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.
