This post is very polemical, and if you're anything like the user above it's unclear to me how you'll feel about it.
I'll be direct.
Rosa, I'm almost positive your most recent post in this thread is well-intentioned. That said, I think it's poor. I don't believe the vision of it aligns very well with either what this thread is or what it ought to be. I've been lurking around here for a while and, as you'll probably be able to tell, I haven't been very satisfied with the direction this thread has taken over the past couple pages either. Even so, I reach a very different set of conclusions regarding what to do about it than you. Let's get into it.
Several months ago, back when Pokepride was removed from the thread OP and in discussion as to whether or not it would/should be readded, the server staff team approached the active cong moderation team at the time to discuss multiple topics and propositions ranging from the likes of defining a clear and concise purpose for both the thread and the server, cong staff's involvement, and, most notably, this said same topic of splitting the thread into two different ones. The idea was ultimately cast aside, due to the concerns of bad faith users clogging up a hypothetical LGBTQ+ discussion thread, as well as the fact that said bad faith users could easily be filtered out from the server, making it a better place for these discussions to be had.
While I understood where they were coming from, I never really agreed with it, personally, though, after seeing how this thread's been faring over the past week or so, I think I see what they mean now.
I feel like discussions about this thread's purpose are both good and probably necessary — I, and I'm sure many others, see it as one of cong's most important, and to ensure that it remains relevant and useful in the future it does behoove the moderation team to periodically discuss where it's going and how it could improve. On the other hand, I'm concerned you've reached the wrong conclusion from these discussions. You have to recognize that what you're doing when you say
To have unfettered discourse would require mass filtering of these problematic presences that is simply not feasible for a public thread on smogon. Given Pokepride's status as a more gated community, I welcome anyone who feels comfortable with the idea to bring up points of discussion there.
is
exactly what these problematic presences want. The reason you see so many bad-faith individuals attacking this thread is because they recognize the importance of it as an open forum for discussion and want to silence it. This thread is far-and-away the most accessible way to discuss everything related to queerness on Smogon — it serves variously as a place to come out, a place for queer users to post life updates, a forum for queer political discussion, and also an area for miscellaneous discussion and general life help. And it is not only the most accessible all-purpose thread related to queerness. This thread gives us a medium for formal discussion meaningfully distinct from a disorganized live chat format hosted by what you yourself call a "gated community" that has long had an at-best tenuous connection to many of us who post here. This thread, in short, is
special, and 732 posts over 30 pages prove that.
Attempting to moderate or otherwise censor all political speech within it is highly problematic for a number of reasons even aside from how this thread is uniquely qualified to serve as a medium for unfettered discourse. For one, it's not going to stop banned deucers from making alts to troll, harass, and otherwise prey on this thread's users, nor will it stop the bad-faith users who toe the line here yet don't do anything banworthy. These people will still do this regardless of how you censor posts — just the fact that this is the
LGBTQ+ thread alone means they'll keep coming, unfortunately regardless of what moderation strategy you take. Censorship of good-faith discussion is not a solution to this problem. Furthermore, censoring explicitly political discussion here is a victory that these problematic users both haven't earned and don't deserve. How can I tell? Look at low-tier 1v1 goon
pqs "cringe" or "haha" reacting every recent post that attempts to engage in discourse and liking every post that strives to silence it. For another topical example, consider
an actual message a banned deucer posted here just yesterday as this discussion heated up:
What you're suggesting is to throw in the towel and let
these people win, and you don't see any problem with that?
Even then, recognize that this is discourse you
fundamentally can't silence. Attempting to relegate it to private channels or otherwise suppress it will instead directly lead to its indirect proliferation. An excellent point that both
starry blanket and
Myzozoa make (and that you never address) is that the very act of coming out is a political statement.
Queerness itself is innately political. Coming out as queer is declaring yourself to be in opposition to the heteronormative status quo. Every time you engage in
any sort of conversation involving queerness, you are challenging conservative lines of thought. And, as myzozoa in particular points out, silencing explicitly political queer discourse is in fact a political statement in and of itself — a conservative one, at that, because it enables the heteronormative establishment to prevail. The fact is, sexuality (and the politics surrounding it) is in everything we do here, regardless of how you feel about it. It's in Fresher Than You's post that asks in part about androgynous fashion. It's in Coconut's vaguely threatening message to "keep things civil and on topic." It's
definitely in Jakee's post about PDA with his boyfriend. If you want to stop political discourse here, you need to delete the entire thread or remove every explicit or implicit reference to queerness within it. I don't think anybody wants that.
I'll circle back to the above in a bit because it's also relevant to the later parts of your post, but I also want to address your perception that the discourse in the thread hasn't been great.
While I do not mean to directly discourage attempts at discourse from this thread, it would be foolish to not acknowledge the fact that basically all attempts at it within the past year or so have not really gone over well. While there is of course one particular aggressive (now banned) user who can be found at the center of many of the arguments within the past year, that isn't to say that they were the sole aggressor. Even now, we can still see instances where people try to cut someone down and stifle their argument, rather than trying to accommodate them and help them come to learn and develop from the discussion.
The first clause of your topic sentence here claims that you don't want to discourage attempts at political discourse in this thread, but the entire rest of this paragraph (and almost all of the rest of your post) is in fact a direct attempt to dissuade users from it. What your supposed intent is is one thing; how it actually comes across when you as a moderator and ostensible leader of Smogon's queer community post is quite another. Your take in this paragraph also unfortunately reads as politically illiterate. You and many others in this thread seem to confuse reasonable political discourse with attempts to exclude people from the discussion. Nobody would deny that Crux has a particularly confrontational style of argumentation, but like
TheValkyries alluded to earlier you have to go through some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to read bad faith into his posts leading up to his ban. Whether queer spaces should include cishet asexuals
is in fact a debate worth having in a public forum for discussion such as this, and the very fact that it
is a public forum means that any affected parties are necessarily
not excluded from participation. It's necessarily impossible to include every marginalized identity in the queer political movement we all participate in by the very fact of our existence — new identities vie for inclusion often, and it's doubtful the queer community has the resources to accommodate them all. Yet even if you buy that the queer community
should include everyone (or even just cishet asexuals!) wanting to participate in it, this sort of discussion is
still worth having. I used to be firmly on the side of excluding cishet asexuals, but
Hogg's excellent post gives me an idea of how asexuality is a factor that leads to
tangible oppression that leaves me much more ambivalent about, if not perhaps even in favor of welcoming cishet asexuals into queer spaces. These are things I probably
would never have learned had the original posts on asexuality not compelled Hogg to post his take. I see this as public discourse working exactly the way it's supposed to — I can easily read and participate in it without an invitation, and as a result I come out of it a more informed and perhaps better person holistically. Why would you try to repress that in order to prevent a few people's feelings from getting hurt?
And I
am very convinced you're actively attempting to repress discussion, just as Kris and Coconut have done on prior pages. When you write that
All of this intermingled with the more commonplace coming out posts, advice, sharing experiences, and other everyday things just leads to the thread seeming conflicted about what it wants to be, in my opinion.
The main "solution", or at least something resembling one, that I can come up with is establishing stricter guidelines (echoing Plague von Karma's sentiment) that clarify what good circumstances for a discussion might resemble. As I've mentioned in the Pokepride server, I believe discussions are more a matter of finding the right time and place to occur, since their status as a notable outlier to everything else that occurs within the thread generally requires them to be more self-contained so that the peace doesn't get disrupted too much. This is not necessarily a push to restrict discussion, so much as it is a push for stronger moderation of discussions so that they can operate in a well-timed and amicable manner.
you're saying something else that's self-contradictory, and since I believe your post to be in good faith it seems to me that you don't realize the way in which it contradicts itself. "Establishing stricter guidelines" to "clarify what good circumstances for a discussion might resemble" is
in itself "a push to restrict discussion." You are saying something vague and threatening while arguing for more enforcement of rules that it's unclear those of us frequenting this thread will actually have any involvement in the creation of. At best you are trying to scare us out of posting whatever we want to; at worst you are saying free discourse here is straight-up harmful. I think you are creating a problem that does not exist — perceiving as a bad thing the fact that this thread lacks any unifying purpose outside of queer discussion — and trying to effect a solution to it that many of us don't want. Your read of explicitly political discussions as "notable outliers" to the rest of the content of the thread is straight-up wrong; they are in many ways
the most important part of the thread, and not incongruent at all with the less explicitly political discourse. Remember that every single coming-out post in this thread is a political statement
and invitation to political discourse, and reconsider your declaration that we should throw out the politics from the thread. The fact that the thread is full of politics is not a problem, as political discussion is, in fact, the very purpose of its existence. You're trying to limit when the thread has explicitly political discussions, to what extent it has them, to what extent we are allowed to say what we want in them, to what extent they're seen as relevant to the thread, to what extent they're perceived as "amicable" (whatever the fuck this means), and in what place they occur, and you're also going to tell us you aren't "push[ing] to restrict discussion?" Do you not see all the political statements you yourself are making, despite your attempts to suppress our discussion of politics?
To close out, I want to address the last place I feel your post misses the mark. Quoted below:
In general, I believe that the LGBTQ+ movement and LGBTQ+ community don't necessarily need to both adhere to the same levels of political-ness as one another. At the end of the day, this is a Pokemon site with its userbase being mostly teenagers; there is only so much activism that can be accomplished here. While wanting to inform and raise awareness for certain topics is an understandably noble cause, I believe these are things that people should really be eased into at their own pace, rather than being immediately thrown into the deep end, so that way people can actually take away something from these discussions, rather than them all being painted under the same brush of "drama". Bringing people together as a community requires the desire to be hospitable and communicate with one another; without that, we stand no chance at swaying the will of those who would oppose us.
If you buy anything I said about queerness being political at any point earlier in this post, you necessarily have to recognize the fallacy inherent in believing there's a clear demarcation between the "LGBTQ+ movement" and "LGBTQ+ community" like you suggest. Furthermore, your claim about the userbase here "being mostly teenagers" isn't logically consistent with the idea that "there is only so much activism that can be accomplished here." Being a queer teenager doesn't exclude you from political participation. I'm sorry, but if you're queer, and you're out, even if only to yourself, you're in the movement by default. Believing that what goes on in this thread stays online is irresponsible. The best thing about this thread, in fact, is the fact that it has positive real-world implications for those of us who engage with it. Let's face it: it's undeniable that the world is a dangerous place for queer folk. Even in the United States, sometimes seen as a progressive country for queer people, things are not looking great. Consider how only just now, several decades after the AIDS epidemic,
the FDA is finally considering limiting its restrictions on men who have sex with men being able to donate blood. Consider how the most recent administration
banned transgender people from participating in the military. Note how in many states there are no legal mechanisms put in place to protect queer folk from housing discrimination, nor from getting fired on the basis of their queerness alone. This is not a world where we can expect to let teenagers using this thread "ease into [things] at their own pace" — we have a phenomenal public outlet for all manner of productive discussion that can educate people on the oftentimes harsh realities of queerness, and we should necessarily use that outlet for all that it's worth to inform and perhaps even
protect our userbase. I don't disagree that we should bring people together as a community, but I can only see the censorship you repeatedly propose as oppositional to this. We cannot come together by silencing discussion — rather, we need to learn to listen, and listen well, because if this is your vision of "fixing" this thread I genuinely want no part in it.
