General trans community.
Rules:
Follow all blahaj.zone rules
All posts must be trans-related. Other queer-related posts go to c/lgbtq.
Don't post negative, depressing news articles about trans issues unless there is a call to action or a way to help.
Resources:
Best resource: https://github.com/cvyl/awesome-transgender Site with links to resources for just about anything.
Trevor Project: crisis mental health services for LGBTQ people, lots of helpful information and resources: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
The Gender Dysphoria Bible: useful info on various aspects of gender dysphoria: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en
StainedGlassWoman: Various useful essays on trans topics: https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/
Trans resources: https://trans-resources.info/
[USA] Resources for trans people in the South: https://southernequality.org/resources/transinthesouth/#provider-map
[USA] Report discrimination: https://action.aclu.org/legal-intake/report-lgbtqhiv-discrimination
[USA] Keep track on trans legislation and news: https://www.erininthemorning.com/
[GERMANY] Bundesverband Trans: Find medical trans resources: https://www.bundesverband-trans.de/publikationen/leitfaden-fuer-behandlungssuchende/
[GERMANY] Trans DB: Insurance information (may be outdated): https://transdb.de/
[GERMANY] Deutsche Gesellschaft für Transidentität und Intersexualität: They have contact information for their advice centers and some general information for trans and intersex people. They also do activism: dgti.org
*this is a work in progress, and these resources are courtesy of users like you! if you have a resource that helped you out in your trans journey, comment below in the pinned post and I'll add here to pass it on
So what are we gonna do about it?
Percentages based off a single, voluntary survey are not actionable without knowing the root cause. Is it because there's less trans men in general? Is it because cis people are over-represented by virtue of them being far more prevalent in society? What is the optimal ratio we're going for?
IMO this is because Lemmy is still mostly targeted at techy/open source people. Trans women have already created their own communities/subculture in this world ('programmer socks' etc). But there's not that critical mass of trans men programmers to make a bustling community here.
Lemmy is probably also very white.
So we need more diverse topics to attract a more diverse audience. Right now, the only people signing up for Lemmy are people who have opinions about Internet protocols.
I'm not techy at all but after 8 or 9 months of lemmy I just bought an old Thinkpad and I'll be putting Linux on it when it gets here next week. Y'all are contagious lol
I wonder if other instances such as slrpnk.net would have more trans men. I hope we can figure out a way to attract non-programmers on here. Need a script that explains the concept of Lemmy in laymen's terms.
I definitely wanna do an analysis of ethnicity on here, although I'll likely need to do that on meta since it's not directly related to being trans and people are probably getting tired of all the graphs and surveys by now.
Yea I've tried plenty times already, but even tech savy ppl who don't care about privacy are hard to convince to come on lemmy. Reddit's bad reputaion doesn't help either and a lot of ppl are far too tech lazy to move over here.
I don't have an opinion about internet thingies!
How did you end up here?
Not op, but also barely know how IP works. Fuck reddit threads I agreed with during the blackout sent me here after they killed 3rd party apps. I like it here so I stayed. The simpler Linux memes are funny :)
What?
+1 - this survey is measuring existing demographics, not suitability (although if there are issues there we should definitely flag+fix them). I would expect the numbers for users signing up for Lemmy to be more similar than different.
What if we pooled a little bit of money and bought targeted ads? If 20 or 100 signups would be meaningful those numbers aren't so expensive to buy and would then give us much more direct signal on whether trans men are bouncing off the community.
Cis here. There isnt much content on Lemmy, compared to reddit.
I don't participate in this community but I do see a lot of this instances posts on 'All'.
You can see that as a con, as you've pointed out, or as a plus, you've got reach outside of your community.
You may be better off with a private invite only community of some sort. I'm not sure if that is possible with Lemmy, it might be.
Two ideas I have:
Find some other place that is primarily trans men and advertise this community there. I'm not sure where that would be though.
Ask people to recommend the trans men they know this community.
Are you trans? Love to shit post, but hate corporations? Do we have the site for you!
If only I could have given my past self the pitch sooner... he'd have eaten that shit up
I dunno if you can force it. I think it might just be something that takes time.
I'm a binary transdude, and I think the problem is that transmen tend to leave trans spaces once they have achieved their transition goals. They're more likely to be stealth irl, too. I don't think there's anything wrong with having an imbalance of gender identities in this space, and I don't think that steps need to be taken to correct it. It's pretty chill as is.
As the other checks notes one of three other binary trans men on here, I will say I feel the lack of transmasculine people on here. This community isn't quite as bad because it's not specific to that, but even the answers to questions are usually from transfemmes and there's nothing wrong with that but they aren't as relatable to me and it makes it harder to understand what some widely held transmasculine experiences are.
c/FTM on the other hand? There's hardly any active users on it, and a lot of the active ones are transfems trying to be supportive. It's a big deal to me because it's one of the few places on the Internet where I feel safe and able to be open about my transness. The problem is there's no major place where I can ask questions and get advice and support for my trans man specific problems.
You're right, trans men are definitely more likely to live stealth and have it a lot easier in that regard. I'm in the beginning stages of medically transitioning which is why I seek out support on here. Even if most trans men move on (which I'm sure there there are a lot that do want to stay in trans spaces), it's still important to have a place where we can go to get advice and support from other trans men while going through the process.
That’s right, there are more CIS WOMEN on a TRANS community than binary trans men or transmasculine people alone.
There are also more cis men than transfeminine people, so this isn't surprising. Bayes theorem explains this well.
I said this in the other thread, but perhaps Lemmy has an AFAB problem, rather. Maybe there's some particular trait attained in youth that boys are more likely to get which is a prerequisite for getting into lemmy later
Reddit was a wildly sexist place and most lemmy communities are too. So it’s not a surprise that afabs are not really drawn to this place.
The main reason why I mentioned cis women in particular is because Lemmy is known to have such a low percentage of them, so the fact that there's more on here than trans men or transmasculine enbies alone on a trans community is baffling to me.
Lemmy does seem to have an AFAB problem and my current theroy is that AMABs are usually pushed into the CS and related fields at a young age much more than AFABS. Lemmy is currently made up of a large percentage of people in the CS field right now. That could change in the future if the word is spread about it.
that's my theory too. I am afab but I have a brother who got me interested in CS at a young age.
Perhaps reddit also has an AFAB problem. Or rather, the effect you're thinking of that makes cis women rare here applies equally to other afabs.
Willingness to answer surveys is a trait inherited via the Y chromosome, apparently /s
I think this problem kinda carries over from Reddit too. There was more of everybody there of course, just because it was larger, but I think the demographics broke down similarly? On the other hand, I think Tumblr leaned the opposite direction, so it would be neat to see if that followed through on Wafrn (fediverse Tumblr-esque platform).
No idea what to actually do about it though, unfortunately... 😭
One thing I will suggest is to use the fact that you are the mod of one of the largest trans communities on lemmy to be absolutely biased towards content that encourages and appeals to trans masc folk. Stick a link to the trans masc communities in the side bar. Make posts about those communities and pin them.
Make posts with "CW: Assumes reader is trans masc". Put on trans masc mods. Make a weekly sticky post "Trans masc weekly chat - top level posts from trans masc folk only" etc.
The bias towards trans fem folk is common in a lot of social media spaces, and in my experience, one of the most effective ways of dealing with it is by explicitly making space for trans masc folk, and asking trans fem folk to take a back seat when needed.
You can't easily draw more trans masc folk to lemmy, but what you can do is make the guys that are here feel like they have explicit support and spaces where they won't get drowned out so they hang around longer. And over time, that changes the community to be more balanced. Feel free to use your position to create those opportunities. You have my explicit support to do so!
That is some very good advice. Thank you ada
Sexism is somewhat of a regular occurrence on 196 and personally that really throws me off. I report sexist memes but mods there do not seem to care as the posts are never removed.
I think trans men are better at recognising sexism for obvious reasons than cis men and I think that as long as it’s a regular occurrence on the biggest community of this instance it will be a reason why some trans men (and cis women for that matter) decide not to stay here.
can u give some examples? I cant think of a single time 196 hasnt been anti-sexist, and that community is specially anti-transphobia
The Sydney Sweeney meme was pretty sexist. There are semi frequently memes where the centre of the joke is a woman’s body, where I will find gross comments as well.
Most of the memes are fun and trans positive, but there is definitely a pattern of objectifying and sexist jokes that are not being moderated (as I said, I do report but no action is being taken). I have also found the community very hostile against observations of sexism, which absolutely does not help. Personally, as a trans masc person who has experienced a lot of sexism on the internet when I still presented as femme, I do not feel welcome there.
Ohhh yeh, 196 has always been pretty horny and I feel like its hornier here than it was on reddit, I see why that could make u uncomfortable xP
I don’t have a problem with lewd content if it isn’t objectifying.
A picture of a girl getting excited over boobs is different to a meme that refers unironically to the old school ‘joke’ where women and girls with large breasts were told they have great personality. In the first example no one is degraded, while the 2nd example is a joke that has often been used to degrade women. I think context matters a lot and especially memes about trans girls appreciating their new body or describing their transition goal aren’t objectifying at all
That’s right, there are more CIS WOMEN on a TRANS community than binary trans men or transmasculine people alone.
We have a problem.
This kinda reads as 'OMG there are (cis) women on the internet'. Why the need to point out the number of cis women as a problem? There are also more cis men than trans men but i guess that's ok?
I think u meant to reply to the post and not my comment x3 but I guess its just cuz OP focused on AFABs, and the post doesnt complain about there being cis women but about the lack of trans men
How about posting transmasc content? For example links to quality blog posts.
I'd be curious to learn more about it too.
Well, most of the transmen I know are barely online in the first place, so even less would be on Lemmy specifically
It sounds like that's specifically the trans men that you know, not a majority. I know plenty of trans men who are chronically online.
Recommend this community to transmascs or on transmasc communities and make posts that will attract them! :3 The problem as always would be getting new people to make a lemmy account and understand how the fediverse works but they might like Blahaj Lemmy!
Also, anyone on the fediverse could participate on that poll, I'm 100% sure there wouldn't have been THAT many cis people if participation was somehow exclusive to people from this community, if u ask a question about identity everyone that sees it will feel the urge to answer it :p
Right...I'm still struggling to figure out how to make a post that will attract transmascs and explain Lemmy in a comprehensible way. I know that there are a lot of transmascs on Tumblr but I don't often hang around in those circles on there and don't use Tumblr that often. The main place that I used to hang out in transmasc circles was on Reddit. I still haven't gotten around to deleting my reddit account, and I feel guilty for making a post on there but I might could make one last one...if anybody wants to help out in helping me formulate an effective post to put on there that would be greatly appreciated. We could potentially get a fair amount of new people if done properly.
I definitely think that it got leaked to all for some people, but it does sound like there are a lot of allies that lurk on here. Anyhow, it did give a good estimate of the demographics of trans and nonbinary people if you ignore the cis aspect of the survey.
I think my bf has a tumblr account so maybe I could ask him if he'd like to help! :3 but he also has bad memories from that platform so maybe he wont
Yeah I guess people that r already in a transmasc community might not feel like going to another >v< but I think some would like to join if u mention we need to make the difference between transfems and transmascs more balanced and give them clear enough instructions on how to join, like recommending them Blahaj while telling them they can join through other servers and where to find those! idk how to help with that rn but I'd love to :>
and yeah agreed, it was an interesting survey! :3
edit: oh and by "make posts that will attract them" I also meant posts in this community that would be useful/interesting/etc for transmascs
That would be a huge help to do that. Tumblr is a good place to do some recruiting right now because a.) there are a lot of terfs and transphobia and it isn't hard to find and b.) I've heard that anything mentioning trans people gets flagged as NSFW and is repressed in the algorithm. It would be a good appeal for people to know that it's a moderated community and we have a no tolerance policy for transphobia and TERF dog whistles.
Mentioning mobile third party readers would be a big appeal too since many Tumblr users use the app on their phone.
Fwiw I'm a trans man and I also work in tech lol. I didn't see the survey. I'm stealth irl and don't spend much time on trans communities/subs online either. I think this might be fairly common
Hello fellow trans man 👋. Always good to see another on here.
I'm glad you're here regardless
I think one of the things we need is more transparency about the real numbers of daily users. Dot world stopped showing this info, but dot ml has it.
Judging by the numbers on ml and what I know from various instances, I bet we are peaking at less than 5k active daily users. Of those probably 1/3 - 1/2 are actual daily users and the rest are weekly or monthly users. It is that last set weekly/monthly users that are published as total numbers. This is inflated to our perspective as a regular community. How many times do you see an interaction a week or month after a post you've made? I certainly don't see many. So to me that implies all of these folks are primarily lurkers. If that assumption is mostly correct, we have to split our numbers around the world in order to account for how many people are present at any one time.
If we take all that into consideration, those of us that are on regularly at routine times are likely interacting with the same few hundred people daily. The best we can do is be there for each other for support and ready for anyone new that wishes to join the community.
Honestly, I don't think this is all that different than most social media platforms. Like for a long time the Newpipe app would show a view count they were scraping from the YT website and showing it in the view history. Everything I watch was at like 5-15 views despite never watching anything more than once. I fully expect that was the number YT publishes for each view (every person is 5-15 views). I fully expect all of these social reward metrics like views and votes are fudged and they are all smaller communities than the claims.
If we are so small on Lemmy, that means most of the avid users are watching the All feed. That makes the probability of seeing any given post even lower because if the person was not on within a 6-12-24 hour window of the post, they are unlikely to see it.
I view all of us more like a large collective with mostly superficial communities. I'm happy you're here, and anyone else that wants to be positive and build community.
Where do my tboy and trans masc bros like to hang out usually? I see a lot of trans masc stuff on Pinterest and I know a few on Threads, but idk where else?
I think the move would be to bring people over from other social networks though.
Transmen don't tend to gather together like transwomen do. We're just stealth in male-dominated spaces.
It's gonna depend on the dude. Some can't pass and so they can't go stealth. I go stealth most places but I like online trans spaces and knowing trans people. There are multiple large ftm and transmasc subreddits that are active. Evidently there's a portion of men who want to be around other men who have shared their experiences.
Part of the issue could be in overlap of identities. I could have identified myself as transmasc on the poll, but I chose nonbinary instead. Both are true most days, anyways.