Y’all, we have a problem.
These are some of the results of a survey done on our community concerning gender identity:
1.08% Binary Trans men (4).
1.08% Transmasculine people (4).
1.35% Cis women (5).
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 isn’t just a Blahaj problem. Another queer instance did a similar survey and found only 3% of their users were trans and use he/him pronouns.
Not having enough transmasc voices is going to be detrimental to our community. There are plenty of transmasc people on the internet. The problem is with Lemmy.
So what are we gonna do about it?
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Two ideas I have:
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Find some other place that is primarily trans men and advertise this community there. I’m not sure where that would be though.
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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!
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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
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.
I don’t think anyone is arguing transmasc presence shouldn’t be encouraged, but it is also my perception that the ratio of chronically online transfems is significantly higher than transmascs. And furthermore, in trans spaces in general I also see this imbalanced ratio, for example at my local trans support group there might be one or two transmasc folks at most, transfems are more likely to show up to the support group and in much larger numbers (like 1 transmasc to 10 transfems).
I am not entirely sure why this is, either. It’s especially puzzling because as I understand it there actually are equal numbers of trans men and trans women, so it seems that trans men are less present in trans spaces but not fewer in number overall.
I’m not sure my speculations as to why are going to be accurate or helpful, but I am wondering if you have any ideas as to why this disparity exists (on Lemmy or elsewhere)? Being a (trans) man can be quite lonely and I personally would like to see more transmasc presence in trans spaces.
Dang it…I accidentally deleted my comment. Anyway I was saying that I think age plays a role in irl queer spaces. I notice a lot of younger transmasculine folks in society and trans spaces than older (though part of that is a bias in the ones that are visibly trans and not, and older ones are less likely to be as visibly trans). Maybe there’s more transmasculine gen zers or transmasculine gen zers feel able to be more open about their transness. I personally have met many more transmasc than transfem people irl, but every single one of them was gen z.
As somebody else mentioned, it’s relatively easy to be stealth as a trans man especially once on T. Also I have heard a lot of transmasculine people, especially binary trans men who pass and especially straight binary trans men who pass say that many irl queer spaces are unwelcoming or outright hostile to them because of a general distrust of men and masculinity. Not sure if that would apply to online queer spaces, tho.
And you’re right, there is the isolating aspect of being a trans man. Being treated as a man by society is lonely. You’re expected to be stoic and tough stuff out. Friendships between men are a lot less focused on emotional support than between women. Obviously, this will not always be true but it’s something I’ve noticed.
Hmm, the IRL trans spaces I am a part of like the support group tend to be more gen y than gen z, so if you’re right about the age thing it’s at least consistent with what I’m seeing. However, it doesn’t explain why there seems to be such a dearth of transmasc folks online where you would think gen z would be more common. Maybe gen z are more likely to be on tiktok than reddit, and reddit happens to be where the trans community orbits right now?
One of my speculations was that being a trans man doesn’t have the same challenges as for trans women, and those differences might explain the differences in approach to community. I don’t in any way want to imply trans men have it easy, but it does seem like trans men might be able to integrate into cis society more easily for various reasons, and to that end they might be more likely to go stealth and not need to stick around in trans groups (which could expose their trans status, and is a risk probably not worth taking for many trans men). I think the same thing is true of trans women, btw - I don’t see a lot of stealth trans women in the support groups IRL, though I do see many passing trans women online (at least photos of them, which I think are upvoted higher on reddit than less-passing photos).
Somewhat random, but I have personally met several trans men attorneys and seen on TV trans men attorneys, usually attorneys who are fighting for trans rights. Not sure what to make of that and it could be irrelevant or sampling bias (it’s a small subset, maybe 3 - 4 people), but I certainly noticed.
If trans men transition and integrate more easily I would guess it relates to gender disparities among cis people, and the way gender markers are weighted in our society, e.g. a beard and a deep voice both come easily with T and they weigh more heavily when “gendering” someone (compared to feminine markers do on a trans woman). For trans women with a deep voice and a beard shadow it might be really hard to overcome the “weight” of those gender markers to appear as a woman to most people (even if they have large breasts, for example), and there is a greater fragility in their womanhood than there might be for trans men (not to imply trans men don’t also experience similar struggles, uncertainty, etc.).
There is greater fragility in women’s gender even for cis women compared to for men (though again, many cis men experience insecurity in their gender). The gender is more violently and strictly enforced for women than for men, and men who cross over into womanhood are more stigmatized.
Of course what is not getting talked about here are transmasc folks who don’t take T, or of the many instances where trans men have struggled immensely and been killed for who they are. I don’t think I can repeat enough that trans men are subject to similar struggles and violence as trans women even if the ways those manifest might look a little different.
That said, I don’t feel confident in my speculation - I don’t actually know enough and I’m going off of what I’ve seen and what I’ve read about gender from Julia Serano and others. I would prefer something more empirical and tested.
Either way, I wonder what pragmatic steps we can take to create a space that is more inviting to trans men and transmasc folks. We need them, online and IRL.
How about posting transmasc content? For example links to quality blog posts.
I’d be curious to learn more about it too.
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
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
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?
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.
