This may end up being one of my longer posts, and possibly the most important post I'll ever make. If you're reading this, I beg you to save it so you can find it whenever you have time to take out of your day and read it in its entirety.
Since it was mentioned in a post I saw yesterday, I'd like to leave a couple of videos from The Alt-Right Playbook series by Innuendo Studios. This video below is the one that was explicitly referenced in the post. It's less than 5 minutes long.
This next one is one that very well illustrates a specific bad faith rhetorical strategy that originated in very right-leaning online spaces in the early to mid 2010s (mainly 4chan and Reddit) and was then disseminated to other social media with more politically diverse userbases when the channers and redditors started using it (among others discussed in the series) to obfuscate, silence, or "takedown" arguments by progressives. I'm highlighting this particular one because I think it is very commonly used now on Tumblr among users calling themselves "transfeminist" in a way that destabilizes and obfuscates actual feminist analysis. (I don't think everyone who does it is equally aware of what they're doing - this is a strategy that does not require a complete awareness of its results on the part of the user. However, many people who use it do very well know what they are doing and feign ignorance, as the strategy is one that has plausible deniability built into it. The video goes into this.) The video is 18 minutes long.
I would sincerely recommend anyone who considers themselves a progressive and who frequently comes across bad faith arguments made by people who try to smuggle in regressive ideas in the form of quippy statemens, "owns", gaslighting, goalpost-shifting, etc. to watch the entire series. It has many parts but most of the videos are pretty short and the whole thing is really digestible and simply phrased.
More specifically to the topic of this blog, the recent trans community """infighting""" is one where a contingent of 4chan and old-school Reddit expatriates have been pushing increasingly antifeminist beliefs into the previously relatively progressive and feminist demographic of queer and trans Tumblr users, moving the overton window slowly but surely to the right on issues like rape culture, domestic abuse, reproductive oppression, and the way gendered socialization produces unequal consciousness and thus unequal material results, while gradually discouraging direct engagement with the history of feminist political action and feminist theory and literature.
Now, I guarantee you that I have been online for longer than at least 80% of the people reading this. This is both because I am old (#MillennialCringe) and because I, like many nerdy girls and "girls" of the 00s, was a very early adopter (never let them tell you that the internet was solely or mostly male until X recent date. It's a sexist lie.) So as someone who has been online for a very long time and has been immersed in online political discussion for almost as long, let me tell you, the Internet's historical memory is extremely short.
The reason people who unironically believe in things like AFAB privilege, that "people with a vagina can get justice for rape if their rapist is AMAB" (quite literally the opposite of how rape has worked for the entirety of human history, BTW!), that cis men are closer to being "TMA" than anyone AFAB or even cis men are TMA (where to be "TMA" is to universally suffer the most severe gendered victimization and violence, since "literally everybody AFAB has privilege over ["TMA" peope]"), that "there is a type of power that AFAB people hold that cis men don't" due to "having access to cis womanhood", who proclaim their "little fondness for cis women as a class" while having "no quarrel with the cisgender men", who argue in favor of introducing "nuance" to the condemnation of a rapist as an offender and wonder whether it is even possible to know if or when rape has occurred, who perpetrate the classic MRA talking point of "false rape accusationss", can insist that they are the indefatigable feminist activists being harassed and persecuted, while the people who point out the physical, psychological, medical, legal, economic, reproductive, occupational, and sexual damage that being classed as female has come with for the majority of human history* are maligned as "MRAs", or "gamergaters" with so little pushback from anyone, is that the true nature and history of those fascist, racist, and antifeminist movements has been memoryholed, even as little as <15 years after they happened. At the same time, its agents have demonstrably succeeded in normalizing their language and beliefs throughout the entire Internet, to the point that the average Twitter or Tiktok feed of 2026 looks not unlike the front page of /pol/ in 2014.
I believe it has at this point become fundamental for anyone who considers themselves a progressive to actually educate themselves on the history, tactics, demographic makeup, language, and aesthetics of those movements. This is especially true for anyone who considers themselves a feminist and who wants to spread feminist beliefs, participate in feminist analysis and work to end sexist oppression. Sexism has always been one of the chief values used to attract people, mainly white cis men who felt disenfranchised from masculinity, to these environments and radicalize them. (The other big one of course being racism.) Here is a video in the Alt-Right Playbook series on how such radicalization worked in detail, it's longer than the others but very important, please, please watch it.
It's especially important to note that I don't believe it to be a coincidence that these movements gained traction not thanks to platforming or support from "classic" conservative hubs but thanks to the radicalization and infiltration of nerdy online spaces with a predominant white male presence. It is equally not coincidental, in my opinion, that to the sexist, racist men in these communities, Tumblr was seen as the stronghold of the annoying, whiny, self-victimizing feminists. This was due to the fact that Tumblr (and some other often female-created and female-moderated fannish spaces, like FF.net, LiveJournal, and later Ao3) was where all the nerdy girls and women ended up gathering, in order to be able to discuss nerdy interests somewhere where they wouldn't be subject to misogynistic harassment. All of this takes on even more significance when you remember that Gamergate, and the broader culture of anti-feminist movements it both was an early part of and further sparked, started specifically as a reaction to feminist journalist critiquing sexist ideology and content in video games, and more broadly to the growing voice of women in the culture of nerd hobbies.
(From Meme Wars, Chapter 3: Gamers Rise. Full citation below)
(From "Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games". Full citation below.)
One last thing I want to note is that many of the antifeminist talking points and stereotypes - and their related imagery - that were created at the time by these communities seem to have been recycled into talking points and imagery that is now used against transmasculine people and NB people AFAB (though they do of course still get used against women.) There is a clear and straightforward lineage that can be traced from the "hysterical feminazi" to the "whiny bitchboy transandrocunt", from the "crazy bitch who wants to cuck videogames" to compensate for her inferiority to the "power-tripping TME using AFAB privilege to censor TMA expression", from the "cringe fat SJW screeching about being lithosexual" to the "ugly theyfab with giant tits who thinks pronouns make them oppressed" or "delusional dyed-hair pooner with zippertits and fandom brain." The place where this lineage can be seen most evidently is in the wojak-style cartoons produced in these sort of spaces, where the aesthetic similarity and the correspondence of the language use highlight the fact that there is a direct continuity between the antifeminist 4/8channers and Redditors of then and the antifeminist, anti-transmasculine, exorsexist posters of now. The latter's ideologies still often start off on Chan boards, and eventually spread to Reddit and Twitter and Instagram and Bluesky, with the difference that they now use Tumblr as an inbetween step to proliferate and solidify their ideas, having at least partially supplanted the native userbase of Tumblr ("woke snowflake SJW" types) but having retained the website's function as a petri dish for percolating ideas about LGBT/queer identity and feminism before they get "trickled down" to the rest of the LGBT/feminist internet. At the bottom of this post I will leave some images as examples. (TW for virulent misogyny, transphobia and racism, and for self harm scars)
Before that, some sources for further reading.
Articles and papers:
The only guide on Gamergate you will ever need to read (available on Removepaywall.com), Dewey, The Washington Post, 2014.
Chat logs show how 4chan users created #GamerGate controversy, Johnston, Ars Tecnica, 2014.
Under Trump, Gamergate Can Stop Pretending It Was About Games, Maiber, Vice, 2017.
Mobilizing Misogyny, DiBranco, PRA, 2017.
8chan, 8kun, 4chan, Endchan: What you need to know, Gonzalez, CNET, 2019.
Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games: A Review of the Literature, Wells et al., Games and Culture Journal, 2023.
Books:
Gendertrolling: How Misogyny Went Viral, Mantilla, ACB-CLIO, 2015.
This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, Phillips, MIT Press, 2015.
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Nagle, Zero Books, 2017.
Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History, Jane, Sage, 2017.
Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America, Friedberg, Dreyfuss and Donovan, Bloomsbury, 2022.
Now the images. This is just a sample of what I could find through a quick and dirty search, purely for illustrative purposes. (TW for virulent misogyny, transphobia and racism, and for self harm scars)
I’m going to add a few more videos that I think are relevant. I did not want to overload the thing with video links but I think these are also extremely relevant to the discussion.
This first video is a 4 minute long video from the series outlining another rhetorical strategy, one that I see self-proclaimed “transfeminists” of all genders use all the time against transmasculine and nonbinary people trying ti speak of their oppression.
The next two are historiographical videos, telling the story of Gamergate and adjacent movements in the early 2010s. The first one is about the vicious misogynistic and racist harassment of Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic with a relatively small Youtube channel and website in 2012-13. Sarkeesian was later also dragged into the “true” Gamergate of 2014. The video is only 9 minutes long.
This last video is much longer at 50 minutes, but it’s in my opinion an important and necessary watch. It tells the story of 2014’s Gamergate, starting from the harassment of game journalists Zoe Quinn, sparked by her abusive ex boyfriend on 4chan and blown up through private IRC chats.
"From researching historic twill patterns in museum collections to dyeing wool with Kool-Aid, Diné (Navajo) weaver and instructor Venancio Aragón interlocks research and experimentation to expand the visual and technical vocabularies of Diné weaving. Working on the Diné upright loom, Aragón is part of a generation of Diné weavers who reinterpret ancestral knowledge through experimentation, carrying the medium forward on their own terms. As he stated in our interview with him, “I am not a purist.”
Based in Farmington, New Mexico, Aragón is trained in cultural anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies, currently teaching at Diné College, the Navajo Nation’s tribal college. Before transitioning to full-time weaving and teaching, Aragón worked as an interpretive park ranger at the Mesa Verde, Aztec Ruins, Bandelier, and Petroglyph National Monuments, where he led tours and developed public education initiatives. He was born to the Tó’aheedlíinii (The Water Flow Together People) clan and born for the Naakaii (Mexican people). His maternal grandfather is of the Tsénahabiłnii (Sleeping Rock) clan, and his paternal grandfather is of the Naakaii (Mexican people)."
This is from 1966 and you can see over a hundred photos on the NYPL digital collections website. It is absolutely gorgeous. These are just a few of my favourites.
I’m sorry Europeans but America is the culmination of the European project of colonization, enslavement and capitalism. This is your child not claiming them doesn’t make them not yours. America is merely an extension and a continuation of Europe on other shores, as is Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
You’ve been more than happy to align yourself with America for these very reasons. It’s profitable, your own colonial ventures may even get backed up militarily by America and you can still seem progressive in comparison while being an accomplice.
a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.
care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.
connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims
gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme
glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.
ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme
life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure
taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies
the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care
islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support
baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies
gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.
hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste
anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care
palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon
dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram
certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.
So he said it can't be a Black. So I said, "For God's sakes, Judge Murphy, that's the whole point of the Goddamn story!" So he said, "No, it can't be a Black". Bill just called him up and raised the roof, and finally they said, "Well, you gotta take the perspiration off". I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, "Fuck you", and he hung up.
Just to add context for those not aware of the impact of this story.
The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.
They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.
The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.
The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.
The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.
Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.
Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.
The black character was not a caricature, or comedy relief, he was a main character in his own right, a human who "simply" was black.
Ok, but this story is sadly revolutionary even now.
That is not just a human who happens to be black, as far as every other character in this story is concerned this is the most important, maybe even the only human they ever see, who happens to be black.
As depressing as that is, but a black person just casually representing the entirety of humanity is a breathtakingly powerfull statement even today, a quarter of a century later.
Oh, guys, we just need a little to get to the middle of our goal We are close to 15,000 We need less than €820 Come on, guys! We just need 2% To reach 50% of the target.
As part of this process, the Kurdish movement offers a potentially useful tool to help the global Left break old attachments in pursuit of new organizational alternatives: its unique model of criticism and self-criticism. During daily or weekly sessions of what’s called “tekmil,” comrades in a given collective or commune systematically identify selfish, patriarchal, destructive, or unhelpful behavior patterns in themselves and their comrades.
Unlike the bitter haranguing associated with a Maoist struggle session, criticism in the Kurdish movement is seen as useful only if it leads to generative change. Tekmil is intended to be calm, productive, and therapeutic. Militants are not supposed to criticize the actions of individuals in isolation but rather refer to the aspects of their upbringing and socialization that have engendered the counterproductive behavior in question. For example, they might note a university-educated male comrade’s patriarchal replication of intellectual hierarchies, a city-dweller’s disrespect for the natural world, a Western internationalist’s Orientalizing fetishization of violence. At the same time, the individual being criticized has the responsibility to take the criticism seriously and implement concrete steps toward its resolution—for example, that patriarchal male comrade might step back from leading group study-sessions, volunteer for extra kitchen duty, and ask other male comrades to monitor his behavior in conversations.
In a sense, tekmil is marked by the same spirit as Adorno’s “negative utopianism,” expressing hopes for the new only through a radical assessment of the failures of the old. It seeks to cultivate revolutionary new personalities and collectives through a critique of what is capitalistic, patriarchal, and individualistic in the old. And this radical, negative, constructive process can help us not only on the individual but also on the organizational scale. As Nunes writes, “Perhaps we should start from the assumption that everything has failed.” Recognizing state socialism’s ultimate defeat by imperialist capitalism and the bloody suppression of would-be anarchist revolutions is not an excuse to wallow in melancholy for what could have been; it is an urgent reason to rethink both sets of tactics.
from Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment by Matt Broomfield
The reason most indie novels are written like the author is terrified of doing something wrong is because the overwhelming majority of indie novelists get their start by networking in the violent panopticon of the social media indie publishing community, which favours the people who are able to win at the social policing game.
I had heard of the whole messed up situation with this story, but I hadn't ever read the synopsis of the story before, and WOW
This story sounds like it could have been a brilliant exploration of gender and warfare and violence but instead it was attacked by people who didn't know how to confront a story that made them uncomfortable, and the author faced horrible consequences.
It's so important to be able to deal with stories that give you uncomfortable feelings in other ways than just attacking it. Being shown new perspectives sometimes has feelings of discomfort because it's an unfamiliar way of seeing the world.
Isabel Fall alluded to Nazi concepts in an edgy ambiguous Nazisploitation aesthetic that, if you read it in good faith, you could tell was ultimately in subversion of those concepts. However, the general sentiment of edgy South Parkian ambiguity caused the hypersensitive leftist critics to read her as a Nazi as a baseline assumption. It's the same phenomenon as The Boys viewers reading the (very Jewish) show as Nazi because of the presence of a likable Nazi character. Any attempt to put the brakes on it has everyone scrutinizing you as a Nazi, so the most extreme voices intimidate the rest into staying quiet.
When the detail that the writer was a trans woman (and a specific one people knew) had filtered into common knowledge, the consensus of the vocal detractors was that she had done Nazi actions equivalent to being a Nazi that hurt every trans woman, and it was their responsibility to terrorize her. When she ended up suicidal and swore off writing, that was viewed as a great victory against an enemy of trans women. (Not dissimilar from people harassing Jewish actress Aya Cash for portraying a Nazi on The Boys.)
Also, people like to single out N.K. Jemisin for participating, but she was pretty much doing what people expect of an ally: following the leading voices of the relevant minority, repeating their messages, and using her social capital to boost theirs. The problem was the trans women leading the mob. I find the presence of trans woman author Alexandra Erin more objectionable because she was run off Tumblr for being into vore and bondage and because she liked a post from a black submissive woman showing off a collar, which was framed as her wanting to enslave black people, so you would think she'd be sympathetic to a trans woman author stigmatized for being into edgy humor. Instead, she likened the story to firing randomly in the air and hoping only bad people would be hurt, when it should be clear innocents would likely be hurt, making the whole endeavor harmful. (Like being open about liking controversial fetishes on Tumblr?)
Edgy humor sets off mainstream leftists like Daleks sighting an enemy.
And there is some reason to say NK Jemisin was doing what people expect from an ally, but if this was the result, maybe it’s time we actually think about that a little.
Like, how many times can we see a marginalized creator get torn to bloody shreds by other marginalized people and well intended “Allies” who never actually looked at the evidence themselves and just went off what “the affected group” was saying? The queer experience is subjective as hell, and I can’t imagine any other marginalized experience is different. Maybe we should stop mob harassing people for making something without looking at the thing ourselves.
And it’s fine if you don’t want to look at a thing, but at this point I think we need to bring back the old rule that if you haven’t seen/read something, you ought to just not talk about it at all and admit you don’t know anything about the subject.
Because here's the other thing? The people who did this to Ms. Fall? Entirely other progs/lefties/libs. Not a single conservative was involved. It was all lefties attacking our own.
You will never see this happen to a more 'conservative' or even 'apolitical' (read: written by a white man from a white man's perspective) indie novel, because those perspectives aren't hounded like a transfem's are. They aren't expected to be perfect the way a transfem's are. By engaging in harassment campaigns like this, you are purely and totally making it harder for marginalized people to publish, because at the end of the day, they are the ones who lose their social support networks to harassment campaigns by the terminally online, while the mediocre white dude can just fucking ignore anything the twitter mob says.
I think it's important to point out that, if I am reading the interview she gave not long after it all went down correctly, not only did she get harassed until she gave up writing, she fucking went back in the closet.
Because there was little biographical information available about its author, the debate hinged on one question: Who was Isabel Fall? And that question ate her alive. When she emerged from the hospital a few weeks later, the world had moved on, but she was still scarred by what had happened. She decided on something drastic: She would no longer be Isabel Fall.
As a trans woman early in transition, Fall had the option of retreating to the relative safety of her legal, masculine identity. That’s what she did, staying out of the limelight and growing ever more frustrated by what had happened to her. She bristles when I ask her in an email if she’s stopped transitioning, but it’s the only phrase I can think of to describe how the situation appears.
Isabel Fall was on a path to becoming herself, and then she wasn’t — and all because she published a short story. And then her life fell apart.
...
After she checked out of the hospital, Isabel Fall ceased to be Isabel Fall. “I had a few other stories in the works on similar themes, and I withdrew them; that is the most concrete thing I can say that I stopped doing,” Fall says. “More abstractly, more emotionally, I have stopped trying to believe I am a woman or to work towards womanness. If other people want to put markings on my gender-sphere and decide what I am, fine, let them. It’s not worth fighting.”
That makes me so fucking angry every time I think about it that I want to spit or cry.
I have not been the subject of the level of intense, sudden, overwhelming attention that she has; I have been the target of a lower-volume, sustained campaign, and there is a reason that I call it "the acid fire hose." That shit will strip the fucking flesh from your bones.
So yeah. Of course indie authors flinch.
Honestly, there are plenty of books by indie authors, especially trans authors, that I've wanted to say, "I liked this mostly, but I really didn't care for [aspect]," but I was so concerned that I would cause problems that I fully just... didn't talk about the book at all bc I couldn't honestly just be like YUP I LIKED IT ALL.
The idea of a popular teenage subculture where girl & boys pretty much all dress the same feels impossible now but for a while it was reality and it was beautiful.
2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard
3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."
4. Zombies (which I would class as cannibals, since they were human and need to eat humans to live) have a root in Haitian folklore and represented enslavement.
adding that, if you can find it, cannibal culture by deborah root is about exactly this. the way the white western world is a hungry, destructive force that cannibalizes non-white cultures and creates wealth and status through the cannibal colonization of those cultures.
here's the intro
i almost think there's an essay in bell hooks' black looks about this too? yes! just checked, there's an essay called "eating the other"
gamechangershow
romaincrisis
pixelskylines
vaporwave
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
