Not everybody has them, but everybody should
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We (the iNat staff members of the Community Circleâme, Tony, Scott, and Ken-ichi) want to briefly return to the topic of pronouns and gender and to apologize for our missteps there. Weâve learned a lot from this conversation and we have updated the Community Guidelines to clarify that everyoneâs stated pronouns should be respected. Comments that state otherwise will be hidden or removed. We also have existing community guidelines that prohibit attacking other users. We will hide posts and may suspend users who violate this or other standards in the forum guidelines.
iNat platforms should be welcoming spaces for all users. We appreciate the emotional labor from many in the community who helped us understand how to do better. Pride Month is a period when showing extra support for the LGBTQIA+ community is a priority, and our decisions did not align with that.
So, in short, we got this one wrong. We apologize to nonbinary-naturalist and anyone else who was hurt by us allowing misgendering posts to stay up. We have modified the Community Guidelines to prevent it from happening again. We will continue educating ourselves and our moderators on these topics.
Thank you to everyone who has shown us and others on this thread patience and grace over the last few weeks.
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This, is why I stay here, in iNat! 
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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Moderation decisions about several posts in the LGBTQIA+ Thread
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate the step forward.
While it is a step forward that finally, after three-plus weeks of asking, there is a rule protecting our pronoun use, the rest of new guidelines show that the Staff still fails to recognise the reasons behind all this. The inherent core issues, if you will. When lgbtqia+ people are tone policed and treated as if standing up for ourselves is just as bad as those acting in bigoted manner, it still denies our personhood and our agency.
Considering the new guidelines as written have bolstered the Staff as being correct in their treatment of us in our reaction to the transmisia, unfortunately ultimately means the apology is lipservice because when something comes up (not just for lgbtqia+, but race, or other things as well!) in the future the same will repeat. Change needs to occur so things do not repeat.
The rule that our pronouns must be used is great, I really do appreciate that. It is a step forward, and if this were 3 weeks ago when first pointed out, this would have solved it! Unfortunately, this is no longer just the original incident, it is also the actions of the Staff in the following weeks which has showcased this much deeper issue. I am glad Staff has realized they got it wrong, but I fail to see any understanding of how wrong, based on reading the actual text of the new guidelines, and the lack of apology for how we were treated by Staff - not just the act of misgendering (which Staff now has apologized for - thank you) but in the actions the Staff took to prevent us from defending ourselves when it became clear that our many calm extremely well written extremely detailed posts were ignored. Or, for example, even some outright support of transmisic posts (shown by Staff likes of said posts).
There are these deep ingrained issues that require addressing, that the writing of the new guidelines defends & protects the Staff from actually addressing. The use-correct-pronoun issue is solved. The circumstances and guidelines that allowed the issue in the first place, is not.
Without fixing the core of the problems, the problem still exists, it will just pop up in another way next time. It wonât be pronouns thanks to the new rule, but it will be something else. The goal, I believe, should be to prevent that next time all together.
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Not just the staff. I was accused of âaggressionâ and ânot helping the conversationâ for defining what the rage and controversy was about, since that seemed to have gotten lost in the boiling emotions. It was not a staffer or a mod who accused me.
Well, maybe our experiences with queerness and nature. But the moving of yet another post into a thread that is already closed shows that discussing certain aspects of our experience with queerness and iNat is still not welcome here.
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Sorry, we got our wires crossed about moving the last two posts. Iâve brought them back here.
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Thank you for your kind response, especially this part:
I donât expect everyone to suddenly become perfectly happy with the concept of it/its pronouns, but I do expect that they will gender me correctly regardless of their personal feelings.
Itâs not a problem if someone feels uncomfortable using it/its pronouns for me or anyone else. It becomes a problem when they weaponize their discomfort to misgender me.
And since itâs probably been lost in the long thread now, if you (or anyone else reading this) would like to get more practice at using neopronouns, I am in the middle (Actually, literally the middle now! 50/101!) of writing a collection of short stories, each one using a new set of pronouns, with short tutorials at the beginning to show how to use them.
You can read the short stories as they are written here: neopronouns-in-action.tumblr.com
And you can read a now slightly out of date version here on the web archive, which comes with a free audio book versionâŚ(though now that I think of it Iâm not sure how well the audio pronounces the neopronounsâŚokay no I checked, it does do pretty okay lol. Oh no wait. It pronounced âviâ as âsixâ because of Roman numerals.) here.
When I finish writing all 101 stories, the whole book will be free to download from the web archive, and youâll be able to buy a physical copy from whichever print-on-demand site I figure out works best.
Thank you again for your kind words and response, you are a great ally :)
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Thank you.
I really do hope youâll take at least a small look at the additional aspect i am concerned about, where moderation focuses on ending conflict sometimes by threatening consequences for BOTH people if there is a conflict. While I donât feel that users on iNat are usually outwardly malicious, it really is true that sometimes someone is wrong, and the other person isnât. The âboth sidesâ approach really empowers bullies, abusers, and just fails to encourage better behavior. @NoGenAI calling out tone policing is really on point here. I know itâs been really hurtful to me when that happened to me, and it can be downright dangerous when it is directed at multiply marginalized groups like trans people. I hope this is a step forward⌠but please remember, sometimes one person is just in the wrong.
Thereâs a disproportionate number of LGBT, neurodivergent, and other underrepresented people on iNat. I know it often doesnât go smoothly when a lot of people with a lot of trauma or past history of being abused come together. But honestly, a lot of us are just tired of the common abuse tactics like âboth sidesâ-ism. A common type of abuse directed towards autistic people is making us upset or triggering autistic meltdown behaviors with known triggers, then shaming us for being upset or dysregulated by the toxic treatment. I saw that happening in this thread to people (at least one of whom said they are autistic), not as intentional abuse, but no doubt as part of a pattern that person has experienced before⌠I am tired of this stuff and i just have absolutely zero tolerance for it any more. Youâre in an important role where you provide a community for a lot of people who canât find it elsewhere. Please protect it instead of turning this place (more) toxic as well.
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To the iNaturalist staff:
- Please actually read this post
- Set a ten minute timer
- Play with a stress ball or look at cute pictures of kittens while you wait for the timer to be up
- Read this post again
Sigh. Thereâs a lot that needs to be said here. I had to break my boycott of iNaturalist to see your updates to the community guidelines, andâŚ
Sigh.
I think it would benefit everyone here if staff would list out, in bullet point by bullet point, what exactly it is youâre apologizing for. Just so itâs clear to everyone what you think you got wrong.
Iâm serious.
Because I read the new community guidelines, and it is clear you still do not understand what the problem with your reaction a here, as paid staff members.
Most of what has been added accomplishes nothing but further defend the actions that you, the paid staff, took during this incident.
You are still equating telling people not to be bigoted with attacking other users. You are still showing everyone that you believe criticizing bigotry, and asking people not to be bigoted towards you, is more offensive and aggressive than being bigoted in the first place.
forum mod Astra_the_dragon has done nothing but slander me throughout this incident, as have the paid staff, pretending that I am being unreasonable and demanding that, and I quote, âeveryone be perfect all the timeâ.
Astra has repeatedly spoken directly over me and decided that because he is okay with being misgendered, then all trans people must be okay with being misgendered, pretending that the situation is about some hypothetical trans person as though Iâve not been here the entire time I was allowed to be, still defending myself tooth and nail to receive the most basic respect.
But somehow, my posts where I demand he stop speaking over me and saying I must accept being misgendered were considered a âpersonal attackâ that is too inappropriate for the forums, but not the ones where he claims Iâm being irrational and need to just let people misgender me.
You are now claiming you understand you were wrong, but youâve done nothing to prove that, all your actions show that you still believe you were right. This is, as the kids call it, lip service.
If you all know you were wrong, then why has âdo not bring up the same argument repeatedlyâ been added to the official community guidelines?
The only âargumentâ being brought up repeatedlyâŚwas the fact that you were all still being bigoted, and refusing to listen to the marginalized people who were begging you to listen to us.
In the PMs you, the paid staff members sent me imediately before you banned me from the forums, you explicitly stated, and I quote:
âIf your actions continue to violate the guidelines, or reiterate points youâve made multiple times, we will temporarily suspend you from the Forum for a week.â
And then when you did suspended me from the forums for âbringing up the same topic over and over againâ, also known as, continually asking to be treated with bare minimum respect, you sent this:
âPer the warning message I sent you, weâve decided to suspend your forum account for one week for continually disrupting conversations and attacking others. If you continue when your account is reinstated, youâll be banned from the Forum. This may also affect your account on iNaturalist. Sockpuppet accounts will be grounds for a ban as well.â
by âdisrupting conversationâ you mean continuing the conversation about the tone policing and bigotry of the paid staff, which you are now saying you know was wrong. By âattacking othersâ you mean telling Astra to stop speaking over me and the other trans people, and our allies, whoâve spoken up during this incident.
âIf you continue when your account is reinstated, youâll be banned from the Forum.â
So since I was suspended for continuing to defend myself, which you now admit I shouldnât have had to do, does this mean I will not be permanently banned from the forum for bringing these issues up again when theyâre still not resolved?
Also why were you accusing me of using sockpuppets. Why would I create sockpuppets when I was boycotting iNaturalist. That kind of defeats the purpose.
This is not a real apology because youâve done nothing to show you actually mean what you are saying, and youâve done nothing but prove you still think your actions were right. The only thing youâre apologizing for is not removing the two posts misgendering me, but youâre completely avoiding aknowledging any of the problems you all specifically created in your reactions to us asking you to remove the posts.
The problem moved far beyond two posts migendering me as soon as you, the paid memebers of staff, decided to involve yourself by tone policing and victim blaming. At one point you literally told us that if we donât want to be misgendered, we should just go somewhere else.
Nothing about this apology aknowledges any of this. And youâve still not aknowledged it despite several other people now pointing it out.
And even if this apology were actually addressing the problems the staff created on their own, our demands were a public apology, not just here on the forums, but on iNaturalist.org as well, to prove that you are really holding yourselves responsible.
If you donât want anyone outside the forums to know that you made a mistake in the first place, then that is just showing that you arenât actually committed to making sure it never happens again.
There is no shame in making mistakes as long as you fix them. This is not fixing them. You are all still doubling down on your bigoted, tone policing behavior, and still equating âtelling people they are being bigotedâ to âpersonal attacksâ âname callingâ âlabelingâ and âsealioningâ.
If you truly accept that what you did was wrong, then please, and I am being serious, list out what you did wrong. Youâre getting paid for this. I am not, and neither have any of my allies whoâve spent their precious time and energy explaining to you all, for three weeks now, that you are being bigoted and harming your community.
The victims of this bigotry are not getting paid to educate you. You on the other hand are getting paid, but you are still refusing to actually listen and actually learn.
List out what you did wrong and explain how youâre going to do better in the future. Youâre getting paid for it, so thereâs no excuse not to.
Unless youâre going to pay me, and everyone else, for all the time and effort weâve put in to educating you while receiving nothing but insults and retaliation, this apology, which does not aknowledge even half the things you did wrong, is not good enough.
Especially because as youâve all proven over the past three weeks, thereâs a 99% chance this post will be immediately hidden or locked away where no one is allowed to comment on it, and you will instead completely and willfully misinterpret everything Iâve written here to paint me as unreasonable and irrational and violent.
To all the people whoâve spoken up in my defence, whether you are trans or not, thank you.
To the iNaturalist staff:
- Please actually read this post
- Set a ten minute timer
- Play with a stress ball or look at cute pictures of kittens while you wait for the timer to be up
- Read this post again
And then do your job, as you are being paid to, and write a reply that represents the good of iNaturalist, not your own personal hurt feelings.
You are getting paid to be a good person. You are getting paid to make this community safe for everyone, including marginalized people.
We are not getting paid to defend ourselves from bigotry.
It is your job to put the good of the community ahead of your feelings, which are hurt by marginalized people criticizing your bigotry.
Edit: Hereâs a link for a youtube video you can all watch about tone policing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty7pPe_P0Bs&ab_channel=ClaudiaBoleyn
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Hi, nonbinary-naturalist.
If you have an issue with how the staff handled this, then message @forum_moderators with why you think they handled it wrong.
If you donât want your messages to be âhiddenâ as you say, then take screenshots of every message you send, and every message they send to you and put it in the discord server or something.
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I have to disagree with youâŚI think when organisations rainbow-wash themselves for pride month and do things behind the scenes to the trans/nonbinary/queer community, it deserves to be brought to light.
Pride was a riotâŚgay rights didnât happen by keeping things in the dark, and trans rights wonât happen that way either. Progress is made by putting light on the problems, not by hiding them in the dark.
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I didnât want to edit so iâm doubleposting (sorry!)
I really think iNat is at a crossroads here. I see glimmer of hope in that Tony moved my post and jasonâs back to here after astra tried to hide them like all the posts before. I personally would like to see a trans/queer/nb bipogm person hired to be outreach and community coordinator as well.
Short apologies are great; but when such fails to address the core of the issues and part of the apology includes hidden within links a bolstered wall to protect staff from âdealing with usâ; we have every right to be suspicious about it. I appreciate the detail of nonbinary-naturalists post of where these issues are, exactly. This gives a great roadmap for Staff to reflect on and correct, and is poking everyone along towards a more positive future.
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I think it made great points and everything was worded politely. The entire situation has been unpleasant and a lot of people have voiced their opinions so I donât see why what it said here shouldnât be heard as well. I personally prefer for this to be out in the open and not behind closed doors, seeing as a lot of us are concerned and invested in the situation.
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this thread began as a celebration of community has devolved into what seems to be the total opposite.
gender is a complicated topic â ask 10 different people for a definition of gender, and youâll get 10 different definitions â and i think it was a good thing that iNaturalist attempted to even go down the road of celebrating human diversity and providing a space for willing participants to discuss and share experiences.
it seems like thereâs been much learned by all, even with the recent discord in the thread. but people learn best through positive reinforcement, and neverending discord will eventually stifle learning / understanding and even lead perhaps to learning the wrong lessons. iâd hate for one of such lessons to be that celebrating human diversity comes with too many potential pitfalls to be worth attempting again in the future.
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you canât celebrate community if you arenât willing to learn from your mistakes. We arenât getting paid to educate people, but weâre still showing up here, three weeks later.
Asking for real justice and a real promise to do better isnât neverending discord. You cannot celebrate community if youâre willing to shove the most marginalized people in your community out.
Iâm pretty sure if we trans people, including me, the one who was being misgendered, are still willing to stick around educating people for free, in our own time, you can thank us and appreciate all the hard work weâre putting in instead of acting like weâre the ones being divisive.
Edit:
Seriously. Weâre not getting paid for this, but weâre literally still here educating people for free on our own time. If I thought the iNaturalist were too far beyond hope to change their minds and really fix their mistakes, I wouldnât be here, commenting this.
Itâs not my job, or the job of any other marginalized people, to create âpositive reinforcementâ to convince people to stop being bigoted. I am not here to hold anyoneâs hands and belittle them by acting like theyâre children who donât understand the difference between right and wrong.
Demanding that marginalized people who are facing bigotry be nicer to the people being bigoted against us (when we are being as polite as possible) is just more tone policing. You cannot celebrate the Queer / LGBT community here or anywhere else if you arenât willing to listen to the people who are hurt by your actions, or the actions of others.
Edit #2:
Iâd love nothing more than to be able to get back to sharing fun stories and stuff but I literally cannot do that until the paid iNaturalist staff prove that Iâm actually welcome here, and that they will have the backs of other marginalized people in the future.
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ok. go with your approach as long as you can keep it up, if you like. my lesson learned is that itâs no longer productive for me to visit this thread, and itâs time for me to move on, but i hope others still are able to get something good from it. see you all elsewhere in the forum!
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I say all of this with a great deal of respect for you and I donât want it to come off any other way. Iâve been really hesitant to comment on this situation at all since I donât want to start anything unnecessary but I hope that I can add something to this conversation that might be found helpful.
At this point this discussion has long stopped being constructive in any way or form, and is being unnecessarily divisive. I feel like, as a community this topic has been resolved, staff have made a final decision and have given what I see as an honest and sincere apology, they have updated community guidelines and the moderator thread has been closed. I understand that this issue might not be resolved for you since this has personally effected you in ways I, as a cis person couldnât understand. But if you truly want a resolution, and a shared understanding, starting out with asking for a bullet-point list of everything the staff did wrong isnât how you do it. I get you are frustrated, as there is a lot to be angry about but being amicable, even if you feel like the situation doesnât warrant being amicable is the best way to actually get a conclusion you would like to see from a situation like this.
Iâd love nothing more than to be able to get back to sharing fun stories and stuff but I literally cannot do that until the paid iNaturalist staff prove that Iâm actually welcome here, and that they will have the backs of other marginalized people in the future
From what Iâve read, I feel like this incident as a whole has only further shown how much this community cares about the many great LGBTQ+ people in this space, and I hope that in the future people will be just as quick to criticise bigotry, intentional or not with the politeness and respect that I have seen multiple people use on this thread and others. Iâm pretty confident saying you are welcome here, and Iâm pretty sure even those whose words started this would say that.
My biggest issue with all of this is how much people from both sides, moderators included attribute malice to each others words and actions. From what iâve seen, no one here meant to hurt you or anyone else, but a lot of people made mistakes, and itâs on all of us to forgive and move forward. It is much easier to believe that a small team of staff where overwhelmed by an inflammed situation and poorly chose which messages to hide and which message not to, and that you and others made important and valuable comments about this to the community, staff, and moderators and were understandable upset by it, rather than attribute malice to everyoneâs actions.
I hope we can all move on to celebrating this community, and sharing further actions in the future that could be done to prevent future incidents like this. Remember that we are in a community that is very diverse, and that includes ages and backgrounds, and many people on iNaturalist are new to many aspects of pronouns and the like. But everyone that Iâve met on iNaturalist so far has been well-meaning in their words and actions.
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I can empathise with the difficulty of this conversation. It isnât easy. It wonât be easy.
Itâs expecting people to dive into themselves and learn to be better, to do better. That comes with a lot of self-improvement wherein it is realised how one has harmed & hurt others.
The easy thing to do is to shut it down, or to leave to avoid those feelings of learning you (general you) harmed another human.
But everyone who does so, please recognise, you can only do that because of your privledge.
âŚA privledge we donât have. Which is why we are still here, still showing up, still educating, still talking.
There are many excellent articles written about this phenomenon by bipoc/bipogm folk. I encourage people to do some digging and learn more.
And. this discussion and others can co-occur. There is nothing preventing anyone from posting about a âhappy lgbtqâ thing here. We can celebrate that while we also strive for betterment.
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Hereâs a video I think many people here could benefit from watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hcnep5QdSA&ab_channel=FeministFrequency
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