i think in general it is very easy to conceptualize a company or organization as 'having opinions,' in no small part because they themselves actively promote that, but in reality the customer service and public outreach is done by tons of random people with their own random perspectives.
which results in cases like this, where tumblr as a website may be hostile to trans women, but the majority of the people you try to talk to about it are NOT, and the company isn't on paper, so it becomes much, much harder to address the problem. if you call someone and say 'hey tumblr's sexist,' and that person, as the current voice of tumblr, goes 'well hang on, i'm not sexist, so i think the company probably isn't either,' then no one will get anywhere.
it's the same problem with like, when i call social security about my disability benefits, the individual i speak to isn't an asshole. doesn't change the fact that the aggregate of all their policies and standards results in an extremely dehumanizing experience. what it DOES do is obfuscate who or what is to blame for the problem. when something is made up of so many moving parts, any single part can easily wash their hands of the problem until somehow no one at all is taking responsibility. systems suck.
like this isn't a bug, its a feature of large companies. they explicitly talk about it* in my business ethics classes (ugh) that i'm taking right now. the higher-ups dont want to be responsible for the behavior of the random front-line workers, and the front-line workers ''shouldn't'' be held responsible for the way the company presents itself. it results in zero accountability anywhere, a shambling mass of processes that are mostly working to their own end. many of which sprung up on their own with very little human input or forethought at all.
the point is that reform needs to keep all this in mind to be successful, it's a very difficult beast to combat, and mostly requires a lot of very slow and boring victories. a lot of 'this specific process fucking sucks, can we replace it with a better one,' one at a time, until the aggregate is less bad.
*they talk about the many ways you can't blame various people for things 'the company' does. they then turn around and say the company can't be blamed for individual employees. they do NOT state the obvious conclusion that no one can be blamed for anything. it's all very transparent.
thinking about this again bc of pride month, and yeah, it still really really sucks that "tumblr is a hostile environment to lgbt+ people in general, and trans women in specific" is true at the same time as "tumblr as a company purports to be super inclusive and looooves trans women."
like i dont know the solution here, other than continuing to demand transparency and accountability so we can SEE who, specifically, is behind every transphobic moderation decision, and why there aren't any working checks in place. is it a company wide culture, or just a few very very influential assholes? or is it actually a passive process driven by many smaller biases that seem minor on their own, but all add up to outright hostility, like the social security thing? we can't know for sure, even if we suspect, because they won't admit the problem actually exists. because SURELY The Company is its own entity that is consistent with the values stated in their press releases! you wouldn't call poor sweet Tumblr The Company mean names, would you?
The Company is really like, an ecosystem of decisions. Ecological thinking and ecological solutions apply.
