I’ve been waiting until after Christmas day to make this post, but some of our communities recently have had a lot of noise and upset over someone that uses neopronouns that most people are unfamiliar with.
So I want to make this clear. A persons pronouns are to be respected. This is true when the user is using neopronouns that you’re unfamiliar with. It’s true even if you think someone is trolling. Pronouns are not rewards for good behaviour. They aren’t only to be respected when you like the person you’re interacting with, or if their pronouns “make sense” to you. Trolls, spammers, twitter users, it doesn’t matter who they are, your options are to respect their pronouns, or to not engage with them.
I really want to re-iterate the importance of this. Gender diverse folk are undermined, invalidated and questioned at every step of our lives. As a community, we need to be working to undo that, not creating more of it, and that means there is no space for treating pronouns (including neopronouns) as a reward for good behaviour.
This isn’t a free reign for trolls and spammers. The rules still apply. Trolling, spamming, etc will continue to be dealt with, but it’s not an excuse to act as if respecting someones pronouns is optional.
My issues with dragonfucker are to do with the fact that drag decided to make an alt account and proceed to spam me with insults, porn, and even death threats. Creating a community to harass me publicly and pinging me on every fediverse account I owned.
I know I couldn’t actually prove it was drag who did it, Lemmy has awful tools to identify users, and drag denies all accountability, but the circumstances of it were so suspicious that I’d be willing to bet money that dragonfucker was the person behind it, or someone close with drag.
I’m not going to lie when I got the ping under the post asking for admins to help track me down so I could be tortured and killed I did get very scared that someone would show up at my home and I did actually contact the police about it. Though ultimately nothing came of the investigation.
It makes me very sad and also afraid that no one is addressing the real issues, instead choosing to complain about pronouns and debate the validity of other people’s genders. Which as an Agender person also makes me feel sad and also kind of unsafe.