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Could we please refrain from doing exactly what nearly got programming.dev defederated?
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
People don't stop being trans because you disagree with them politically. I despise Jenner and other high profile trans grifters but I'm not shitty enough to deny their identities.
Do better. As a user of both sites this shit is genuinely upsetting. Despite how you may feel about hexbear, how can you claim that they bait people into revealing their internalized transphobia and then turn around and make shitty claims like this? I don't give a shit if you call me a tankie or red fash or whatever, but I'm trans whether you like me or not.
You might be surprised sometimes. It's not some one-off thing of kids-will-be-kids. It's organized campaigns where an individual will manipulate a community somewhere into serving their interests.
Like, I could write a guide on how to do it, publish it somewhere, and then share that to 4chan or discord or something. It would be received as very funny by some, and a very small percentage of 4chans millions of users could possibly start attempting it. That small percentage is still in the hundreds or thousands of individuals though. And they're high-energy, passionate, and capable of learning through experience.
4chan takes a very militaristic approach to things sometimes, as a sort of poster child for toxic masculinity. So, they are capable of organizing sometimes. Or at least used to be, my experience was from a lot of years ago, before /b/ died of cancer.
I'm sorry, but I doubt people would start a lemmy instance, immerse themselves in leftist theory, and pretend to have a large amount of trans users for years prior to the reddit migration just to troll on lemmy instances starting 6-7 months ago.
It's just not coming from hexbear. In fact I doubt it's even close to happening at this scale anywhere on the fediverse for that matter.
No, they would not go through all that work, you're right. They would take something else someone has established and try to infiltrate it later.
I guess? But regardless of your point of view, hexbear acts in defense of trans people. Even if you don't agree with their methodology, they're always on the side of trans liberation.
What does 'bad faith trolling as a trans person' look like to you?
It's circumstantial. Could be calls for violence, exaggerated requests for inappropriate empathy, general unreasonableness? The mechanism of action for real life effects is a stubborn hardening of everyone's positions and a general breakdown of willingness to engage in serious dialogue in the long-term.
Those things could also be associated with lack of faith/trust in and general apathy for our current avenues for real social change.
Trans people calling for more materially effective strategies to enact trans liberation shouldn't be seen as trolling simply because one disagrees with an attempt at change outside of the established systems. It's not a problem with trans people, it's a problem with the people who take issue with attempts at circumventing the status quo.
Hexbear generally disagrees with respectability politics because they do nothing for the material conditions for trans people, which is why they appear brash. Whether or not you agree with their methodology does not diminish their arguments.
Culpable deniability is a critical cornerstone of conservative methods. All their behaviors must be explainable as potentially innocent, otherwise they are a very low-quality troll, likely to be detected and overall be ineffective. But still, they can learn from experience and grow in skill.
It would be very appropriate for you to question whether I am trolling right now, though a quick perusal through my history should illustrate I'm a fairly classical liberal that ultimately believes in freedom and equality. In my case, this has evolved into a belief that people should have freedom to transition, if that would make them happier, so I do support trans rights.
Bringing this back to methodology, I do not think trans people, being so small in number, have very many realistic options for progress outside "civility politics". But that is simply my opinion, I can agree to disagree on that one.