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[CW: h-slur] niche trans kbin magazine using uncomfy language in their tag cloud (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by jahtnamas to c/nothowintersexworks
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(making the assumption marking the image as NSFW blurs is so i don't upset people)

now, i'm not intersex. this alone may be grounds for this post getting removed and i will understand, but i also feel like this may be the wrong community anyway. i don't know!!

this is related to something i've been very bothered by since it happened last year. this is the kbin version of a subreddit i used to belong to (r/salmacian) of a niche trans identity for people who want to have bottom surgeries where one essentially ends up "having both", like penile-preserving vaginoplasty. (there's also other genital desires some of these folks want, but not currently possible with x-preserving y surgeries.) while the original 1996 definition for this identity defined it as "male/female-to-intersex transsexual", it was later recognized that That Isn't How Intersex Works (probably the only connecting phrase to this community) and was redefined to be more clear and respectful.

last may, a representative of the intersex subreddit came to the salmacian subreddit politely asking us not to use the h-slur to describe ourselves if we were not intersex. i thought this request was reasonable. i never felt comfortable using this kind of language to describe myself and my transition goals. the word i wanted to use was right there in the name of the community, i just have to explain it a little bit.
this request ended up causing a massive schism between salmacians who wanted to use respectful language and salmacians throwing baby hissy fits because using the slur was better for them. i recall there being a few intersex people who also identified as salmacian who were against the use of disrespectful language. after a week of back-and-forth and the moderation switching to newer, actually-active users it was agreed that using the slur is okay "in good faith". i didn't agree with this and ended up just deleting my reddit account ~~definitely not as part of a psychotic breakdown i was having over the entire situation~~.

i've been seeing ripples of this discourse from other intersex folks online, slamming salmacians and other altersex folks for "fetishizing the intersex experience". which... yeah that's exactly what the whiners were doing, and also exactly what i wanted to avoid. this is a major reason i'm hesitant to refer to myself as salmacian anymore even if i talk about my transition goals in a respectful manner. i still think it's a cool label, even though i apparently pronounce it wrong, but i really don't want to be associated with people who are okay with using anti-intersex language as labels.

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[-] stgiga 3 points 2 years ago

I'm not going to remove this post.

Interestingly enough, I'm also a salmacian/aphrodisian (I want a PPV with no orchi), and in Summer 2022 into part of Fall 2022, I was a member of r/Salmacian's Discord server, a place in which there was significant toxicity, and the server broke with EVERY other LGBTQ+ server I've been in, and allowed people to refer to themselves with terms that would get one automatically banned from most LGBTQ+ servers. There were also other questionable managerial decisions made there.

[-] jahtnamas 3 points 2 years ago

i was also there until about the end of may, so we may have just missed each other. i recall a severe cognitive dissonance between a mod telling me "we don't want to alienate people here" irt language, and then almost immediately proceeding to alienate me specifically. probably not on purpose, who knows. that's just the paranoia talking.

thank you for listening and sharing your experiences too.

[-] stgiga 2 points 2 years ago

I joined late-June to early July 2022. Also, I should mention that the "we don't want to alienate people here" was DEFINITELY what was spoken there. But not just in regards to these terms. The server admins got mad at me once when I was a bit "what" at seeing something of a golden nature in the NSFW channels. On day 1 I got DM'd by one of the admins because I was hyperverbal, even though they knew I have ADHD. So I felt like every day in that server I had to walk on eggshells. They even hated when I made an additional salmacian flag version besides their own.

Also, up until later in my time there, the NSFW channels had been named in a way that ace people had problems with.

It was quite a wild server, and not in the best way. I'll just say that (if I remember correctly) there MAY have been people who called me the bad terms, but my reaction did not consist of summoning the mods, given their stance. Because that would get ME banned. Basically, some higher-ups in the server tried to reclaim terms that were derogatorily used to refer to intersex people rather than altersex people, and, to the best of my knowledge, those responsible for the effort were either not intersex at all, or a majority were not. To use a financial analogy: they basically tried to cash a check for money they didn't have, and pulled it off by being a teller. Given how badly my call-outs of people talking to me with the word dude and then claiming "dude is a gender-neutral term" went, voicing anything that could be said about the topic of terms just didn't feel like a good idea. So I learned to just not react negatively if people called me the terms. That was a lesson there that some learned the hard way. Ultimately and in general, people there who used the terms for themselves early on in their journeys, and then stopped when joining mainstream LGBTQ+ servers ended up loving that they could use those terms for themselves again in that server, rather than on a place like SoFurry for example (shudder given its forced use of the bad term for anyone setting their gender as nonbinary). And these people didn't tend to be a small amount of the server.

Anyways, despite all that, I still call myself a salmacian/aphrodisian. Ultimately, I'm intersex AND altersex, AND nonbinary, all their own things, not conflated or anything like that, so don't worry. Understand that this SubLemmy is not something like the Century Club on Reddit. Your post actually helped out this SubLemmy a lot. Oh, and I should mention that the whole "Male/Female-to-Intersex" thing is a perfect example of Not How Intersex Works. This wasn't the wrong community to post in.

Best Wishes, stgiga

this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Not How Intersex Works

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A place for debunking misconceptions about intersex people, of which there are MANY.

Rules:

  1. Please don't be a bigot.
  2. Don't be a jerk.
  3. Follow TOS.
  4. Please spoiler and properly flair the dark stuff. If it's NSFW, mark it as such.
  5. Please avoid starting catfights.

You get the idea.

Important Information:

This Community was made by an intersex person who is also nonbinary. As the maker of this sub, let me say that in all my years of social media usage, I have seen SO many people not know the first thing about what being intersex is, much less the details of it. This Community is intended to be a place where inaccuracies about intersex people are to be debunked.

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