On Trans Women & Tumblr
I don't have to tell you that tumblr has been systematically deleting trans women's blogs for years now. They also mark innocent pictures as mature. It's known. What we don't know is why. I think I have a vague explanation as to why this is happening:
I'd like to offer a theory: these "mature" labels and terminations can be done if enough accounts make a report. Tumblr's automated system flags mature content based on how many reports they get. If they get enough account reports in a short amount of time, they can automatically delete an account.
We have seen this happen with @isuggestforcefem and @patricia-taxxon. If these names elicit a disgust response for you, that's the idea. We have seen trans women be run off this site based on "righteous" reporting. The idea is to make you believe that these women are irredeemable and that terming them is a justifiable thing to do. These are cases that were talked about a lot on the timeline. The latest to be targeted is @yay-bunnies. Not even a second after I learned that her account was terminated did I see a sockpuppet account justifying it by calling her "transandrophobic". Something the cancellations of Patricia Taxxon and ISFF also had in common. Id also like to offer that besides these high profile cases, the other trans women who get termed out of nowhere are ALSO victims of mass reporting by bad faith actors. If a group of accounts target a random trans woman put of nowhere, the sheer number of reports can silently terminate her account. I think theres a highly coordinated campaign to remove trans women from tumblr.
This site has been the target of 4chan & Kiwifarms raids before. I don't see why this campaign of terminating trans women would be out of their power.
To be honest, I think there is a group of transmasc accounts (real or sockpuppets), stealth terfs and radfems that work together to flag trans women's posts as mature, mark blogs as mature, terminate accounts and whip up hate for the more famous accounts that then lead to mass reporting and account termination.
No matter the make-up of the group, they exist to make trans women's lives miserable on Tumblr. Some of them aren't even that hard to spot. If you see a blog (terf, transmasc or anti) that posts nothing but justifications on why a trans woman on tumblr is evil, that's a sockpuppet.
But what about @staff ? They must know when a mass flagging occurs and they have the information on which accounts keep flagging trans women's posts. I don't think they are so ignorant that they cant identify the source of mass flagging and terminations. Which means that either they are fully aware and dont care that trans women are targeted OR they know and are actively allowing it. We know they had a terf on their moderation team a while back. I wouldn't put it past them. No matter what, staff is complicit.
I think I have a fairly good grasp on the shape of the problem but I don't see how trans women can take actions to prevent this from happening. The botnet's goal could also be to sow hatred between transmascs and transfems. If im being honest, the only people I see that actively call for problematic trans women to lose their accounts have been either trans mascs, terfs or radfems. This is a transmasc solidarity issue. If you're transmasc and you see a brother calling for the head of a trans woman (no matter how "evil"), please intervene. They'll listen to you more than us.
The only way Ive seen to innoculate yourself against this cop-mindset is to adopt this stance:
I don't give a fuck what she did, she's a doll so she stays.
Sticking up for our most problematic sisters is the only way to ensure that nobody can manufacture consent for targeting us. The girls that had "drama" and were booted off tumblr could have stayed if all of us said "so what?" To the claims of "being a trans woman wrong" that were going around. I hope you learned something from this and I hope next time someone starts pointing at a problematic trans woman, you say "I dont give a fuck what she did'.
