Reposting these two comments specifically about the person in the screenshot and the comment from a cis lemmy.world user I was responding to because the comment I was responding to got removed for transphobia
Trans hexbear user here, here’s the estradiol I bought as a bit so I could extra convincingly fake my dysphoria for years to troll the liberals or whatever the fuck you think is happening
I personally know many of the trans users on the site and have met a few of them irl (genuinely, if you give me a name I can probably personally confirm that they’re trans), they’ve given me a great deal of support in helping me transition and advising me on different methods of hrt, relative costs, etcetera. Even the site’s few cishet users have been unflinching in their support of trans rights.
For someone who I’ve seen no indication is trans to imply that the instance with the most trans people on lemmy is actually primarily just conservative cis larpers who went 3 and a half years pretending to be trans to each other in an echo chamber and taking hrt and doing fundraisers for trans charities and holding weekly reading groups of queer theory and banning any suspected transphobia on the spot just to make cis liberals feel bad by calling them out for misgendering and not giving a shit about how transphobes feel is just completely transphobic in of itself.
If a hexbear user said the shit that the user in the screenshot said but about blahaj they’d have their comment removed on the spot and would be banned from the comm at least, if not banned from the site. We moderate far more harshly than blahaj zone does and that’s what made us a notably trans positive space years before this Lemmy instance was created. I had two cases of chasers in my replies from this instance in the short window that we were federated and both of them only had their comment deleted with no additional measures taken, on the other hand, about two weeks ago I had the first chaser in my dms I’d ever gotten over two years on the site from another hexbear.net account so I reported it and within less than an hour he’d been banned site wide and had his account removed with no option for appeal despite his account being an entire year old.
Second comment:
This is a massive exaggeration and mischaracterization of what I said. I was describing a possibility, and think it is likely that some not most or all people fit my description. Are you attempting to imply there are zero cis conservative larpers on that Instance or something? That would be surprising to me, given this is the internet, but I will admit that it is possible.
Hexbear has existed for years and from the moment of its creation was basically under attack from /pol/, users of thedonald (there were some hexbear users that made a practice of finding Nazis on the Donald and doxxing them plus getting them fired by sending copies of their online footprint to their employers, so thedonald retaliated) and also what would later establish itself as the MAGA communist / patsoc movement (think people like Haz, Caleb Maupin, Jackson Hinkle, Midwestern Marx, etcetera - Haz actually made an account on hexbear back when it was called chapo.chat and very quickly got banned) though at the time we all called them stupidpollers because iirc they had a pretty big overlap with users of r/stupidpol, we also had one nazi called silver legion who kept harassing users and pretending if any of them left that they were actually secret silver legion agents leaving to decrease the morale of the site, also he kept doing holocaust denial and kept getting banned and making new accounts. During this time the site was repeatedly ddossed, users were doxxed and harassed in their DMs by Nazis (trans users were especially targeted), and a form of trolling that was called Kerry posting at the time became common (repeatedly posting very large images of the 2004 Democrat nominee for the presidency John Kerry to slow the site down - in retrospect this one is pretty funny ngl and has become a core part of site lore nowadays).
Basically we’ve had far more experience with sniffing out people trying to infiltrate our spaces than any other instance on lemmy, so I’m willing to say that I don’t believe there’s a single conservative person pretending to be trans on our instance. We’ve had two over the last half year or so and both of them got called out and banned in a bit over a week.
But to circle back around to the specific claim the person in the screenshot made that you’re backing up, they’re saying that there’s a 60% chance that none of our users are trans and that we’re all just pretending, also implying that the users in the programming dev thread that started all this drama specifically were themselves faking being trans to make the mod feel bad. I’m going to go through the thread and check each username but from the ones I recognised all of them I personally know to be trans.
The point about community size is fair enough, and that’s on me for not considering it. It’s worth noting though we actually had programming.dev removed from our white list so that hexbear users couldn’t see their posts for previous cases of unmoderated transphobia but for some reason the mods decided to readd it at some point, idk why
We currently have a defederation thread running on it and from what I understand there has also been a fair bit of discussion behind closed doors of defederation for programming.dev during this whole thing