Hello, Agender is looking for moderators to help moderate this community. If you think you could help out this community please feel free to reply below explaining how you think you can help this community.

It is recommended but not required that you have an account on lemmy.blahaj.zone to moderate with, and it is strongly recommended but not explicitly required that you have a Matrix account for secure messaging, linked to your Lemmy account.

Hello everybody, I'm Draconic NEO, some people call me Draconic or NEO. I am Aromantic Asexual, and probably also Agender. I'm into open source and linux and am currently exploring the fediverse.

I joined blahaj.zone to start up some A-spec communties as I felt those are sorely lacking in the Fediverse. I chose this instance because it seems like the best place to host communities like that on the count of it being an LGBTQIA safe-space that doesn't tolerate bigots \glares at lemm.ee\ and also having downvotes disabled (useful since lots of bigots will downvote people simply for being openly queer). I initially avoided blahaj.zone since it was less stable in the past (I remember frequent downtimes and image errors) as well as concerns regarding egg_irl, as I have experienced a lot of unpleasant harassment Mostly in DMs from reddit.com/r/egg_irl (Was really nasty and I won't get into it here) however it seems like that isn't an issue here as people here seem very nice.

The communtities I have started are:

• !agender@lemmy.blahaj.zone
• !asexual@lemmy.blahaj.zone
• !aroace@lemmy.blahaj.zone
• !aroaceagender@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Feel free to join them if you are interested.

Hello and welcome to our community. This post is mainly to help explain things to people who first come across this community.

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What is Agender?

Agender is a gender identity in which people feel very little or lack of any gender identity. The term Agender comes from the greek prefix A- meaning without and gender.

Some Agender people may feel no gender, while others may feel a weaker sense of gender, and others still may feel a strong sense of connection to being Agender. It is very much a spectrum. I created a chart to better help visualize it:

!

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What is Gender modality, I saw it mentioned in the sidebar, so what is it?

Gender modality is complicated, and there's a bit of disagreement on what it is or isn't in the community, as well as whether or not gender modalities are valid.

The most common definition and the definition you'll see when you look up gender modality is: >Gender Modality refers to the correspondence (or lack thereof) between one's assigned gender at birth and one's actual gender and/or gender presentation.\ \- Gender Modality, on Gender Fandom

I don't disagree with that definition but it feels lacking. I think a good way to explain it that compliments the previous way is that modalities are like groups that can contain other gender identities. Like how on Lemmy there are communities contained in instances. Yeah I know a lot of people will hate that analogy but I think it works. It can be a bit confusing but in general it's just best to respect the way a person identifies, even if it's one of the non-standard gender modalities.

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Wait I thought that people were either cis or trans?

Yeah this is where a lot of the disagreement comes in around gender modality. There are some people who do believe that. While others believe that there are multiple gender modalities besides just the two. We here believe that the way a person identifies should be respected and not invalidated, and that means if they identify under one of these other gender modalities it needs to be respected.

What about if someone is in-denial about being trans?

Here we believe that self-discovery is a very important and personal process that should not be ham-fisted like it has been in the past on... certain user forums (egg_irl) this doesn't mean one can't help or support people, that's always encouraged, but they have to want the support. If it is forced or coercive it is not respectful and can even be harmful. Do not try and force people to identify a certain way against their will (This falls under Rule 2).

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About the community

This next section addresses various questions about the community, this part is a bit more meta.

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Why create this community?

I created this community because one of the communities I noticed that was lacking on Lemmy was an Agender one, there were plenty of Nonbinary ones but not a single Agender one or even aspec one. So I decided to create this one in hopes that it would allow Agender people to feel more at home in the Fediverse.

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Why did you choose this instance?

We wanted to choose an instance which has downvotes disabled due to the fact that trolls and bigots very often attack queer people by mass downvoting their posts to supress them and their content. We want to avoid this type of abuse. We originally chose Reddthat for this purpose because it fits that criteria while also being very stable, however we decided to abandon it due to their lack of agency around the threads federation issue, this is especially problematic due to the fact that threads has a severe queerphobia problem. So we moved to lemmy.blahaj.zone as it is our only real option.

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#### Why didn't you just choose blahaj.zone?

In the beginning we did consider it but in the end I ended up choosing this instance for a variety of reasons. One reason was when I initially planned this out lemmy.blahaj.zone was having frequent outages and pictrs (image server) issues. So for that reason I went with the next best one Reddthat.com. I may revisit that idea in the future but as is I'll stick with what I've already got set up and go from there. We have migrated our community to blahaj.zone due to concerns regarding Reddthat's lack of agency around threads federation.

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If you have any more questions or feedback you'd like to give me just leave a comment below and I'll get back to you. If you want you could also post in our Matrix Discussion Channel.