Gender and Policy in Lesbian Chat
2019, October 09
Gender and Policy in Lesbian Chat
What Should Lesbian Chat Be?
Ideally, none of our rooms should be places for predatory behavior of any kind. Ideally, everyone should be safe from mistreatment by anyone. Our ability to make this happen, however, is extremely limited, and as we have previously discussed, it is the responsibility of every user to be careful who they talk to and what details they give about themselves, and to use the block feature to shut out any kind of chat they don't want to see.
However, providing some rooms centered around narrower thresholds of gender and sexuality has been an attempt to provide safer spaces for some. Lesbian Chat is one such room, intended as a place for women to talk to women who are attracted to other women. A place to congregate away from men, to not have to worry about certain kinds of advances, certain kinds of behavior.
Over the history of the room's existence, we've employed various methods to keep the wrong people out, or at least make users aware that the people they are talking to may not be who they claim to be. We've tried anything from banning people who log in explicitly as men (setting the gender field to "male" in the login dialog), to manually banning people who declare themselves to be men in the chat. Repeatedly, they circumvent this to get in anyway, because we do not, and we will never, require identifying documents or payments of any kind.
The presence of men has been a constant panic for the users of this particular room. People report other people, completely unfoundedly and without evidence, for being supposedly men. This panic has become so unreasonable that it is not even worth our time to enforce a no-men policy with any kind of vigor. If a given moderator wishes to hang out in Lesbian Chat, and to ban men from the room, they are welcome to do so, but we do not require this of any of our moderators.
A much more troubling thing has come from the panic, though: users have targeted people who absolutely do belong in the room: Trans women. Anything from complaining about "dicks" to explicit and intentional transphobia is employed by these people. This behavior will not be tolerated.
Hereafter, we explicitly affirm that the following are welcome in Lesbian Chat:
- Genitals of all types.
- People of all genders aside from men, including non-binary people.
The following are not welcome:
- Transphobia, in particular transmisogyny.
Don't like it? You don't have to leave angry -- just leave!