I’m just so exhausted. We can’t seem to talk about gender or sex without the default thought process going “politics” or “troll”. Trans existence is taboo.

If this isn’t resolved I will no longer post science articles on Mander.

Eewww nope what a creepy choice I don’t like it at all, I hope this was a misunderstanding.

edit ok who wants to make a new science focused instance?

:l

Not a good look.
Patiently awaiting Sal’s response.
Prepared to be disappointed.

My main account used to be on mander, and politics is kinda a general but subtle problem on mander. (I eventually decided not to have a “main” account at all after I realized how much creepy surveillance is on the internet – little to do with mander’s politics.)

Sal tries to prevent the political circus from taking over the instance, but there’s a tension because the political circus is increasingly escaping containment and actually effecting people’s lives. While I’m not exactly sure what Sal was thinking with this particular incident, I think it’s hard to disagree that LGBT has become a part of the political circus and culture war.

Like, let’s just lay it out at a very high level: LGBT people, like everyone, are weird. Unlike most other weirdness they’re organized and vocal about their weirdness because of a long history of very real persecution. The LGBT community works very hard to “build allies” (make disliking their weirdness socially taboo) because that protects them from further persecution. This is wise in a sense: It’s a peaceful mechanism of self defense. The issue is as polarization increases people can become confused about which side is the aggressor – even if they know overall the LGBT were persecuted, they may view that has historical, or they may think the response is disproportionate, or some other similar view. This frustrates a lot of LGBT people who have personally experienced these persecutions because they know it’s not over, LGBT won’t be a non-issue anytime in the foreseeable future, and are rather fond of their communities. That said, I think the LGBT community knows it’s become a political element. Debatable whether they’re political pawns being used to seize power or a political faction in their own right.

I can’t tell you whether Sal made the right call or not. I don’t know where people should draw the line for apart of politics or not apart of politics, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to step away from the political circus. Further, dbzer0 certainly doesn’t have much room to criticize other instances who choose to moderate their communities, even if you don’t fully agree on where to draw the line.

I’d advocate giving @Sal@mander.xyz some grace with these judgements. They’re hard to make, and if nothing else @TRAHR@quokk.au is very clearly a very political account who probably shouldn’t be posting on mander in the first place.

I don’t want to speak on behalf of Sal, but I would like to point out that I have seen a lot of posts on similar topics on Mander.xyz. I think it’s worth waiting for Sal to comment on this before people get the pitchforks out.

I will also point out this from the sidebar of mander.xyz:

Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.

This is something that I talked to Sal about before creating !publichealth@mander.xyz, and I was satisfied with the answer at the time. Everything intersects politics at some level, and those intersections are more prominent in some topics. Mander.xyz is an academic focussed instance, and it tries to carve out a space for constructive conversation the communities that are hosted on it. Sometimes it’s not the topic that is the problem, but the quality of the specific article that is being posted.

Also, that particular community is supposed to be about ‘General discussions about “science” itself’, and if you look at the very old posts, they were meta discussions about the scientific method and scientific research. It seems to have taken a new life over the years though.

It’s also possible that the comment section was the concern, and maybe it was easier to remove the post instead of carefully going through all the comments. I think Sal has earned a chance at speaking about this before the pitchforks.

@Sal@mander.xyz Could we get an explanation on this. It seems unfair to have a good scientific article removed from the Science instance seemingly without good reason.

i think it was removed because the comments got way too heated. shoild prabably have been locked instead. doesn’t explain the given reason though.

If I look on Science@mander.xyz it’s still there, but that might be me. This being said.

BPR. The whole gender debate has become toxic.

Most plausible scenario is that it’s not a reflection on what you posted but that the mod didn’t want to deal with the comment section, and removed it for that reason.

Or they didn’t read the article and assumed it was ‘it’s just science’ transphobia, because there are so many of them even on here. Probably should have taken a breath and read the article, which is still up on !science@lemmy.ml and is genuinely interesting.

Or they didn’t want to set a precedent of allowing one article on gender/sex, only for a hundred transphobes to start whining that their ‘scientific’ articles weren’t allowed.

I mean, maybe they should have locked it, but there’s a plausible reason they didn’t want to deal with that shit and shut it down fast.

I saw that get removed because I tried to comment. I’m befuddled about it, too.

I am gonna need more context