and banning any suspected transphobia on the spot just to make cis liberals feel bad by calling them out for misgendering and not giving a shit about how transphobes feel is just completely transphobic in of itself.

Look at this post from my old hexbear account where I was talking about the increasing realisation that I was probably trans (with several of the trans people you and the blahaj user in the screenshot are claiming are probably just cis people faking it in the comments, CDommunist actually wrote out a short poem for me that I still have saved to this day because it meant so much to me during my transition) from about a year before hexbear even federated and long before fucking redditors (who have seemingly endless patience for bigots, but none for actual trans people) came to lemmy, and then tell me that I'm just "faking it for attention" or to troll or whatever

If a hexbear user said the shit that the user in the screenshot said but about blahaj they'd have their comment removed on the spot and would be banned from the comm at least, if not banned from the site. We moderate far more harshly than blahaj zone does and that's what made us a notably trans positive space years before this Lemmy instance was created. I had two cases of chasers in my replies from this instance in the short window that we were federated and both of them only had their comment deleted with no additional measures taken, on the other hand, about two weeks ago I had the first chaser in my dms I'd ever gotten over two years on the site from another hexbear.net account so I reported it and within less than an hour he'd been banned site wide and had his account removed with no option for appeal despite his account being an entire year old.

Second comment:

This is a massive exaggeration and mischaracterization of what I said. I was describing a possibility, and think it is likely that some not most or all people fit my description. Are you attempting to imply there are zero cis conservative larpers on that Instance or something? That would be surprising to me, given this is the internet, but I will admit that it is possible.

Hexbear has existed for years and from the moment of its creation was basically under attack from /pol/, users of thedonald (there were some hexbear users that made a practice of finding Nazis on the Donald and doxxing them plus getting them fired by sending copies of their online footprint to their employers, so thedonald retaliated) and also what would later establish itself as the MAGA communist / patsoc movement (think people like Haz, Caleb Maupin, Jackson Hinkle, Midwestern Marx, etcetera - Haz actually made an account on hexbear back when it was called chapo.chat and very quickly got banned) though at the time we all called them stupidpollers because iirc they had a pretty big overlap with users of r/stupidpol, we also had one nazi called silver legion who kept harassing users and pretending if any of them left that they were actually secret silver legion agents leaving to decrease the morale of the site, also he kept doing holocaust denial and kept getting banned and making new accounts. During this time the site was repeatedly ddossed, users were doxxed and harassed in their DMs by Nazis (trans users were especially targeted), and a form of trolling that was called Kerry posting at the time became common (repeatedly posting very large images of the 2004 Democrat nominee for the presidency John Kerry to slow the site down - in retrospect this one is pretty funny ngl and has become a core part of site lore nowadays).

Basically we’ve had far more experience with sniffing out people trying to infiltrate our spaces than any other instance on lemmy, so I’m willing to say that I don’t believe there’s a single conservative person pretending to be trans on our instance. We’ve had two over the last half year or so and both of them got called out and banned in a bit over a week.

But to circle back around to the specific claim the person in the screenshot made that you’re backing up, they’re saying that there’s a 60% chance that none of our users are trans and that we’re all just pretending, also implying that the users in the programming dev thread that started all this drama specifically were themselves faking being trans to make the mod feel bad. I’m going to go through the thread and check each username but from the ones I recognised all of them I personally know to be trans.

I agree, even if someone is a horrible person gender identity isn't something that should ever undermined or invalidated. Gender identity and sexuality are things you don't try to undermine or make fun of, no matter how awful of a person they are, because it sets a precedent for justifying that awful practice.

If we want gender identity to be seen as valid, it should be seen as unacceptable in all cases to invalidate it.

Hexbear users are assholes, and some of them may even push for things harmful to trans and gender-diverse people, but they still are the gender they identify as, and that should be acknowledged and respected, even if you don't respect them as a person and/or they aren't respectable because disrespecting gender identity indirectly hurts many other people, not just them.

I understand why you're upset and I agree this isn't okay. We can only know this little bit about people online and we have to trust that they are giving us that information in good faith - if they claim to be trans, we need to accept them as the trans person that they are.