#most of the sources are terfs and terfs citing nazis. one of the sources is saying the am i a girl website is grooming :)))

[gremlingirlsmell]

ngl if your hitpiece about a subgroup transfems starts with "I think transmisogyny is real, BUT" you know youre gonna read the most egregious transmisogynistic drivel

[shadowmaat]

Mullet Wig, the Llama King

New drama just dropped!

I think we've all noticed that our favorite hellsite has some... issues when it comes to moderating toxic groups: Nazis, transphobes, TERFs, extremists of every stripe, etc.

In fact, there seems to be a trend where the victims of those groups are more likely to suffer consequences than the perpetrators themselves. Even in my tiny little mud puddle among the tumbleweeds I've heard things.

So when Our Kitty of Hacking, who has the bonus of being a reliable source, shares a story of a trans woman being banned from the site, I go digging.

In THIS corner we have a trans woman buckling under the weight of harassment and stalking. She's made multiple appeals to the mod squad for help and been continually ignored.

In frustration, she makes a post wishing for cartoonish violence to happen to Our Supreme Overlord... and gets banned.

In THAT corner we have Our Supreme Overlord, who bought a site that has never been profitable, couldn't turn a profit, and decided to shove it in the corner.

Under a deluge of complaints about the banning, he feigns having the high ground and cites the reasons why he's totally right and everyone else is wrong.

Point the first: "We have queer folks on staff, so we can't be queerphobic! They've never complained!"

Having queer peeps on staff doesn't mean much. For most companies it's just a checkmark to show how cool and inclusive they are. It doesn't mean they're treated well, it doesn't mean their concerns are listened to or addressed, and it doesn't mean that they speak for the entire community. Also? Just because they don't say anything doesn't mean they don't have objections. "fear of losing your job" is a hella big reason to keep your mouth shut.

"There was unmarked sexually explicit material and that's against our TOS!"

There's a difference between "showing off results of surgery while fully clothed" and "sexually explicit material" you absolute corncob.

"There were threats of violence!"

A Looney Tunes-style threat, especially one couched as "I hope" rather than "I'm going to" is not something to be taken seriously.

Also? The victim you've chosen to vilify was also receiving threats of violence- likely much more realistic and specific- and yet those threats were apparently not found to be in violation. Interesting how that works.

Additional point: You misgendered her. You fucking MISGENDERED HER. There is absolutely no excuse for that and you can't fucking claim you "didn't know" her pronouns. If you aren't sure, you FIND OUT before you go spouting self-defensive bullshit.

You've turned a blind eye to the hate groups and bad actors on here for years. Now, suddenly, when it's all about YOU, you suddenly find a way to moderate/remove anyone who hurts your fee-fees. C'mon, dude. I'll do a whipround to get you some mountaineering gear so you can finally get over yourself.

Just go back to ignoring us, you soggy cabbage.

[wirewitchviolet]

Actually, ALL the things you’ve picked up from TERFs about trans people are blatant lies, not just the things from after you caught on to what ridiculous hatemongers they are.

So the other day I saw someone talking about a piece of media that chose to indicate a character was trans by having that character’s bedroom decorated with some trans pride stuff and one of that characters parents’ having a little solidarity pin too to show that we’re going for “cool little fact you might not know” and not “tragic secret” with it. Responses to this had a lot of trans people cheering because hey that’s some nice clear cut representation, in a way that’s both totally unambiguous and realistic, while avoiding all the stupid crap cis people try when they go for positive trans representation like having a characters go around telling everyone their deadnames or casting people in drag or whatever, BUT there were also a ton of people responding to this, and not just bigots either, just absolutely losing their minds and bending over backwards to think of why a cis character would have a bedroom full of trans pride stuff, because the idea of this character they liked and thought was cool being trans just was not compatible with some unexamined BS or other they’d all internalized. So... let’s unpack that maybe?

So, trans people have been around for as long as people have been around. We’ve been over this plenty of times. Have a quick little video of things you can go look up if you need a refresher though.

It’s not impossible that transphobes have also been around forever, here and there. It’s baked into colonialism where like, we have the term “missionary sex” because creepy zealots went all over the world threatening and blackmailing people to only have sex in that position and they call it their “mission.” And there was the whole attempted total eradication of us by the nazis and all. Typically though these seems to come across in this very openly right-wing authoritarian “the very fact that you exist contradicts the collection of weird fantasies I need to believe to avoid the reality where I’m a pathetic idiot.”

In the grand scheme of things, the TERF approach of going “oh I’m actually a real bleeding heart feminist scientist who cares about children and the environment and it just turns out that when you really look at the data that I totally obtained through the actual scientific method and didn’t just completely pull out of my ass and counting on nobody ever asking me for sources unfortunately says trans people are baby-eating rapists with hulk powers who have infiltrating every position of power and influence, honest!” That one’s relatively new.

I’d hope that these days, it’s easy for most people to see through that. Like yeah, the real hardcore fascists will pretend to believe such propaganda is on the level in order to help push through new kinds of discrimination and rationalizations for violence, but anyone with a functioning contest and critical thinking skills isn’t generally too far away from seeing how these people just talk like the nazis they are when they aren’t actively drafting propaganda pieces, or there will be some virality to something like this-

...or this...

... or one of those “Parker Posie” videos where she’s just like cheering at a crowd of armed nazis and encouraging them to go on killing sprees, and when you see that stuff you hopefully go “hmm... maybe the violent people who can’t stop talking about showing porn to toddlers aren’t on the level, and I shouldn’t trust their completely unhinged claims that the trans mafia are kidnapping children and replacing their genitals with grenade launchers or whatever.”

But that kinda relies on “being extremely online” and seeing the weird violent fantasies juxtaposed with the propaganda pieces citing the made up studies and such. And while this is a relatively new approach like I said, that’s relative to... the whole history of humanity. This particular tactic got started around the 70s or so, and back then, you absolutely didn’t see the terrifying mask-off moments. For that matter, you didn’t see the absurd propaganda pieces either. They didn’t really have the means to get those out to the public like they do now.

So the main way people used to get familiar with this sort of thing was, some foaming at the mouth bigot writes their big scaremongering screed and gets it printed in some unscrupulous magazine or whatever. Then some screenwriter looking for inspiration stumbles across that and goes, “ooh, I can sensationalize this weirdness to make this exploitation thriller I’m working on feel like it’s grounded in something,” and tada, here’s half a century of movies and TV filtering the absolutely bonkers propaganda and convincing the average person a typical trans woman is like a linebacker who just busted out of a mental institution treating some weird multiple identities time-sharing a single body disorder caused by Some People Are Just Born Crazy Syndrome who then immediately put on a slinky black dress and started murdering women to steal their pituitary glands to make love potions and maybe also skinning them to make bodysuits, then seducing men so they become gay or something.

Anyway, that’s all exactly as made up as the grenade launcher thing. Trans people don’t have weird brain problems, aren’t sex weirdos, aren’t serial killers, aren’t crossdressers, or any of a dozen other lies that were taught to you as facts your whole life. Please get over all that nonsense conditioning and reach a point where you understand there is no inherent conflict between being trans and being a tiny acrobatic girl with cool hair or whatever. That’s a weird thing to be unable to square in your mind.

[raptorific]

#yeah i am kinda in the middle here #it's really good that a reputable publication has picked it up and vetted the story and provided more details #because now it's pretty much undeniable #(although I could have sworn Rolling Stone or Vice or someone did that last summer??? am I going crazy?) #however#'well one of the three reporters from the podcast is a terf so I won't listen to/read it and make up my own mind about the allegations'#was a shitty weasel position that i didn't/don't really respect#the source was not easily discredited #rachel johnson was not at all the person apparently leading the story #and most of the people i saw leaning heavily on that were people who really did not want to believe the women or engage with the story #i was also skeptical about the source so I yanno examined the transcripts of the podcast to get a sense of what they were working with #and it was almost exactly the same material we're seeing now #AND following the podcast more women came forward #neil gaiman #neil gaiman allegations #not exactly disagreeing with op here to be clear #more using op as a proxy to examine some of the things i've seen people saying#sorry

Yeah, if "one of the three reporters" on anything is a TERF, that tanks the credibility of the whole thing, the same as if one of the three reporters on a story was a klansman or a nazi, even if they're not a lead. The people who said the original source was Not Credible were not simply burying their heads in the sand because they didn't want to believe it. Pretty much all of those people, as soon as there was a Real Source, immediately took up the cause on this one.

If you're telling the truth, then having members of a hate group on your team is a really bad idea, because it means you lose credibility with the public, and has the net result of burying the True Things you're saying instead of shining a light on them.

The whole point I'm making here is that there is a reason no Legitimate Sources were reporting on The Podcast for months and months and months, and that's because the podcast is not (and in fact all podcasts are not) a credible source. It's the same situation as documentaries-- they're presented as Informational but they are held to no standard of accuracy or truthfulness whatsoever. The reason they were able to report on the allegations several months earlier than all the Real Publications is because they did not have to trouble themselves with things like "journalistic integrity" or "fact-checking" or "verification."

I also reviewed those transcripts, and again, the sources were opaque and the reporting was not credible. I believed the allegations from day one-- behind closed doors basically all the Gaiman Fans who heard the podcast allegations were like "yeah man that sounds like something he'd do"-- but like hell if I was going to cite that shitty dubious podcast as a source. I, like pretty much everyone else who said "the source isn't exactly reliable," was waiting to actually be able to win the "he did it" argument instead of citing a source that could so easily be immediately dismissed.

And, crucially, they were not working with the same material we're looking at now. There are significant new bombshell allegations in the Vulture article that were not in the podcast because, again, the podcast didn't really do much of an investigation to verify their story. They didn't ask any of the right questions. They didn't get a lot of the important information. This is because they're podcasters, not journalists. Which, as was the point of the whole post, is why it was right of journalists to take the allegations seriously enough to bother investigating them properly, and why it was wrong of the podcasters to do such an unprofessional, slapshod, no-credibility job "supporting the victims."

I wish people would understand that it is actually a good thing when allegations of sexual misconduct are thoroughly investigated, leaving no stone unturned, and that most survivors of sexual assault who've come forward are not lucky enough to have people take their story seriously enough to look into it in good faith, verify it, and post a long, exhaustively researched researched article informing everyone that they're telling the truth.