#Trans Bans

[gwydionmisha]

Now is an excellent time to tell your Democratic Congress Critters trans Healthcare is important

If you can't safely contact them in person, here are some other options:

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.

Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

[trans-androgyne]

I do think transfems are the trans people being banned most frequently. I believe the bannings are caused by transphobic mass reporting and transfems are the most visible trans folks so they get the brunt of it. But that doesn’t mean the other trans folks affected by this shouldn’t get to talk about it or feel like their bannings are just as serious. We’re being kicked off with nobody to notice or mourn us. It’s not exactly a great time for the rest of us either.

[theoretically-questionable]

Moderation is a Sucker's Game

Longpost time - tl;dr: the concept of moderation is totally beefed on a fundamental level everywhere and recent anti-trans bans indicate Tumblr has only made the problem harder for itself by making bad staff choices. No solution, not absolving Tumblr of responsibility, but also I think it's an interesting systemic issue on top of genuine incompetence.

Tumblr has a running history of screwing up moderation hard enough to either drive entire communities off the site or allow rule-breaking harassment to persist and drive them off.

As such, I think Tumblr will definitely cease at some point, because it is handling the problem of moderation much worse than most other big platforms and this is a major barrier to its financial sustainability - they cannot say "we put our users first and refuse to use relatively profitable Unethical Data-Harvesting Tricks" and expect to pivot to a user-supported financing model if they're widely perceived as repeatedly spurning said userbase.

The prior 'Porn Ban' (and subsequent smug tone of Staff communications) and the 'we had a moderator on staff accepting payments for making anti-trans moderation decisions' reveal stand out, as well as the (iirc) 2016-era peak of racist harassment (not that it ever *stopped*) which went largely unmoderated; instead, black users responding to, pointing out, or sometimes literally just screenshotting the deluge of harassment were permabanned.

There has also, of course, been the whole "over-moderation of queer- and specifically trans-related tags and terms in Search" - something that has also, repeatedly, affected Palestinian and pro-Palestine blogs.

Right now, of course, we have the current wave of anti-transfem "everything you do, selfies and textposts alike, can and will be marked as mature", compounded by instant permabans handed out without notice or appeal, all based on automod decisions from bad-faith reports and bizzarely cursory/biased human reviews.

This is all contrasted by semi-regular waves of fresh kinds of porn-related advertisements and spam blogs, which often go entirely unmoderated, automated or otherwise, for months upon months. Also the explicitly ToS-breaking harassment that gets reported and returned as "fine, actually".

Why is this happening? Beyond the inherent problem of "many Tumblr staff have had and currently have biases and open bigotry" (@photomatt springs to mind), you'd think that boring business sense would come first - diversity is Tumblr's brand, fandom is Tumblr's brand, so "not specifically driving off those groups" should have been an *essential* part of monetization efforts. Right?

Trouble is, even a lawsuit settled not-in-Tumblr's-favour can't solve the core problem, which seems to be the same one every user-generated-content platform faces: reasonable moderation isn't feasible for real-time, user-generated content at scale.

Straight-up, that is the largest problem Tumblr faces. Nobody knows how to do it fairly or reasonably. Content moderation has long been the writhing tar-pit horror sitting at the core of all large-scale social media. Increasingly, this unsolvable problem looks like it might be the reason the entire format is structurally doomed - or at least, doomed to a cycle of new platform -> rise in popularity -> failures in moderation and financing -> user exodus and platform collapse.

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) tackle moderation by being totally opaque and overzealous - often you won't even be told your reach has been limited. Or, if you're told, you might not know *what* post triggered it, or why. If you do, you won't be told what effect being 'limited' has, or how long it will last. There is no reliable appeal process, but that doesn't matter. They are too big to be affected by people being unhappy about moderation on an individual or community level.

Twitter 'solved' the problem by leaning more and more on pure automation - which wasn't working great, sure, but once it was bought and most of those measures scrapped for 'limiting free speech', Twitter got *much, much worse*. It is now a cesspool of unavoidable spams and spam-for-scams. Also, harassment.

Tiktok also does a lot of automated moderation - not as much as people seem to think, but also not as efficiently as other platforms, given that it's video content. They also make heavier use of de-prioritizing content algorithmically rather than just banning or deleting videos. Twitch and YouTube follow along in this bucket, being very willing to use automated systems to suspend, de-rank, and de-monetize hard, early, and arbitrarily.

Mastodon and similar 'decentralised' networks offload the problem onto whoever runs each local server/instance. You set up social.horse.mastodon or whatever? Great - moderation of posts on there is your problem. Some instances are great! Some instances are full of petty tyrants over-moderating their little fiefdoms. Some instances are godawful. Usually, nobody is being paid, which isn't great.

Unfortunately, instance-to-instance communication sometimes means that you can be harassed by a group of people from those godawful servers who are functionally unreportable and who cannot be stopped from spinning up dozens of sockpuppets on said servers to evade your blocks of individual accounts. This is also a problem with the concept of "email", so, you know, not strictly a new problem.

Google can't moderate its search results, and is overtaken by SEO spam and generative misinformation (even prior to their "AI answers" integration).

Amazon, as a storefront, is overrun by scams. Some of them are, functionally, directly run and facilitated by Amazon's own staff, facilities, and even manufacturing processes.

We seethe at Adobe insisting they have the right to moderate (automated or otherwise) the content we put on their cloud services, but chances are they would largely *rather not* - but legal obligations, advertiser/partner dollars, payment processors, and technical requirements are involved, so they're screwed and so are users.

Nobody can "do" content moderation of any kind at scale without being too lax or too overzealous, and probably both at the same time. If the billions of dollars of these corporate giants can't hack the problem, the rinkydink tens of millions of Automattic ain't gonna cut it.

None of this is "working" or "fair" or even "reasonable".

And that's fine by these companies! Their main moderation concern is "not being found liable for horrific and illegal shit users do", followed by "being pleasant *enough* to be used profitably, regardless of actual user experience or sentiment".

Good moderation is hard. Think about the obscenely small teacher–student ratio you need for a good, safe, productive classroom experience. You're not going to push more than a hundred students to one or two lecturers before you lose the ability to meaningfully grade their exams and give feedback, let alone have insight into their real-time behaviour for a dozen hours a week.

Now, imagine that but 24/7. A perpetual whorl of short-form essays being handed in at random times of day, wildly multimedia projects of totally inconsistent sizes from dozens of countries. What sort of ratio of moderators to users would even *plausibly* keep things under control? How do you *pay* for that? How do you have meaningful *oversight* over the mods? Fuck, how do you even *begin* to compensate for the fact that they'll be inevitably be exposed to a subset of your users posting criminally heinous content for laughs?

The answer is that you don't manage to balance it reasonably. You use keywords to auto-filter certain posts so they'll be seen less, lowering the chance of anyone reporting them. You use basic network models to auto-approve or auto-deny some reported content based on what's *probably* in the images or text, and call a 70% success rate an exemplary success, because that's 70% of those reported posts your human moderators will correctly never see and a further 25% fewer posts that are incorrectly ruled on but never get appealed! Huge reduction in workload - fantastic news!

You try your damndest to make sure that advertisers feel like their content is never posted next to or in association with "bad" content, even if it's not ToS-breaking, because that's where the dollars are and without those all you've got are good intentions and that's not a currency you can pay your moderators in. You hope to hell that you fall on the side of "overzealous", because right-wing single-issue ideologues have the ears of payment processors and lawmakers the world over, and they'll cut you the hell off if you get a reputation, fair or otherwise, for being the sort of platform that might "facilitate harm" to kids, or women, or Jesus. Mostly Jesus.

Hence, the uncomfortable tension stretching taut the façade of every major platform - on the one hand, 'shifting moderation burdens to your users' is universally regarded as a shitty and unethical cost-cutting move ripe for exploitation by bad actors. On the other, despite having a surplus of capital and benefitting from the efficiencies of scale (and, arguably, having an unshiftable responsibility to moderate their own platforms), companies aren't managing to wield moderation in a way that works for their users.

In Tumblr's case, it's not profitable. In *Twitter's* case, it's not even profitable.

Obviously, I don't have a solution to this. Tumblr has chosen to fight the dual battles of "moderation is hard" and *ALSO* "some of our staff, including moderators, are inarguably biased/bigoted against core user groups". That's on them. Not going to pretend it isn't, not going to make excuses for it.

The best answer I have is to archive your shit and hop onto smaller networks with staff, communities, and rules that you can vibe with, and hope you will be in a position to help directly and monetarily contribute to their continued existence in a sustainable way.

We're here for the community and a broad set of fairly straightforward features (and lack of other, worse features). Those can, will, and often *do* exist elsewhere. If you stick around and one of these 'elsewhere' platforms finds a size that's sustainable and a moderation approach that actually works for the vast majority of users, then you've hit the jackpot.

If not? Well, archive everything you can and hop ships to new networks. These aren't public institutions designed to last lifetimes - these are passion projects (or cash grabs) bloated beyond initial scope and inevitably riddled with the biases, oversights, and straight-up skill issues of their creators. They were never going to last, and their insistence on pretending they're immortal and behaving in accordance is part of the problem.

Also, you should support laws that would mandate user access to their own data in an exportable and preferably cross-platform-compatible format. Part of what keeps people on networks is lock-in and effort. Making it legally mandatory to make those transitions between networks easy is probably one of the only bits of social media-related law that would actually curb malfeasance (from users and platforms themselves).

[archaalen]

Supreme Court takes up state bans on gender-affirming care for minors | AP News

[telomeke]

ID text–

Text of the email sent to Adria Jawort:

Adria, It is with deepest regret that I must cancel your talk tomorrow. Out local Chief Executive and County Attorney have decided that it is too much of a legal risk to have a transgendered person in the library. I really regret this.

I know y'all should all know by now, but here is a current example of how drag bans actually ban trans people from existing in public spaces

This was the email that was sent to Adria Jawort, a two spirit author scheduled to speak at a Montana library, on the first day of pride month.

[zinniajones]

We won! After more than a year since the passage of SB 254, nurse practitioners can prescribe HRT to trans adults in Florida again 💊💉🧑‍⚕️✌️ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flnd.460963/gov.uscourts.flnd.460963.223.0.pdf

[thekidsfromyestergay]

Insane to me that the UK government is slowly trying to legislate trans people out of existence and I have not seen a single person talk about it

[ocdevelopmentstuff2]

Hey y'all, my main got banned for literally no reason. Never even made original posts on main or reblog anything against TOS. Another instance of Tumblr hating trans people. 🙄

[libraford]

A bill to restrict HRT to age 21+ has been proposed in Ohio.

They are currently taking comments on the issue via the MHA website linked above. The commentary phase ends January 19th at 5pm.

Please take this opportunity to make your voice heard while the window is open.

[lovesick0cupid]

"imagine liking men" is dumb have you ever seen a mans happy trail. Good Lord

[gwydionmisha]

You are a great source of news and information and related statistics. You keep your nose to the ground and update folks like me. I appreciate that. I was wondering, I feel like I need to have sources on hand, printed out to carry with me because I got a coworker who loves to debate. He refuses to use my chosen name, despite my repetitive reminding him how I hate it, especially when he uses all 3 syllables of it and he also strikes me as the kind of guy who wants the lgbtq community to "be palletable". So he asks me about all this stuff. And I can't hold all the facts and figures, and I know he's not likely to change his viewpoints but still. What would be some good, uh, starting material to keep on hand? Statistics or studies, or even articles about legislations currently passing that actively harm us as a whole?

It's a huge topic, so this is a bit skatter shot.

AMA strengthens its policy on protecting access to gender-affirming care: https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/news-room/2023/ama-gender-affirming-care

Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/stop-using-phony-science-to-justify-transphobia/

Well, this is a good place to start on trans kids being trans: https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/08/18/trans-youth-study-detransition/

Gender-Affirming Care Bans Harm More Than Just the Trans Community: https://www.verywellhealth.com/ripple-effects-gender-affirming-care-bans-7555097

Many transgender health bills came from a handful of far-right interest groups, AP finds: https://apnews.com/article/transgender-health-model-legislation-5cc4a7cb4ab69150f670d06fd0f361ab

A thing on Mom's for liberty neo-nazi stuff and book bans: https://www.salon.com/2023/06/23/kids-deserve-better-moms-for-liberty-chapter-blasted-for-quoting-hitler-in-newsletter_partner/

Let me know what else you need.

[trans-androgyne]

Hey am i seeing things right? Did velvet get termed??

Yeah, it’s really messed up, it was after being harassed and presumably mass reported by a popular transfem’s followers. She appealed it but it doesn’t seem like she plans to come back to that account. She’ll be on another blog with less discourse.

[queenburd]

in the span of hours tumblr has banned an out trans woman who was outspoken about her harrassment and the unfairness of the website's system and MULTIPLE out trans women who commented on the absurdity of the situation--has even banned them for posting pictures of hammers and cars.

if staff thought this was going to make the situation go away, all staff's gotten is a class action lawsuit. good job, hellsite "moderators." you showed your whole ass and you're going to go to court. again.

[reasonsforhope]

"Arizona’s ban on transgender athletes has been blocked by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which called the 2022 law “the essence of discrimination.”

Supporters of the so-called Save Women’s Sports Act claimed that the law protected girls and women in schools and colleges from “unfair competition.” However, the federal court found that pre-pubescent trans girls and trans girls on puberty blockers have no significant physical advantages over cis girls their own age, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“[The law] to ensure competitive fairness and equal athletic opportunities for cisgender female athletes cannot be squared with the fact that the Act bars students from female athletics based entirely on transgender status,” Judge Morgan Christen wrote in the court’s 3-0 decision.

“[The law] permits all students other than transgender women and girls to play on teams consistent with their gender identities,” Christen continued, “transgender women and girls alone are barred from doing so. This is the essence of discrimination.”

Two trans girls, an 11-year-old soccer player and a 15-year-old swimmer and volleyball player on puberty blockers, sued to overturn the law; 18 states signed court arguments in favor of the law, and 17 states signed arguments against it.

A lower federal court also ruled against the law, and the two court rulings against it can now be cited as a legal precedent to help other trans girls play sports. However, Arizona could also appeal the decision to be heard by an 11-judge panel on the appeals court or ask the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the matter.

“A student’s transgender status is not an accurate proxy for athletic ability and competitive advantage,” said Rachel Berg, a lawyer with the National Center for Lesbian Rights who represented the two girls in court. “Our clients are thrilled to be able to continue to play on girls’ sports teams with their friends while this case proceeds to trial.”"

-via LGBTQ Nation, September 10, 2024

[useless-englandfacts]

for those thinking it was all too good to be true: labour deciding to permanently keep the tories' ban on puberty blockers for under 18s

[yourlocalxenomorph3]

tumblr pride flag plus the two other versions

reblogs are off because i don't want this post to get so popular that i get the attention of staff or m@tt. i've already been terminated twice and i'd rather not get terminated a third time for some arbitrary reason. everyone is welcome to repost/use these w/o credit 👍