Tumblr: Removes a transfem's fully clothed transition timeline for being sexually explicit

Also Tumblr:

One of my best friends went to college in Montana. They were part of the campus queer community. They had a friend who had been stalked and harassed by this guy on Grindr multiple times. When my friend ask them why nothing had been done, why this guy hadn't been ousted from the community, their friend simply said:

"No. We can't do that. That's the same as leaving him for dead."

And they were right for that.

There's a lot of personal reasons I found it in me to forgive my ex that assaulted and closeted me - but another reason is because they were also a hurting, closeted, queer kid who took their pain out on me. They deserve safe communities to heal in and I am not the arbiter of that. There's a reason why my best friend is still my best friend in spite of the fact that they hurt someone in similar but different ways - that I will not disclose further for their privacy. My best friend deserves to heal and so does the person they hurt. No one else is the arbiter of whether or not either one of them is allowed that.

I hate Blaire White, Caitlyn Jenner, Kalvin Garrah, etc. etc. etc. as people. I would never hold community space for them in a typical queer setting. However, if their existences as trans people were under attack? I would still hold space for them even if they would never hold that for me because that's still the right thing to do. That value stands for me personally across all marginalized people - not just trans people.

Absolutely make your personal spaces safe for yourself. Curate your own online experience. But when shit goes down, you still stand up for the queers you don't like. The queers who've hurt people. Who've hurt you even. Because ultimately you are socially the same. Bigotry is bigger than all of us and that's a tough pill to swallow, but you have to swallow it or we are all fucked.

i’m fascinated about tech ceos (and techbro culture in general) and their absolute refusal to be Chill or Reasonable or Normal. sometimes i think there is something in california water that makes people unable to observe objective reality.

MATT STEP DOWN

YOURE RUINING TUMBLR NOW

WE NEED A CEO

THIS ONE HAS TO GO

SUPPORT TRANS RIGHTS

OR WE'LL HAVE TO FIGHT

insane how this place calls itself queer and then deletes trans women for existing. yes this is about avewy/predstrogen im fucking sick snd tired of watching tumblr doing NOTHING while TERFs share that dumb copy paste anon hate full of straight up vile lies about a transfem who got popular.

The dumbest thing about our pissbaby CEO's transmisogynistic whining is that he didn't HAVE to mention Predstrogen at all. I know he was replying to that ask, but he could have instead made a broad sweeping lie statement about how the staff cares about trans ppl. By directly involving her and threatening (yes Matt, you are the person threatening here) to call the Fucking FBI on her there was no amount of backpedaling to make it seem justified.

[ID: a screenshot of a Tumblr post that reads: "those of us who believe in trans unity need to not let this be swept under the rug. several users, including predstrogen, have reduced this to the very popular game of "TME" vs "TMA" again when this is so much bigger than our fake gender wars." End ID]

"those trans women babbling on about trans men benefiting from transmisogyny are tearing the community apart. yes this horrific mistreatment by the Tumblr staff is only happening to trans women. yes said trans women are mean and dumb for pointing it out."

Spineless clows, the lot of you.

(2019 vs 2024)

never really felt confident enough to post a timeline but this month marks four years and posting it now feels like a two for one combo

The rest of this is venting, I'm not really adding anything new. For sure feels weird celebrating it, in light of literally everything, but if I hadn't made that first appointment four years ago I honestly don't know if I would have made it this far. I'm glad I did it. That being said, fuck the fact that celebrating something like this on the Queer™️ site about expressing yourself is a privilege apparently.

I see transphobia in every online social platform I've interacted with. Seriously wish that was an exaggeration. Feel kinda dumb for thinking this place has been, or could have possibly been, an exception.

Seeing what can happen to trans women for speaking out about the discrimination we face is fucking bleak. Feels unfair getting to celebrate on a platform like this when Predstrogen, girls like her, and transmisogyny affected people at large aren't allowed to.

These milestones mean a lot to us. Feeling safe enough to express our joy about these milestones means a lot to us. Depriving us of expressing this joy because of your feelings about our backgrounds, occupations, your opinions of us as people, or even just the fact that we are trans is fucking deplorable. I do not feel safe tagging my stuff with that cute little trans pride flag. Cus, y'know, transphobia shows up on my dash with that tag. People scan that tag to look for people to harass. And recent, and not so recent, events proves staff doesn't care as long as that tag is cute and colored like our flag so they can keep calling this the queerest site or whatever.

So thanks for tarnishing genuine joy for what I can only assume is a lot of us. fuck your stupid car, woe happy trans women be upon ye, be better for trans people or stop wasting our time, shoulda known what you were signing up for loser @photomatt

Tumblr's on fire again. Why? Because of, you guessed it: Matt's greed and ego. Matt has caught bad press recently due to his banning of Predstrogen, a trans woman who expressed outrage at Tumblr staff for doing essentially nothing to combat the harassment she faced on the platform. This controversy resulted in Matt departing the platform until May. Now, was this a good move? Yes. Was this the only good move Matt took? Yes, because Matt has not only never unbanned Prestrogen or anybody else banned in this ego-flex, but he has also implemented an AI learning algorithm that scrapes Tumblr and Wordpress for art with the only way to prevent artists from getting their shit taken being an opt-out button that, you guessed it, isn't enabled by default. Matt has turned Tumblr into a more egocentric version of Musk's Twitter. Also, I would like to state that I don't think Matt is transphobic. I think he's egotistical and incapable of taking criticism. It's why he was so adamant about defending himself and why he chooses to flaunt every flake of positive press he receives.

Predstrogen literally orchestrated her own harassment campaigns against fellow trans women who disagreed with her but yes, I'm sure it's the hammer car thing we should all be talking about.

Did you see the 'its weird to headcanon the tf2 mercs as trans because transexuality wasnt a thing back then' post because thats what your recent posts reminded me of

Actually most of that last night was cuz of what happened with Predstrogen.

But yes I saw that post too. Eventually it got reblogged onto my dash. That acct actually has me blocked cuz I immediately blocked her after she sent me art with a mirror once in DMs (with my "minors do not DM" warning in my pinned) and then called me daddy in DMs and in my asks. I know she meant it in a "you are now my adopted dad" but I don't need preteens I don't know at all calling me daddy, that shit's weird. She got the "do not act like this with adults or trust them or try to befriend them because that's how you get hurt, also please learn to respect boundaries" talk and then I blocked.

She deleted her old acct, made a new one, then blocked me before I got around to it lmfao. That's the current acct she's got.

She's like... 12 years old. Or 13 now, reckon. Just a dumb kid. She still needs to analyse why trans headcanons make her uncomfortable, but she's also VERY young. She's got room to change. I just wish she'd learnt before she got clowned on by a whole fandom. Feel kinda bad for her especially given her age.

But nah this wasn't about the kid. I'm 23 years old I'm too fucken old to be getting into internet arguments with kids, especially one literally a decade younger than me lmfao. That's like arguing with toddlers and I have enough experience arguing with my own toddler to know I'm not gonna win that argument

Part of the problem surrounding this whole situation (predstrogen, the subsequent callouts about the Cohost founders) is that a lot of people don't make the distinction between "actual report of a person's abusive actions" and "sourceless claims of an intent to abuse based on little to no relevant evidence".

Don't get me wrong, accusations of sexual abuse toward trans women (and many other marginalized people) always deserve at least a little bit of scrutiny. You don't have to suspend your compassion or accuse someone of being a liar, but taking someone at face value isn't the same as taking them in good faith. Just don't ignore that they could be lying, pay attention to major warning signs to that effect, and don't rush into taking actions that could bring immediate or drastic harm to the alleged abuser.

But even with that in mind, a lot of the accusations I've seen people circulate don't even come CLOSE to firsthand victim reports. Instead, we have people being labeled as various types of predator for behaviors that include: being trans women, doing sex work, having squicky/uncomfortable kinks, being furries, being willing to engage in complex and potentially difficult conversations regarding taboo topics, and worst of all, more than one of these at the same time.

Here is the logic beside presenting these things as "proof": "This person doesn't exhibit the level of disgust or avoidance that I expect around sexual taboos, or does not fully understand the reason why some of them exist. If someone does not automatically and unconditionally accept and enforce a taboo, it must be because they want to engage in taboo actions, including ones that might cause harm. Therefore, this person is dangerous and a predator."

And yes, while I only brought them up directly in the entry about discussions, every single thing I listed is a sexual taboo. Even when, as is the case with kinks, furries, and being a trans woman, they may have little or nothing to do with actual sex. By and large, this is because whenever a person exhibits ANY unexplained desires or behaviors, the default assumption is that they must be "a sex thing". Which is just another way of saying "my tastes represent the human default, yours are irrational, superfluous, and yucky."

And that's how it works. "That thing you're doing is strange > that thing you're doing is sexual > you're obsessed with sexually deviant behaviors > you are a sexual predator."

Trans women get a double dose of this, because they're not just transgender, they are also women - who are viewed as inherently sexual for plain ol' misogyny reasons. But while women of relative* privilege exist in a rotating superposition of being innocent recipients with no sexual agency, and devious seductresses out to ruin men's lives, trans women (and many nonwhite cis women) are permanently trapped in the role of seductress, because their very womanhood is taboo.

The reason I'm taking the time to bring all of this up because any one of these beliefs is enough to secure your participation in this system. For example, you might not believe consciously that being a trans woman makes someone a predator, but if she violates some other taboo, even in a completely innocent manner, you end up sliding right on down the chain to "clearly this trans woman is, though". Plus, you probably unconsciously associate trans women with predation, and while you know consciously that's a transmisogynist belief, the recognition of "evidence" still taps into that hidden bias to make the conclusion feel more solid and reasonable than it actually is.

And so all of this needs to be challenged. Challenge your assumption that "freak" is the same as "threat", that your beliefs and preferences are universal and require deliberate and malicious intent to divert from. Pay careful attention to what kind of evidence you're being shown. Keep a wary eye out for emotionally-loaded language designed to influence how you read a situation - e.g. describing some behavior as "disgusting" or "pedophilic" before you've even had the chance to see what the person did. Be careful and patient with the information you've been sent, and above all, remember that peer-to-peer rumormongering is not equal to an actual victim's testimony. It should always be taken with an immediate grain of salt, and examined carefully before you recirculate it or take other action.

*Within the scope of "being women, and therefore obviously affected by misogyny".

I have no opinion on fluorosensitive or catgirlforeskin or any of the other people mentioned and obviously do not think predstrogen deserved an ounce of the persecution she received. So this isn't about that. This post is to say: yes white trans women trying to wave criticism of their behavior aside as 'just more transmisogyny' is a problem that exists, doesnt mean that every white trans woman does it, doesnt mean that they face no real oppressions, just means that it's pervasive enough a problem to warrant scrutiny and criticism. There are people who understand that you are a marginalised class of woman, and these same people might also have legitimate reasons to think you're racist. Not the end of the world. :P

Terfs piss me off so bad they're saying that everyone talking about predstrogen and not nex benedict is because "no one cares about women" no you asshole it's fucking transandrophobia

Nex was not a fucking woman and predstrogen is one

Yes it's a GOOD THING that people are talking about the staffs transmisogyny and the terfs are saying that we only care because it's "about a man" which is not fucking true.

And yes it fucking sucks that not enough people are talking about nex but it's not a woman's issue because they're not a woman damn it

They're so backwards