The title kinda speaks for itself. I'm really disappointed in the way people reacted to the latest announcement/rollback of an FA function. TLDR: they're getting rid of the "Gender" dropdown and replacing it with tags. That is, when you choose a gender from the dropdown during upload now, it adds a tag instead of putting it in a hard-coded category. In terms of the actual change, I'm pretty ambivalent about it - it doesn't really affect me one way or the other, since I've mostly used tags instead of the dropdowns anyway.

But what was extremely disappointing to see was the amount of entitlement and thinly-veiled (or in many cases not-veiled-at-all) transphobia in the comments. There's a lot of stuff that I'm seeing from people that I thought we had moved past, and I was really disappointed to see that we apparently haven't. I want to make two key points here:

First, screaming at the staff and being belligerent is not going to get you what you want. This site has never worked that way, and it never will. "But Alioth!" you say, "Screaming at the staff did get them to reverse course on the babyfur bans, and it got the bad staff to leave!" No. It didn't. What made that happen was people who stayed out of the noise working behind the scenes, patiently, to educate and work together. Yes, I was very vocally critical of the 2.7 policy - that's not what got me involved in that work. What got me involved was other people - the ones I mentioned who were staying out of the noise - who were patient and who knew that my input would be valuable, and they got me involved. And, as it turned out, I also learned a lot about how the site works during that process. I apologized for my part in adding to the stress. The "bad staff" left because the site's owner (not the site's users) stepped up and said "this is how it's gonna be," and they weren't on board with that. But none of us got anywhere by screaming at each other. We got it working by having nearly three months of discussion - sometimes for hours a day, for which none of us got paid - over what was reasonable, legal, and technically feasible. No amount of bullying the site staff is going to just make them do what you want - that might work on social media, but it doesn't work here.

The FA staff are open to criticism (they've left comments open on the journals - they didn't do that expecting everything to be smiles and rainbows). But at the end of the day, it's their website. When the 2.7 stuff was being kicked around, I said even then: FA is not the only game in town. If you don't like the way they run it, go to Bluesky, or Weasyl, or wherever. It's their website. They do not owe the community a "majority vote." They don't owe the community a "town hall where people can approve/disapprove" of every change. Yes, it's good that they're doing those town halls and having more open discussion, but ultimately, it's their website, and they get to make the decisions for how it is run. It's not a democracy - it's a benevolent (or malevolent, if you need to feel persecuted) dictatorship. It's not a libertarian free speech bunker where you can just be an asshole to people without consequences. Which brings me to my next point:

Trans people are what they say they are. A trans man isn't a "girl who thinks she's a boy." A trans woman isn't a "gay guy who's trying to trick straight guys." Trans men are men. Trans women are women. If a trans man on this site creates a character that he uses to represent himself (or even just as a character) and he tags it as "male," he has tagged it correctly. Period. It doesn't matter what that character's reproductive organs look like. "But my sexual preference is that-" blah blah blah don't care. The world is a diverse place. Some men have vulvas. Some women have penises. And when you search "male" or "female" on this site, you might see something other than the anatomy you have traditionally associated with that. Get over it and stop fetishizing people based on what they have in their pants. "But sex and gender are two separate th-" shhhhhhhhhh. Sex and gender are complicated, and neither one fits neatly into the little boxes that you would like it to. Those may have felt like the "good old days" to you, but to a lot of people, they were assumptions that forced people to be uncomfortable in their own skin and unable to live their own truth. The outside world is trying very hard to do that again - we DON'T do it here. Fix your hearts or die.