Hari, no intention to pick a fight, but moderation shouldn’t be based off of your personal irritation or the lack thereof. It should be based off of whether someone has broken the rules. Whether someone has the “right” political views, or contradicts a mod’s personal viewpoint on an issue, shouldn’t come into the equation.
Every moderator has personal political bias; that’s totally normal. But in a lot of your moderation warnings/notes, you seem to have more of a tendency to let your personal partisan views influence your modding than most other admins. The two things ought to be kept separate, like church and state.
If that’s the case, you are going about it in a very bad way. You’ve just quoted part of what he said and treated as if it was the entirety of the post. You’ve ignored the rest of the post, which makes it clear that he didn’t Warn based on his personal irritation, but based on her actions. He laid out an argument for why she was not arguing in good faith.
Rather than rebut his argument, you’ve decided to take one portion of his post out of context, ignoring the rest of the post. So you are effectively rebutting a stawman–a position no one actually took.
Now granted, this happens sometimes even when people are arguing in good faith. People misunderstand things, or people get heated. But DemonTree has a long history of this sort of argument. And that history is exactly why I side with the moderation here. She has a pattern of behavior that shows this wasn’t some accident.
She argued something that her source did not say. She refused to explain why she thought it said something it didn’t say. She didn’t provide a cite to any source that agreed with her interpretation. And then she started accusing people of not caring about women’s sports at all, trying to negate the counterarguments against her position by bringing up an emotional strawman.
It’s just not how people act when they’re arguing in good faith. The Warning here is a good wakeup call that DemonTree needs to stop arguing in her typical disingenuous manner. She needs to stop throwing around emotionally loaded language, accusing her opponents of not caring about women simply because they don’t agree with her positions.
You know, we used to discuss this topic every once and a while on the SDMB, without all of the problems. We respectfully discussed the issue of trans athletics. It’s not like it can’t be done. It was only when two posters, YWTF and DemonTree, came in that things got so acrimonious.
Where do you get the notion that this EO isn’t affecting men’s sports? The EO forbids banning transgender male athletes from men’s sports on the basis of their transgender identity, just as it forbids banning transgender female athletes from women’s sports on the basis of their transgender identity.
Maybe you just meant that transgender female athletes are more likely to have a physical advantage over their cisgender competitors than transgender male athletes are, and that you don’t think a ruling that might disadvantage cisgender male athletes would be tolerated?
Yup. The problem, as I see it, has been the introduction of this strain of anti-transgender ressentiment politics that uses women’s rights as a smokescreen for attacks on trans rights. This has led, in particular, to an anti-transgender minority of cisgender women claiming to speak for all women, ignoring the fact that the cisgender women who disagree with them have just as much claim to represent women as they do.
Even in DemonTree’s own threads there are plenty of other posters, of various gender identities, discussing reasonably and civilly the issues of differences between transgender and cisgender people and the fairest ways to accommodate them in accordance with nondiscrimination principles. But we can have that kind of constructive discussion because we’re not just using the topics as an excuse to dogwhistle the message “transgender women aren’t women”. Whenever DemonTree pops back up with her dogwhistling, the discussion gets derailed.
Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. And I think if it did disadvantage cis male athletes, they wouldn’t tolerate it, and they wouldn’t be expected to, because of societal gender roles. Women are expected to be nice and agreeable, and encouraged to put other people first, and are socially punished for not filling that role. So it’s much harder for women to protest in the first place, and to get listened to, when something disadvantages them.
I saw this post and thought, not surprising, you were able to find two people who don’t like the term. Then I read the links (did you, beyond the headlines?).
One of the authors actually says they are fine with the term, but are worried about some unnamed people who might not be. The other author doesn’t like to be called a “cis man” because he’s just a plain man, damn it. I guess descriptors are only for people who aren’t normal, as he defines it.
So congrats. You found one bigot who doesn’t like “cis”.
FWIW, I was fine with Hari’s warning of DemonTree–she’s engaged in one too many rides on this loathsome hobby horse–but thought Sal’s was overly harsh. What Exit wanted to keep the thread laser-focused, but that focus wasn’t crystal-clear to everyone. A warning to Sal for discussing the issue that prompted the EO, instead of the EO itself, seemed to me like overkill.
Partly a matter of timing. Ignoring the modnote that soon after I made the second one was the major reason for the warning. I said I would have to give out warnings and probably eject the poster from the thread, MustangSal earned it.