ProtoDot

alright one more take before i shut the fuck up. i wholly believe the coming weeks is going to be the make it or break it period of cohost and it's staff--and it all depends on how they're going to handle the transmisogyny problem seeding itself here that was directly brought from transandrophobia truthers, people who sit uncomfortably close to the TERF table who migrated from tumblr to here.

you may vocally support porn and allow porn to exist on this website, you get free reign to set your pronouns here, it's a small anti-corporate site that chooses to go against the grain of the enshittification of the internet, but do you allow trans women to exist comfortably on this site? are you going to protect trans women from the relentless pedojacketing, the entirely fabricated claims that we face in order for transmisogynists to justify our harassment, and the inherently hostile culture that trans women are forced to survive in that has been propagated by sites like tumblr?

a good solid chunk of us i'd reckon migrated from tumblr to here SO we could avoid the shadowbans we faced on tumblr, to avoid the outright brazen searchbanning of the "tgirl" tag like what tumblr did, to avoid getting permanently banned and our blogs getting annihilated forever for no reason like we had to do on tumblr, and to avoid the TERF harassment campaigns on tumblr.

there's really no good place left for us to go, and i like cohost even if it's clunky! and YES, there's absolutely going to have to be uncomfortable decisions to be made about dealing with the transmisogyny problem on this site--but if my years of moderation experience is anything to go off of when i ran basically Lord Of The Flies: Homestuck Discord Edition, the unspoken unfortunate truth about moderations is that you HAVE to make uncomfortable decisions. it isn't easy, but you have to take the issue out at it's source before it starts to fester.

and i'd hate to see cohost's staff annihilate their goodwill much in the same way that tumblr's staff did. as i've said. as i've always said. when trans women are ringing a five-alarm fire? you listen to them. you help them. you don't let them burn, you don't giggle to yourself and throw napalm into that fire. you help them. you uplift them. you give them a space where they can just. exist. in peace

remember furry life online? if you don't, a brief summary is that it was a furry art website that briefly caught on when furaffinity made a few back-to-back questionable decisions around summer 2020, most notably their dodgy record when it came to getting rid of zoophiles. it briefly picked up at the lead of a bunch of fatfur artists, and literally, for a brief moment, furry life online had the chance of the century to do what most art sites tried and failed to do--actually exceed furaffinity. all the furry life online admins had to do was to continue to enforce the pre-existing rules that people found fair, and maintain the site as a whole.

...so, instead, furry life online's owners immediately waffled about changing what they constitute as zoophilia. in addition, their age rating metrics changed overnight to include truly baffling things such as "a swear is immediately mature, 5 swears is an adult", and most infamous of all, the spine test: whether or not a character was considered a feral animal hinged entirely on the verticality of the spine, of all things. this naturally broke when it came to things like taurs or characters that are merely hunchbacks. for some godforsaken, pokemon characters were instantly treated as zoophilia no matter what. this culminated in the absolutely gobsmacking addition of the "waist test": basically, if a character's waist was too large proportional to their body, the image was immediately mature or adult, no ifs, ands, or buts.

and with one fell swoop, practically overnight, furry life online lost all of its userbase--starting with the very people who brought everyone to it, and working its way from there--meanwhile furaffinity had started to clamp down on the very issues people were leaving it over, so many users just. moved back to it. furry life online was a ghost town for approximately a year and a half before shutting down at some point in the summer of 2021. tellingly, nowhere can we find an exact date of closure. nobody even cared to say when it died.

furry life online had gone from a site that had the chance to usurp one of the greatest sites in a specific niche, and then when presented with that chance, did everything to throw it all away, shoo away the very people bringing new blood in, and vanished without a trace, forgotten, as the site it was trying to replace only asserted itself even harder in the coming years.

...

this post is about cohost's (mis)handling of rising harassment against transfems.

made thw mistake of checking and personally i think its pretty cool that everything i've talked about vis a vis "hey it's pretty unreasonable + pretty textbook transmisogyny to antagonize a woman on her ventposts and then act like she's the bull in the china shop for snapping and telling someone to fuck off (extra mean flavor)" has been picked apart to the basest possible strawman of "this clique of invaders just wants free reign to tell everyone to kill themselves with no consequences" . great crowd

i'm genuinely pretty floored by it all truth be told. like, it takes a pretty ghoulish lack of any empathy whatsoever to sit there and armchair psychoanalyze rita, myself, and the other trans women who got ran off of tumblr And Then, Additionally, come to the conclusion that we are simply hysterical, discourse-poisoned crabs in a bucket, out of touch with reality, and have a ego-driven need to create the most toxic environments possible to fuel our supposed victim complexes.

like. it is fully unreal to act like the aggrieved party in a scenario where the conversation is predicated on a woman fleeing harassment, talking about the subject matter of that harassment in detail, being told point-blank that it isn't real, and then having a hundred people all throw their arms up in total horror and start a side-wide debate about whether or not she (or anyone else who came with her) should be allowed to stay when she isn't very nice about it.

its very easy to sidestep any of the material facts, of course, so long as you strip away literally everything that isn't "a lady said kys online at me". that makes it very easy actually to then chalk up any criticism or friction as the result of The Dregs seeping out, that tumblr's recessed backwater is leaking into the fresh water supply, and that the hole in the wall simply needs to be patched up.

consider that the catalyst of this entire scenario was her talking about the pretty dire and increasing phenomenon of tme trans people aligning themselves Against tma ones as a reaction to discussions about intercommunity misogyny, and in increasingly radical ways. the response was mostly confusion, aggression, and attempts at junior sleuthing to try to get to the "real" bottom of all this.

that's what makes it so truly comical to me that the assertion across the board has been that this is all the result of tumblr being a shitty little microcosm, that the problems there don't exist in the Real World, and certainly could never exist here. the reality is that you've had a pleasant little bubble, largely untouched by the outside world, for quite a while. when confronted with the ideas and struggles of another group of people, you were woefully unequipped to handle it, and would much rather build a narrative that this is entirely our fault - the result of pure mania and nothing more.

a few days ago i very, very vaguely touched on the idea that this website isn't ready for a conversation about what actually happened on tumblr, what the real driving force behind the last mass harassment wave was, and that people would much rather stick to the very digestible narrative of an incompetent ceo with personal beef. i locked shares on that post because i saw some somewhat concerning waves in the water - but i was hoping that, with time, my paranoia would be proven wrong. you've all been working very, very hard to prove it right.

Read this post. Scroll back up and hit read more. Don't ignore our plight

Somehow he managed to wiggle his big butt under the sofa. If you wanted proof cats are liquid, here you go.