The thread about dragonfucker getting banned has been honestly very uncomfortable for me to go through. I don't know or particularly care about this user, nor do I know what drama drag's involved in, or how much of that is drag's fault. But I have read a significant amount of inexcusably transphobic assertions from a large number of users, many of them accusing drag of being a troll or even a disgrace to the transgender community for the unspeakably vile sin of having a neopronoun.

Like, I'm not attempting to defend drag here. People are saying that drag was probably banned for more reasons beyond screenshotting DMs, but when reading into the thread it seems to me that the only thing that everyone hates about drag is... that drag has a non-normative gender identity? And that's somehow making a joke of the transgender community? I mean, fill me in if you feel like it, but no amount of trolling or crimes drag has commited justifies the amount of ridiculing that this person has received on the basis of drag's gender identity on that thread. It does seem to me, as an external observer, that a large amount of users were eagerly awaiting for drag to have a less than ideal behavior for everyone to be immensely mean to drag and to claim "See? I always knew drag was just a troll! No one can possibly have a gender identity this far from what I'm comfortable tolerating!".

It's making me feel bad on baseline empathy alone, and neopronouns or non-binary genders aren't really an emotionally charged topic for me. I'm cis male, lol. But seeing the unimaginably hostile reaction many have had towards this user on the basis of drag's quirky pronoun, which literally does not hurt anybody, has made me very uncomfortable.

I have already been feeling uncomfortable on Lemmy, in general, because of this insane obsession users from certain instances have with tankies, and the disingenuity anything politics is treated because of that (and politics being such a prevalent topic on Lemmy is certainly not helping!). I don't like how, for example, I have seen orders of magnitude more people shitting on Hexbear trolls than actual Hexbear users trolling back when it was online. But Hexbear trolls, or tankies, or whatever, are an abstract group, that is not contingent on some intimately held aspect of yourself. This drama however is targeting a specific user, a single person, who belongs in an already excluded demography, and is probably still figuring things out about dragself. It's a whole new level of fucked up.

My mutuals from other sites, some of whom are leftists, and some of whom are trans, are wary of moving into the Fediverse and particularly Lemmy because of stuff like this. I have argued in favor of the Fediverse in the past because I'm a bit of a FOSS nut, but this I cannot defend against.

Anyway sorry for the rambling lol. The other thread made me feel bad enough on a gut level that I had to let it out. Also, for what it's worth, I have seen enough people with non-normative gender identities to trust that OP is not, in fact, a drag alt. Not that this being the case would change much about the recalcitrant transphobia.