Hey everyone, I've removed bans for everyone that did not request one in the previous admin thread. (I think. If you got banned and I didn't restore your account yet, let me know and I'll fix it.) Don't worry! We're not gonna just ban people for no reason.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, Alaskaball confirmed that Sangria was their admin alt. They were messing around with their admin tools on their own account and figured it would be seen as a funny bit, but without being informed of the bit many of the mods and admins were just as shocked, confused, and appalled as you were. I've talked to the other admins and mods, and we're all gonna take it easy on bits for a bit. (Pun intended. This is the last one, I promise.)
If you're afraid that there's been an infiltration of transphobic, egomaniacal wrecker mods who hate the users, I want to assure you that's absolutely not the case. The overwhelming majority of mods and admins on this site are trans. Our admins are all trusted, long-time users in good standing. We regularly browse, comment, and post on our main accounts. You post and chat with us daily as comrades, and we value all of you. You may not recognize the usernames on our admin accounts because we regularly swap the alts used for admin privileges. This is why you'll see really old or unused alt accounts as well as really new accounts on the admin team.
I've seen a lot of speculation down below, some entertaining, some upsetting. We absolutely do not accept transphobia or any form of bigotry on this site. Some of the statements provided by mods and admins have been seen as transphobic and bioessentialist. I want to offer some transparency, but also clarify that I can't get much more specific on this for personal security reasons.
During the earlier discussions on how we felt things could be improved with these communities, multiple trans mods and admins described their reasoning in favour of the change by expressing with a variety of wording that it's the [he/him] demographic in particular that has been the source of toxic and troubling behavior in the tanks. That the he/hims haven't been beating the accusations, so to speak. With that group being largely cishet white guys on this site, these two terms were assumed to roughly correlate. We weren't making prepared statements for release, the comments that got posted here were paraphrased and combined from more casual comments made by trans people, in the mod chat to mostly other trans people about some of the chauvinistic and ironically bigoted posting habits that they saw as alienating and unhealthy for the site, and what we could do to improve the situation. We genuinely didn't foresee the potential for a miscommunication of those statements as being bioessentialist, and want to extend our sincerest apologies for the misunderstanding.
Edit: Please feel welcome to post in c/gossip as you would have posted in the_dunk_tank, and in c/counterpropaganda as you would have posted in the_dredge_tank.
I'd like to add that a thing creeping into a lot of these discussions is the survey. the survey is not a representitive of all users, it is a self selecting group of people who took one to give us a sample of the userbase that we have extrapolated. the survey itself says around 600 people responded. a look at the side bar will show you the number of users a day/week/month regularly exceeds this. people in that thread of the survey results were debating about how many trans men and cis women were even on here because the data does not tell them this, so they invented readings from it.
furthermore, the survey does not say; are the 'he/him's cis, are the 'he/hims' white, are the 'he/hims' straight. you do not know who is behind the prounoun tag and username, do not invent a bogeyman out of users based on a survey. it is not empirical evidence. cis het jacketing he/hims is not useful, and can do a lot to hurt people in ways you do not know. I've seen this shit hurt trans men friends of mine so many times
I am nott saying there have not been signs of unreconstructed misogyny of late. I saw the cheating thread and others like it, there is an undercurrent of a problem at certain times. you do not do service to the space projecting those problems onto a bunch of people you do not know in a space where we supposedly pride ourselves on good faith engagement