mariken

so i'll give you a brief run-down but first i do want to make a point that i'm not especially fond of referring to basically anything as Discourse. i think it really uncharitably flattens situations and immediately puts anyone trying to have a serious discussion on the backfoot bc you already have the hurdle to overcome of "what's all this Unnecessary Hubbub you're kicking up"

anyway. i've written some variation of this at least a dozen times this past week, and i'd like this to be the last one, so i'm going to try to be as detailed as possible without making this post 4000 paragraphs long:

• a group of malicious tme trans people, believing that almost all transfeminist theory and discussions of transmisogyny were specifically bigoted against them, engaged in a nearly year-long campaign on tumblr of mass reporting, stalking, and harassment of all kinds against avery predstrogen, along with several others who defended her or were even just adjacent to her presence
• avery was given a lifetime ban from tumblr + had every single one of her posts purged, supposedly for sexual content according to the support emails she recieved (despite her content staying within the updated community guidelines)
• the ceo of automattic (tumblr's parent company), matt mullenweg, personally stepped into the discussion to try and reframe all of it as a response to her use of "death threats" against staff and other users, with his only piece of public evidence being a very comical post wishing that he would die from his car being covered in hammers and then exploding (notably, not a death threat by basically any definition)
• tumblr staff also took this opportunity to begin deleting dozens of other blogs for seemingly no reason other than a) they were defending avery publicly, and b) they were also trans women. i'm willing to bet this was at least partially matt's intervention, considering that many of those same women were people he personally started invading the dm's of to argue with (including myself, btw, although i managed to avoid the actual ban hammer somehow)
• the crowd that kicked off this entire debacle were all very empowered by this series of decisions, with their harassment reaching an even higher pitch than before. any trans woman who had participated in the discussion was fair game. i had to delete many years of my own internet history because i was being stalked and harassed by people who wanted to use that information to doxx and harm me socially and physically.
• a bunch of us, including avery, end up here on cohost. avery in particular wasn't super impressed with the featureset and philosophy of the website (a sentiment a lot of us share), but she still used it as more or less a vent blog
• avery makes a post about how she sometimes pops in to tumblr just to see how the discussion is going, making fun of and lamenting the fact that that same group of shitheaded transmisandry truthers have been really emboldened by the whole affair, all posting increasingly unhinged transmisogynist takes such as "amabs want to subjugate all afabs"
• this post confuses a lot of people who clearly hadn't encountered this type of thing before, and that confusion results in a lot of blunt questions, aggression, assumptions that her post is somehow bigoted against trans men, and weird attempts at sleuthing to figure out what the "real" situation actually is
• one user decides that it's an awesome idea to share the post with a comment that boiled down to "everyone in this thread sucks lol", which after This Entire Nightmare pisses avery off enough that she says "kys then lol i don't give a fuck 👍"
• most of the people in that thread, along with about a dozen others, all throw their hands up in shock and disbelief that she would ever deploy the wicked three-letter-acronym. they begin cooking up post after post about how all this Tumblr Culture coming here is Toxic, Channer-Like, and Unacceptable - despite the very obvious fact that deliberate antagonism baiting out a harsh reaction is like, The Classic Method of isolating and ejecting trans girls from their communities
• i, and many other women who also got the boot from tumblr along with avery, got Pretty Pissed Off at the whole affair, and started defending her and talking about how completely despicable it is to reframe the conversation as "this lady said a mean word to me for No Reason :("
• this incites the anti-tumblr crowd, leading to the mentions, inboxes, and comment sections of many women to get flooded with extremely bad faith argumentation and hostility
• one user in particular is very blatantly antagonizing people, and invades the comment threads of literally every single post i had made for two entire days, responding to myself and anyone else already present with paragraph after paragraph arguing, more or less, that This Website Was Perfect Before You Baddels Showed Up (that's barely paraphrased, by the way. you can go back to check)
• i choose not to engage, post some cropped screencaps showing off how a solid chunk of my notifications tab became nothing but their stupid nonsense, and block them
• immediately after (like, within 10 minutes) i get an anon message, very obviously from that person, evading my block just to continue antagonizing me
• i deploy my own variant of the three-letter-acronym, choosing to hit the bitch with the classic "kys <3" combo
• shortly afterwards, cohost staff then takes down avery and i's posts. hilariously, i get the added stipulation that i should report the anon that was "supposedly" block evading, which is comical considering the post in question a) illustrates that it was happening pretty clearly, and b) also states that i blocked the anon and elected to only post a screenshot of it instead, making it literally impossible for me to actually follow through with their request. any further communication beyond that between myself and cohost staff has been full radio silence on their part, btw
• the anti-tumblr crowd are then emboldened by this (are you noticing a pattern yet), some of them self-deputizing as functionally the cohost mall cop brigade in order to Hold People Accountable (read: mass reporting anyone they think is violating tos)
• said crowd Also begins discussing how "transmisandry/transandrophobia" is to blame for all of this, how terminology and discussions made by trans women about transmisogyny are impenetrable/indecipherable, and also engages in extremely creepy armchair psychiatry in an attempt to paint us as hysterical, incoherent, and a danger to ourselves enough that avery and the rest of us should all be banned "for our own good"
• because of the way this website functions (or, more accurately, Doesn't function), this entire discussion is telephone gamed to hell through one trillion separate vagueposts, with the entire thing getting buried under the sentiment "ummmm just don't say kys okay? it's not that hard :)"

so yeah, it's been a real bear of a month