Endurance Elixir

Enthusiastic pansexual woman in her 30s.

[maddiem4]

✨ My bio in bio 🫦

[transhuman-priestess]

Ph*t*m*tt is absolutely a transphobe but i sincerely doubt that his response to a change on his website being rolled back was 'ban a bunch of trans women.'

Absolutely not defending the mass-banning of trans women. I am a trans women myself, and I'd like to stop seeing my sisters get mass-banned but i really do think this is a case of tilting at windmills, friends.

[transhuman-priestess]

I think its very tempting at times like these to try and personify the social forces at work. The moderation on this site being impersonal and systematic rather than vengeful and petty is strangely comforting but I don't have any reason to believe that's the case.

[transhuman-priestess]

Wait, no, you're totally right. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. How could I be so stupid.

[transhuman-priestess]

It’s not that Matt and his cronies are sitting in San Francisco scheming about how to best fuck over the trannies. It’s that this whole site is a Jurassic park of over automation and it has close to a decade of systems that have pattern matched to target trans users, queer users, users of color, etc because that’s what is deemed “unfriendly” to Silicon Valley zeitgeist that pervades this place.

If it were just staff throwing a hissy fit and banning a bunch of random trans girls it’d be a much easier problem to fix. Unfortunately the rat king of code this place runs on is quite adept at targeting those users all on its own.

It’s an “accident” the way ICE arresting green card holders is an “accident.” It’s the result of a large, unaccountable machine grinding its way through all obstacles that stand in its way. They want to sweep the site for botnets, spam, and abuse. They have tools to do this. Who cares if a few faggots get caught up in it? Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

If they really truly wanted to put the screws to us then why did they reverse the ban? Why didn’t they cast a much wider net? I had a post encouraging people to send feedback with directions and a link. Why wasn’t I banned?

It’s all machine learning and ai crap applied to moderation, the same as it’s been for over a decade.

And if after all this you think I’m “making excuses” for staff or whatever, I don’t really know what to say to you. I get that everyone wants to feel important in some way. It can feel invigorating to play the underdog, the dissident, the outcast, but I just don’t think that’s what’s going on here.

In the end, it’s not personal, it’s just business.

[transhuman-priestess]

That’s what I’m SAYING

[maddiem4]

You know, I left this place (for the most part) for systemic transphobia months ago, with the asterisk that I have a tech devblog with an audience of fellow trans nerds, and I repost stuff from my actual personal site blog onto it. And when I do, two times out of three, I scroll around a little bit and say "yup. It happened again." The details vary every time, of course, but there's so reliably an it.

I think there's contexts where intention matters and contexts where it doesn't. And at this point, personally, because I don't really have an investment in trying to make Tumblr good someday, I think the question of whether Photomatt and co are deliberate scheming villains is kind of academically interesting but pointless, like asking which fictional character would win in a fight or something. The question, the answer, the process to get from one to the other, it tickles the brain but doesn't functionally matter. The purpose of a system is what it does. And we keep seeing what it does. Maybe that's not the purpose in staff's thought bubble when they show up at work every morning, but the contents of that thought bubble are none of my business, and the real world fallout for vulnerable members of the community probably should be, just to clear the very very low bar of ethical consumerism.

That said, I'm not reblogging to tell anyone what they should do, even if they agree with me. I'm generally pretty happy to have low presence here, and even as a choice that worked for me, it still had pros and cons. I think it's both a personal and open question what to do about the fact that Silicon Valley - like Hollywood next door - is glitz built upon endless underpaid labor, shallow as mop water on a wet floor, and incoherent even in the virtues it cares about signalling. The main difference is just that one of them holds a lot more lives in its hands because it can't say no to having more power.

[segamascott]

[dragongirlsweetie]

you don't understand the only way to keep children safe is to isolate them from everyone except the people who are statistically most likely to abuse them

[our-trans-punk-experience]

remembering nex benedict, one year on

Jan 11 2008 - Feb 8 2024

(Post was supposed to come out yesterday but got lost in drafts)

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

I am so very serious when I say that minors should have a legal and easily reinforceable right to say "I don't want to live with my parents (or other adult caretakers)/I don't want to be around that person/I don't want to go to that place" and actually get their wish accommodated. So much childhood trauma could be avoided or ended if children actually had the right to leave the situation or the person hurting them.

[queeranarchism]

By the way, this opinion and "the international adoption and foster care complex needs to be destroyed" go perfectly together.

Children need to be able to leave their parents, but where they go should be up to the child and the options available should give them as much possibility as possible to stay rooted in their own culture and community, to continue to see their friends, to see relatives that they do feel safe with, etc.

The system we currently have is not that. Instead of treating children like the inalienable property of parents, the system treats children like property to be shipped around based on supply and demand, prioritizing the needs of white, rich adults in the imperial core.

'Abolish international adoption' & 'destroy the foster care system and build alternatives based on children's rights and autonomy' are core parts of children's rights.

[sinonlynx]

hey quick question what the fuck

[sinonlynx]

Twitter ads sometimes get real weird sometimes but this is a whole other level

[maddiem4]

See for me, it's like "yeah yeah, the Time Knife, we've all seen it." But we haven't all seen it! Younger generations aren't normalized to this prayer warrior dumbfuckery from childhood. It's a sign that nature is healing, at least where it can. May this someday feel bizarre to all humankind.

[r0tt1ngmal1ce]

how do i explain this... gendered violence, misogynistic violence, the structure that exists to ensure it continues to be replicated is the same one that subjects children to being the property of adults which does not get to have any sort of agency (and which is the end result of misogyny and private property as all-encompassing social relations). the groups that benefit from understanding this the most are the transmisogynized (the most painfully subjugated by misogyny) and children, groups which of course overlap to create some of the most abused and traumatized of us.

so of course it fucking pisses me off that discussions of this are constantly being held away from children, away from transmisogynized children especially, because i know how fucking useful it would've been to understand why i was being raped the way i was when i was younger. because i know how much my life would've been better if i had anyone i felt i could talk to about any of this shit.

and of course it fucking pisses me off that the most harassment i keep receiving is not for being transfem but for being vocal about this. that this is the easiest vector to attack us from, the socially agreed upon fact that a trans woman near a child can only be an abuser who should be purged from society. it pisses me off for those of us who are also children and who are harmed the most from all of this. you don't care about children when you try to protect them from the scary pedophile tranny, what you care about is replicating the entire structure that creates their and our abuse in the first place.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

kill yourself pedo freak

this is a really good website where you can say things like "I'm a bit skeptical of anonymous accusations made against trans women given the high frequency of trans women being targeted with harassment campaigns that use flimsy or non-existent proof to frame them as sexual predators" and then you also immediately get jumped into the pedophile accusations and start receiving shit-tier suicide bait.

it's a neat rhetorical device that's designed to keep anyone from asking too many questions about a harassment campaign in progress for fear of being the next target themselves, which is definitely the kind of tactic used by people who aren't up to anything nefarious.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

also hey, if I may be so bold: I've been getting anons like this for HOURS because I reblogged a trans woman's post alluding to virulent stalking and harassment campaigns. we're not exactly beating the harassment allegations!

[crowwkui]

i missed them 𓅨 also finally drew ivy in full regalia!

[maddiem4]

Not censoring any screen names here. I do not have tolerance for this "I am uwu innocent soft boy who only unpersons the bad people" horseshit. If you're going to act like a tboy internet Hitler with your public screen name, you get to live with your words attached to your screen name. If you choose to delete your comments and ask me to take down this post, I will! That's actually incredibly fucking lenient in the current climate of "accountability."

[maddiem4]

@jayisfromearth You said the funniest possible thing while I was making this post lmao

[maddiem4]

Not censoring any screen names here. I do not have tolerance for this "I am uwu innocent soft boy who only unpersons the bad people" horseshit. If you're going to act like a tboy internet Hitler with your public screen name, you get to live with your words attached to your screen name. If you choose to delete your comments and ask me to take down this post, I will! That's actually incredibly fucking lenient in the current climate of "accountability."

[juney-blues]

if this site hates anyone more than trans women, it's trans women of colour.

[juney-blues]

fucking, "internally generated report!" sailatina was banned directly and intentionally for the crime of being a latina trans woman who wanted to use tumblr. @staff explain your fucking selves.

[lilyhoshikawa]

the same day tumblr banned multiple more high-profile trans women's blogs, likely for the crime of speaking out against their past transphobia, a 17-year-old trans girl in the UK lost a harassment lawsuit against infamous deranged transphobe graham linehan

it's hard to take this pattern of behavior as much else than proof that you can get away with doing anything to transfems and they will always be punished for it

[maddiem4]

Honestly. At this point my plan is to delete the Tumblr app off my phone, to cut my habit of using it. I will only access it on desktop, with an ad blocker, occasionally. I will not post about programming language development on my side blog, except to link to articles on my own website which Tumblr staff and policy have no purview over.

Patricia, Sailatina and isuggestforcefem are not the first high profile trans women to be targeted by bad actors with no consequences for those bad actors, I could list a lot more names over the last few years (predstrogen being particularly noteworthy). I've rationalized my presence here so much, for so long, because there's good folk here too. But I'm really feeling like I'm having to step over bodies to have my own good time, and I'm hitting my limit.

I saw someone phrase it as "this tboy hitler youth website" and that captures a lot of my feelings right now. Not all. But god damn, maybe hit me up when this place structurally recognizes that it doesn't benefit from being hostile to the women who are carrying its culture and content.

[troutreznor]

sexual abuse and exploitation is not caused by individual malicious Rapists and Pedophiles and Sex Offenders overcome with lust or doomed to repeat their own traumas on unsuspecting victims and if only we could root them out and kill them all we'd be safe - sexual abuse is the consequence of a society that uses sex as a weapon of humiliation, dominance, and ownership over those deemed Acceptable Victims

[werewolfbarista]

this website sucks so fucking bad. staff should be fucking ashamed of themselves for letting there exist a literal community of kiwifarms stalkers whose entire life goal seems to be socially murdering trans women, meanwhile their victims are the ones who get banned over and over again for fucking nothing. patricia was repeatedly harassed and triggered and banned because she tried to stand up for herself. sailatina was banned for the simple crime of being a trans woman of color from an internal report. and now isuggestforcefem is down again and literally for fucking what? "harassment"? severely fucking doubt that. this is just another round of transmisogynistic bullshit. queerest place on the internet my ass.