callout posts targeting marginalized people can take deceptive forms.
...here, OP neglected to mention that blog is run by a trans woman. looking up "trans" on that blog immediately revealed this post:
in fact, another user pointed this out in the callout post's replies:
the first word in her bio was her name: Alice. here i'll discuss what happened to her, with her permission, though the analysis is my own.
in those situations, it's not hard to pause and ask yourself: "hey, this is a woman's name, maybe she's trans". but no one seemed to bother, and oddly, the callout post didn't gender her: "a blog" "someone" "y'all"...
she doesn't see her work as pornographic or fetish art, as OP implies. she sees it as artistic nudity. she knows her followers are often drawn to the erotic aspect, but it's something she can't do much about.
anyway, Alice's blog was terminated on July 29th.
that's right! you can call to mass-report a trans woman's blog because she makes evil gross nasty art of... trans women, naked, just vibing.
you can avoid gendering her, render her invisible, deny her voice, deny her authorship, accuse her of fetishizing her own body. you can paint yourself a noble defender of harassed trans women who "do porn", while you harass one of them and paint her as the outsider aggressor.
you gain social capital. she'll lose her donation posts, she'll be cut off from her online friends, she'll get sent hate mail. if she's lucky. but i've seen what happens to transfems who get "exposed" for daring to touch the yucky AI devil, if they get enough attention. they get pedojacketed, sent gore, doxxed. TWERFs and fascists join in on the fun.
a hot allostatic load so woke, even transfems can do it to each other!
don't investigate who you're about to attack. trans women aren't into evil things like AI, right? if they are well, either they aren't really trans women... or they deserve it. you don't even need to examine how it depicts trans women: it's AI, so it's automatically evil.
just read the callout post: AI. yucky. this is a violation of your god-given right to use tumblr without AI users, marginalized or not, existing on it. and art of nude women... that's basically the same as "porn" and "doing porn". yucky things that are porn are even yuckier, don't ask yourself why you feel that way, let it wash over you and push you into a blind rage. the good porn makers get punished by tumblr's staff and userbase, but not the evil porn makers?
unfair. fix this. send tumblr's staff and userbase to punish them. you don't have to figure out her gender, her pronouns, her transness, her class position. let people's imaginations run wild so they can call her a techbro guy dude in the notes. it doesn't matter who she is anyway.
she could say she's a trans woman and beg you to stop. you wouldn't. because it's not about protecting trans women. it's about you.
it's about your favorite reactionary moral panic. you want to protect real art, real trans women, real porn. real transfem porn artists. you can sleep soundly, because no real person was harmed here. AI art makes itself, it doesn't require people, it makes you less of a person anyway.
in this case, the OP of the callout is a U.S. citizen, and uses tumblr to advertise the self-published queer romantasy she sells on patreon. she targeted Alice, a trans woman outside the U.S., who uses tumblr to post transfem AI pin-ups as a hobby and link her HRT donation post.
are there maybe any capitalist incentives pushing patreon artists to feel threatened by AI? to want to socially destroy working-class queer people for their "unfair competition", even hobbyists? are people in the USA in a position of power over all the rest?
western countries are wealthy enough to pay workers a fair bit extra, so they're not working sweatshops all their lives. enough money to start a small business, encouraged by capitalist ideology. this is true in the USA more than anywhere else. achieve stability, autonomy and prestige by being your own boss, so it goes. but every time a new technology appears, small businesses struggle to keep up, they fear for the future. and capitalism pressures workers to be reactionaries, to act on this fear by destroying other workers. those tech industry bootlickers!
you're an "anti-capitalist" anarchist? they're competing unfairly with you, so it's pro-worker to destroy them. they're marginalized working-class queer who struggle to pay the bills? they can't be, or they're traitors, so it's pro-queer to destroy them. they're not even competition, not a material threat, they just consume evil services and create evil images? that's an ideological threat, so it's progressive to destroy them. win the culture war, the war to produce and consume goods correctly, that's how you beat capitalism!
and let's not forget: english isn't Alice's first language. she uses translation apps, which have been AI-powered for a decade and which "smell like" AI text now more than ever. the figure of the pervert porn creep or AI slopmaker looks even more despicable when they talk weird, huh? maybe it's AI translation, ew. or it's a "bot" and not even a person behind the screen, so you can verbally abuse them.
don't get me started on the overlap between transfems, nude/porn/sex work, and new tech/software. Alice is a hobbyist doing artistic nudity for free, but what if a trans woman was selling some actual porn of trans women to pay the bills? would her using AI justify any of this? you know why marginalized people turn to sex work, do the fucking math.
all of this - starting from the material fears at the source to the violent transmisogynistic ideological campaign at the end - is a feature of capitalism. not a bug. is that what we're going to do? let the ruling class make us afraid of AI, then channel this into frenzied attacks to socially murder marginalized people, even of our own demographic? not even for our own tangible benefit, just for vibes? will we stay silent, let it slide, participate, stoke, start this violence?
your "anti-AI pro-transfem" callout targeted a trans woman. she lost her HRT donations.
that's what you did. all you accomplished, either by being irresponsibly incompetent, or on purpose. and you know the funny thing about transfems outside the USA? often our access to HRT is worse, actually.
some of you love, messy, complicated queer characters. but never, ever real people. you talk about queer people getting shadow-banned en masse and you turn around and do it. you talk about empathizing with the human behind the screen, not feeding into outrage cycles, "block and move on". then you leap in for the kill. physician, fix thy heart.
enough letting U.S.-centric wannabe-small-business liberals dictate who we harass to "fight" transphobia and capitalism. ENOUGH!
we must reject any "pro transfem" position based on spreading harassment campaigns. especially ones that strangely forget to gender the target or tell you anything about them. weirdly we don't see a ton of callout posts against cis men- for "porn", for AI, or in general. huh! maybe because callout posts only work when you're punching down.
you can't fight for queer liberation if you are indistinguishable from a facebook conservative spreading moral panics. you must investigate! you must not talk nonsense! your trans liberation politics must be transfeminist, and more than that, grounded in material reality, with concrete goals. you cannot give in to disgust-reflex reactionary bullshit.
you need politics with a coherent view of automation technology, of oppressed people, of action. liberalism, anarchism, "leftism" will not do. i am a communist, not because it's the leftiest leftism possible, but because it is a radically different liberation approach and by far the most successful one worldwide. an approach that provides the tools you need to understand AI, and fight it effectively, where you need to.
Karl Marx and communism were good enough for the Black Panthers, and they're good enough for me. but if they're not good enough for you, at least stop letting knee-jerk reactionary sentiment control you into hurting other marginalized people for the sake of vibes. stop tolerating callouts and reactionary behavior in your social circles, or anywhere.
