I’m a trans woman, but not a binary one. I used to be on Reddit, and I hated r/twoxchromosomes. You know they had trans people complaining about the name within a month of being created? They always use the excuse that they’re too big to change, but they knew about the problem before they got big.

So when I saw c/womensstuff on Lemmy, I was cautiously optimistic. Women need a space on Lemmy to be women without harassment from cis men. There’s a lot of sexism on this site. More than the transphobia, actually, which is a weird dynamic. For the record I’d rather be with the bear than the man, because the bear is probably going to mind its own business.

But I also know how horrible cis women can be to trans people when they’re fixated on maleness as the problem instead of patriarchy. J K Rowling was abused by a man, and she chose to deal with her pain by becoming a Death Eater. Excluding men from the women’s space is a good idea, but I wanted to see if the mods were woke enough to pull it off without falling into the TERF trap.

Yesterday there was a post to the community that hit the front page, and a lot of cis men not reading the rules. I’m glad those cis men are being told to go away, they were turning the women’s community into a men-talking-over-women community. Spaces with more men than women need to have the patience to hold space for women, or they’ll end up as spaces with only men.

And I fucked up yesterday. I pointed out that a man might be bigender, and was rightly told by atomicorange, who is smarter than me, that any bigender people on the community should introduce themselves as a woman before introducing themselves as a man.

But then there’s thermal_shock…

If you assume anyone who isn’t a woman is a cis man, then 99% of the time you’ll be right. But then there’s the 1% of people who are nonbinary. And spaces with more binary people than enbies need to have the patience to hold space for enbies, or they’ll end up as spaces with only binary people.

I’m glad thermal_shock didn’t get banned, but I’m a bit upset that they were told to go away. If c/womensstuff is only for women (binary or nonbinary), that makes sense to me. If it’s for women and enbies and trans men, that makes sense too.

But if the mods mix up those two things, then enbies who aren’t women are in a weird place. Allowed by the rules, but still told by mods to go away.

Society tells us all there are only two genders. A lot of people know that’s not true, but they kinda forget it, because they spend all their time dealing with men and women. And that makes enbies wanna hide ourselves away to avoid having to inconvenience the binaries and maybe get in a confrontation. But we need enbies to be visible so that everyone can have experience around enbies and stop forgetting we exist.

I don’t think c/womensstuff is a TERF space. I think they just fucked up yesterday, like I did. But I’m worried about the future, because I don’t think their mods have been careful enough in how they think. They’re mixing up being a women’s space and being a general gender minority space. They haven’t picked one or the other. And it’s making them mess up.