Automattic CEO, Matt Mullenweg, made an accidental meme out of himself yesterday, after revealing the reason he had Tumblr unperson @predstrogen was she had posted once that she'd hoped he would die in a car explosion of the type that cannot possibly occur outside a Wile E. Coyote sketch. Instead of being a reasonable monkey and keeping out of it, he spent much of late last night and early this morning DM'ing random transfems, justifying his actions and seeking their approval. Naturally, when that backfired, he got out his autographed Elon Musk Nuclear Delete Button for Extra-Special Technology Boys and started banning accounts that were making fun of him. In a classic case of the Streisand effect, many users, myself included, started datahoarding like mad, saving all the evidence of his blunder faster than he could delete it. Now, everyone from comedy blogs like little-guys-daily to your average person on the street is making fun of him.
However, there are plenty of transgender commentators who are seeing this as another example in a long line of examples of transwomen being excluded from public spaces, to the point of blatant discrimination. And now, with both KOSA and Project 2025 to contend with, the likelihood of there being any safe place for transwomen, either online or off, is pushing 0%. We have such a difficult time even appearing in public without some pearl-clutching old church lady objecting to our presence there, combined with anti-transgender activism and hatecrimes reaching the highest levels that they've ever been before, pasty white techbros like Matt, Mark, Elon, and spez coming in and siccing the Radfem Website Moderation Company on their social networks is extremely disheartening, if unsurprising.
In March, I will have been on Tumblr for 11 years. From day 1, it was clear I'd gotten stuck in a revolving door of stupid business decisions, but none have been so stupid as Matt Mullenweg. Apart from simply unpersoning @predstrogen, he also threatened to report their post to the FBI as a credible threat against his life. An empty threat, of course, as she doesn't live in the United States and, even in the FBI's own bunglesome manner, I doubt even they would consider it credible. However, this also had the secondary effect—intentional or otherwise—of empowering a core group of TERFs on the platform. The discrimination against transwomen didn't start with @predstrogen; it started back in 2017, when it got so bad that the ACLU filed an harrassment suit against Tumblr Inc. At the time, the site's moderators tended to censor content from transwomen's blogs with such alarming regularity that it could be plotted on a line graph. When FOSTA-SESTA was signed and what the userbase calls the Great Purge began, it seemed that only transsexuals were censored. Again, when Apple insisted that all of its app developers remove adult content from their apps, Tumblr came for the transsexuals again. Matt accidentally let slip that the moderators at the time were open about their trans-hate, with at least one of them being a self-professed Harry Potter fan; so it's as I said last July. There was no glitch in the system that caused so many transwomen to be silenced; it was a human person with a Hufflepuff scarf.
This is why I don't talk much about my own transition on Tumblr or, really, anywhere else. I operate under the assumption that whatever platform I'm on will try to single me out for perversion and vice. And I'm usually proven right. Twitter got taken over by Elon and suddenly you can't be trans there anymore. Tumblr got taken over by Automattic and suddenly you can't be trans there anymore. Reddit made u/spez CEO and suddenly you can't be trans there anymore. Neocities? Bluesky? Mastodon? Obviously, if KOSA gets signed, anti-trans regulations will extend to the entire internet, but even if it doesn't, I can't be guaranteed that whatever platform I post on next won't change their leadership and suddenly you can't be trans there anymore.
I want so badly to give @predstrogen a hug right now. I can't imagine the living hell Matt Mullenweg and his tangle of TERFs have made her life into. And I know it's just a matter of time before it happens to me, too.
--20 February 2024--