Two hours ago I made a post to !libertyhub@lemmy.blahaj.zone about US politics. I had previously had a good relationship with the head moderator of this community. They’ve encouraged My political posts, and he’s removed comments by people that misgendered Me, and reminded people of My pronouns, like in this thread two days ago:
However, an hour ago in this new thread, the same moderator who was telling people to respect My capitalised pronouns uses lowercase pronouns to address Me:
And he has left up earlier comments which also seemed to misgender Me, and which I specifically pointed out:
Even as some users in the thread gender Me correctly:
I’m making this thread in the main community because since the mod has banned Me, I can no longer report the comment or leave a reply correcting the pronoun. I would like to gain the attention of @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Misgendering trans people and banning Them at the same time so They can’t do anything about it is not the kind of thing I expect to see on Blahaj. This mod is clearly 100% aware of My pronouns, and made a choice here. I suppose they could be using the general “you”, but it just doesn’t look like that, what with banning Me, telling Me My post isn’t welcome, and telling Me to go to a different community. I used to have a good rapport with this mod, they said several times that they valued My posts. I posted something he disagrees with, and now all of a sudden respecting trans people’s pronouns isn’t a priority anymore. He’s misgendering Me and they’re leaving up comments that also misgender Me. It feels targeted.
EDIT: I cannot seem to embed images. Every time I hit edit and fix the image links and press save, they change to some kind of aussie.zone image proxy link. For now I have left them as links without embedding them.
Hey, let’s give OP the benefit of the doubt. We cannot pretend to know what They feel, so let’s just assume these pronouns really make Them happy in the same way as she/they for me. Because there’s other aspects to take issue with…
It’s the implied power dynamic and special grammar rules I don’t like. Capitalizing pronouns, especially since OP says They’re a goddess, feel is like lifting Them up above me, which I don’t feel is fair to me or anyone else. Then I also need to give Them special grammar rules, like they/them, my default gender-neutral pronouns, no longer being neutral? It feels like capitalization should be orthogonal to pronoun choice, but now everyone needs to relearn grammar. Most neopronouns are just learning a new word, not upending grammar. I’ve even noticed it changing how I’m reading replies in these threads, because the capitalized pronouns catch my eye like they’re the start of a sentence or a name I should take note of, they tricked me! I guess the only nice thing for me is it seems to more easily differentiate when a pronoun is referring to inanimate objects or a capital pronouns user.
Assuming OP is genuine (as you probably should), I think the main issue is the undue burden of everyone having to lower ourselves under our capitalized goddess. Should we be required to use a signal that implies You’re above us? When I switch to she, “she” doesn’t change the power dynamic between me and someone else, but if I said my pronoun is “master”, I think people would rightfully refuse. It doesn’t matter if OP sees this as a power thing, because most other people will and so forcing them to use it will bring up that feeling. Yes OP, I don’t want to make a trans person suicidal, but I also don’t want to make everyone around them feel lesser; and as You said, it doesn’t matter what others think, it matters what the person feeling it feels.
I did want to be respectful, and I think I got all the pronouns correct for OP, but it did make me uncomfortable for the reasons described above. In this thread I’ll try to capitalize pronouns as a show of respect, but I’d rather leave it in this thread to respect myself.