Kolektiva Mod Team<p>To those who have reached out to our instance to express your anger, hurt, and disappointment, this is a message to say that we have heard your criticisms, and acknowledge that we fucked up. Based on this feedback and further internal discussion, we have suspended the account of our former user Rusty Betrand, for violating our rules against transphobic discourse.</p><p>While acknowledging that we have made serious mistakes in not taking this action sooner, we also want to push back against the accusations going around that <a href="https://kolektiva.social/tags/Kolektiva" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Kolektiva</span></a> supports transmisogyny, or harbours anti-trans politics or views. This is not true, and deeply upsetting to members of our collective, which includes several trans and non-binary members. </p><p>When Rusty first joined Kolektiva, he was open with our mods about his previous history of trauma. He has repeatedly and openly talked about being a child cult survivor, and having been sexually assaulted by a trans inmate while in prison. He is also a trans man who reacts very emotionally and angrily to being called a transphobe. Given our awareness of this, and his tendency to become triggered when confronted, members of our mod team have always weighed our interactions with him carefully. In hindsight, this has clearly led to us being overly lenient with regards to his toxic behaviour. Although we’ve intervened repeatedly to delete posts that violated our terms of service (which includes a ban on transphobic discourse), several of these posts should have been grounds for immediate suspension. However, it is much easier to suspend a person that seems privileged, than somebody that claims to be disabled, trans, gay, Jewish, and a trauma survivor with multiple mental health issues.</p><p>After a recent rant, in which he made several fucked up and transmisognyistic statements about trans women being biological predators, we decided that he'd unequivocally crossed the line, and that he had to leave Kolektiva. Out of concern for his mental health issues, we attempted to be sensitive when telling him to find another server. Nonetheless, he did not take this message well, and posted a screenshot containing part of the direct message we’d sent him, while making allegations that he was being unfairly targeted, etc. Several of his supporters saw this, and chimed in that we should give him another chance. In our message to him, we’d written that we had repeatedly warned him about his transmisogyny in the past. He argued this was not true, and when we looked through his account history, we realized that he was technically correct. Most of the reports filed against him had been accusations of antisemitism related to his posts about Israel and Palestine (including a smaller number that we determined were valid, and which we deleted and explicitly warned him about). We had deleted a couple posts that we'd considered to be transphobic, but had never actually sent him a formal warning. That technical omission, combined with the messages of support we’d received about him, were the reasons we decided to simply delete several of his offensive posts and give him a final warning before suspending his account. This was a mistake. We should have stuck to our original plan, and followed through with the suspension. Transmisogynistic or TERF discourse has no place on this server, and should never have been tolerated to the extent that it was.</p><p>In our message to Rusty asking him to leave Kolektiva, we pointed out that he sometimes made valid points, and that we realized that sometimes his statements were misconstrued as being transphobic, but that when challenged in these cases he would resort to TERF talking points and clearly transmisogynist rants. Some have pointed to this as evidence that Kolektiva’s mods think transphobia is ‘fair and valid.’ This is not true. We observed multiple occasions where Rusty would post a statement that was itself not inherently transphobic (talking about the importance of trans people and queers embracing feminist politics, for example), and then get accused of transphobia. In these cases, Rusty would generally freak out and start regurgitating TERF talking points. Our message was trying to describe this pattern of behaviour and explain that it was not acceptable. This was intended as a private message to Rusty, but in hindsight we should have predicted that he would screenshot our DM, and we should have chosen our words more carefully.</p><p>Our server, and Mastodon more broadly, is home to many amazing transfemme users. We know that the world is often shitty to trans people, and that part of our responsibility as moderators is creating a space that is as free of this shittiness as possible. Through our mishandling of this situation, we have clearly failed in our duty to do this, and for that we are truly sorry. </p><p>At the end of the day, our mod team is made up of a relatively small team of volunteers who have made mistakes, and frankly will continue to make mistakes in the future. We are open to criticism, and encourage users to reach out to us when they disagree with our actions. We are always accepting volunteers who would like to get involved and help contribute to improving the moderation policies and practices on this instance. If that sounds like you, get in touch.</p>