Forgive me if this was addressed, but I don’t think it was. During a previous struggle session in a statement from the mod team something was said along the lines of “the he/hims aren’t beating the allegations”.
Personally I do not think this is acceptable, to me this is just using “he/hims” as a proxy for saying men. No one in IRL settings uses “he/hims” as a term to describe people who use him/him pronouns, no one is categorized into a grouping in general based on their pronouns as it is just a preferred pronoun not a characteristic like gender identity.
If there is misogyny going on, just say there is misogyny among users, their pronouns do not change the content of what they said, if someone with he/him pronouns and someone with she/her pronouns typed the exact same degrading thing about a woman, their pronouns would not factor into whether what they said was misogynistic or not.
I am bringing this up as it seems like people in the mod chat are still using “he/hims” to refer to people who have indicated they prefer he/him as their pronouns, you might think this is progressive because you are not directly making a gender identity assumption, but I believe this is in fact reactionary and you are just using pronouns as a proxy for the gender that is most commonly associated with the given pronoun i.e. men in the case of saying “he/hims”.
I think this is at least counterproductive and at most harmful, if knowing someone’s gender identity is relevant or useful, it should just be asked for.
The point of having pronouns is to accommodate and to treat people with respect and dignity about what they prefer to be called. Using pronouns as a proxy for gender identity undermines this as, treating someone with dignity would involve asking them directly what their gender identity is, not making judgments or assumptions based off of their preferred pronouns.
The only thing that having he/him pronouns indicates is that the person prefers to be referred to with the pronouns he and him. They are just personal pronouns, they are not equivalent to an ethnicity, a gender identity, a gender expression, etc.
If someone with he/him pronouns seems like they are misogynistic, that may have something to do with their gender identity, but it has nothing to do with their pronouns. It is not fair nor accurate to make assumptions of gender identity from pronouns and I think this should be avoided.
This is not to undermine any concerns about misogyny, but misogyny can and should be fought against regardless of what pronouns are involved in any instance of it.
Thanks for reading this, please know all I want is for pronouns and gender identity not to be conflated and to create a safe and respectful space for all users. And I think a good way to work towards this would be to stop using “he/hims”, “she/hers”, “they/thems”, etc. as a way to refer to people who specify they would like to be referred to as those pronouns.
Just wait until you work out that it’s not actually the “he/hims” engaging in a specific behaviour, and that an equal amount of users with feminine or gender neutral pronouns engage in the same behaviour. That’s when it gets really nasty, from misgendering and accusations of internalised misogyny aimed at femme users (the second of which is already happening in this thread), and up to including public messages containing death threats and violent fantasties about murdering your family made from a network of alt accounts on another instance, because whoever said such was too much of a coward to do it on their main account.
Also profiling behaviour according to pronoun tags is foolish anyway. It opens up a whole new avenue to trolls and discourages honesty. If trolls are aware that the mod team is annoyed with “he/him” users, they can just cook up some accounts with that pronoun choice and inflame the situation. On the opposite end, trolls could pick “she/her” pronouns, say some vile stuff, and hide behind that. What is said is what should be judged, not the pronoun tags of who said it. Anyone can pick any pronoun tag. Lying on the internet is easy. Anyone can claim to be anything. I don’t know who anyone on here actually is, you don’t know who I actually am. The whole point of the pronoun tags was to have openness, honestly and to engage with others from different backgrounds and walks of life. That disappears if people think that their comments are going to be judged differently by the mod team based on what tag they pick.
I’m just commenting this as a warning for new users. I’ve been here since the beginning. Don’t engage with this nonsense. Actually just leave. It’s not worth it.
Removed by mod
To speak to your first paragraph: I originally had he/him pronouns, but as my gender identity changed I changed my pronouns. The moment I did I noticed my interaction with users and, especially, mods got much more lenient and pleasant. This site is sort of an inverse of the outside world, which I’m sure most users consider good, but I don’t, because I don’t think oppression is solved by oppression, it’s solved by liberation - Big words for a forum, which I think is silly, but I know that’s the sort of argument that others will make.
You don’t think cis men, as members of an oppressing social class, should be viewed with more default suspicion? I certainly think white people should be. The brainworms go deep, both the white supremacist ones and the misogynistic ones. That conditioning doesn’t vanish the moment you join a communist website.
As others have said in this thread, we’re at risk of doing “not all men” but for he/hims. It’s reality that most cis men are more misogynistic than average, and, if you believe the site polls, most he/him users on hexbear identify as cis men. Unsurprisingly, there’s a real, noticeable correlation between he/him pronouns and misogyny here.
I don’t think we’re at the point where we need to worry about oppression of cis men, or white people, on hexbear.
In the real world or on here? Considering the fact I have no way of knowing wether people are cis, their race, their class position or really anything else about them, then I assume you mean IRL. Yeah there I do look more suspiciously at people who are more likely to benefit from structures of oppression, when I am engaging in political work or trying to create a cultural or social space inclusive of all people.
And we solve that by doing “black capitalism” but for whomever the mods like today?
I don’t either, which is why I didn’t say that.
I mean here too. As I said, most users with he/him pronouns identify as cis men.
But amab enbies like you and I are not exempt from scrutiny either. We were not only raised as men but we also identify with manhood to some degree, and we live in a patriarchal society where we are told from birth that that makes us superior to women and anyone else who is more femme than us. We are inundated with this message, from every movie and advertisement, from every street corner, from our own friends and family, right out of the cradle. “Femme is weak and stupid and inferior, masc is strong and intelligent and superior.” That shit worms its way in.
You said this:
And now you’ve also compared criticizing men as a group to endorsing black capitalism.
I’m sure you have some nuance behind that thought, but one of your rhetorical angles throughout this thread has been to complain that mods and users are less suspicious of you when you use they/them pronouns, as if that’s not statistically justified, as if that doesn’t reflect the patriarchal world we all live in, and that angle bothers me.
Unfortunately I have to handle something IRL so I can’t continue this right now, but I really think you are pushing too hard and not reflecting on what people are saying, maybe you are in argument mode and you are trying to defend yourself, but please think about this topic very carefully.
As I said I have no way of knowing wether someone is cis or not and your statement that “most users” identify as that isn’t suddenly gonna give me that power.
Nobody is exempt from scrutiny, what is this statement even? Out of pocket statements should be treated like what they are no matter if you feel safe around the gender identity of the poster.
Okay then we should also treat trans women the same way. What an odd way of engaging with the world. Either that or you’re just doing misgendering with extra steps.
Thank you for explaining patriarchy to me, I had no idea.
“statistically justified” lmao what the fuck are you going on about.
No that’s not at all what I’m doing lmao. What a wild reading. I’m not even gonna engage with this.
Eat me. Worst that can happen is I get banned, not really some great tragedy.
9/10 out of ten this will get deleted for hostility lol.
You don’t think hostility is a problem? You don’t think it has ripple effects on community health?
People remember that hostility. The next time they come back to the site, they’re more on guard, more defensive, more likely to be hostile themselves. It becomes a vicious cycle that slowly kills the community.
In one sentence: Most he/him users are cis men, so it’s reasonable to treat them with more suspicion by default. Is that really so confusing?
It’s not about knowing whether a specific person is cis or not. It’s about the general trend that, because most he/him users are cis men, they are more likely to say misogynistic things.
If you ignore the “identifying with masculinity” part of what I said.
But also, women and femmes can be misogynistic. They just tend to be less misogynistic than men. All along, I’ve been speaking in terms of tendencies and probabilities, not absolutes, for a reason.
Is it statistically justified to view white people with suspicion?
Fuck, I feel so mad when people talk to me like this. The level of disrespect just gets under my skin.
Disengage
you do realise that the argument of “trans women are just cis men pretending” is exactly what terfs say? inventing “”““transface””“” to compare gender expression and blackface is absurd and honestly out of line
My point is that the dishonest cis men here are going to pretend to be trans women by adopting she/her pronoun flairs in order to not get heat from mods just like how dishonest white people pretend to be Black by putting on digital blackface. Nowhere did I say that trans women are men. Trans women are obviously women.
how do you propose to check someone for “true transness”? what qualifies are a true trans person vs someone pretending? also please stop drawing parallels between gender expression and blackface. it is really out of place
They don’t propose that should be done. Why are you arguing as if they are?
cw: transphobia
There was a group of wreckers a while ago who were trying to avoid moderation by making profiles that they thought would look like trans users. I’m not trying to imply anyone here is faking being trans, but there are people who are willing to do so in order to troll people here. Moderation based on the stated identity of an anonymous user is an avenue for wreckers to use against us.
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Which men here are doing the bad stuff?
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I don’t really understand the part about doing my investigations for me, you’re the one who made a declarative statement, I asked a question because I dislike vagueposting and I don’t share your experience. Thank you for providing some names so I can look into this on my own time, it’s nice to actually have something concrete to look into.
You’re also not calling people out since you’re not tagging them, but that’s me being pedantic.
If you don’t want me in your inbox, then you should block me, that’s what it’s for.
By asking a question? Lmao okay.
In this thread you’ve already referred to people going by he/him/they/them as men, so I don’t know about “at this point”.
The game being the one where you make a broad statement about site culture and I ask clarification to understand where you’re coming from? What’s gonna happen if I don’t do what you tell me? I’ll get banned and have to make an alt? How terrible.
I think moderation should be harsher on users who do not use “he/him” pronouns in order to discourage people who would use “he/him” lying about their pronouns to avoid punishment. I don’t know how you read my comment and interpreted it as an argument that people using “he/him” should be given leniency.
Lmao funny suggestion, it is the sort of ass-backwards solution I could see some people end at.