The iNaturalist staff have decided to prove, the day before Pride month begins, that iNaturalist's proclaimed acceptance of Queer people is just as performative as any other corporate that pridewashes.
They banned me from the forum for asking not to be misgendered by someone who is purposefully misgendering me and literally admitted that she knows it's wrong but she's going to do it okay.
The staff have done nothing but victim blame, tone police, and punish everyone for the bigotry of two people, which they refuse to remove from the thread.
Meanwhile, they've hidden posts by Trans and ally users who have called out the bigotry and criticized their reaction, and have, from their very first response, been treating our reaction to the bigotry as more aggressive and offensive and inappriate than the bigotry itself.
They literally are leaving the posts where I am purposefully misgendered up, but have hidden and removed my posts as well as the posts of other trans and ally users who have been criticizing their abhorrant behavior and asking for an apology.
According to the iNaturalist staff, asking someone not to misgender you is hate speech, but purposefully misgendering someone is not
= = =
Read this shit for yourself:
The original thread for LGBTQIA+ people, where the user Sedgequeen purposefully misgenders me multiple times, on purpose:
"https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/lgbtqia-and-inaturalist/23565"
The thread the staff created to hide the many trans people and our allies who criticized their first response:
“https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/moderation-decisions-about-several-posts-in-the-lgbtqia-thread/42122/56”
You can send the parent company a message on Facebook here:
“https://www.facebook.com/calacademy/”
And you can share your feedback with the parent company through google:
“https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdoaW33mQfJgl9pEIo9aUoDQ-nKFVYvvcXM0pbOBNvkt5PAog/viewform”
And here’s the parent company’s About Us section about diversity and inclusion so you can see for yourself that they're claiming to support Queer people and inclusivity:
“https://www.calacademy.org/diversity-equity-inclusion-access”
If you have an iNaturalist account you can comment on the forums directly.
They literally just said that if we don’t want to be misgendered we can just leave.
Archived link because I know they’re gonna delete my response like they’re deleting all the posts that criticize them.
And you know what, at this point please just make an iNaturalist account with a throwaway email so you can comment directly in the forums.
Before, I didn’t want people making accounts just for this because I thought it’d be disrespectful, but this shit’s gone too far.
That was before they banned me for asking not to be misgendered.
If you don't want to make any posts or send any messages, please signal boost this post and share it on literally any social media you want. You don't even have to screenshot it, you can copy and paste the whole thing and just put it in quotation marks.
If you care about trans people, please help us call out this blatant bigotry on the part of the iNaturalist staff. Either by sending a message to the parent company, posting to the iNaturalist forum, sharing this post elsewhere on social media, or reblogging it here on tumblr!
Edit 6/1/23: You can also leave a 1 star review for the iNaturalist app, explaining that you are doing so because the staff are transmisic and would rather ban trans users and destroy all trust the community had for them than remove two specific posts purposefully misgendering a trans user, despite a dozen trans and ally users explaining over and over again why this is not okay.
Thank you, and have a happy wrath month.
