#ill leave it here for now
OK, I need to say something about fan culture. No idea if anyone’s gonna listen, but I do feel faintly sick.
How do we, as a fandom, want to treat each other?
Around a year ago, a writer I cared about - madamefaust - was violently bullied out of another fandom and deleted everything she had made. All her works, her entire tumblr. It turned out she had been falsely accused of racism by a group of trolls who… Oh, I’m not going to start this again, read it up on my tumblr if you’re interested. The point is, she hadn’t actually been racist. The reason for this entire charade was envy, and it destroyed her online presence. She cut all ties, so we don’t even know she’s ok.
The way it happened - and I’m getting to the point here - were callout posts which dragged her name across the entire fandom, instead of limiting it to a discussion among individuals. Look, everyone, what she did! Here are screenshots! And then the next person chimes in, HOW DARE YOU, you should be ashamed! There’s no way to defend yourself, if such a thing has started. People read and reblog and judge without actually knowing what happened.
Which is why I would like to say, very emphatically, to @lie-where-i-land: Please do not handle it this way. I understand your point, but the way you’re attacking @cycasand@warrioreowynofrohan (who, for context, opposed the ‘cancellation’ of someone you believe to be a terf) for all the fandom to see, screenshotting their post, inviting everyone to add pressure on them, is not the way to handle fandom conflicts. Many of us around here are old enough to have seen fandom wars, and we don’t want them anymore. Let’s not spread hatred and contempt. There’s enough of that in the world right now.
If you want to express your concerns about transphobia and terfs in fandom, please do! I’m sure most of us will be interested and willing to reflect, engage in discussion, work out ways to make fandom a safe space for trans people. But callout posts of that sort are poison. Please don’t do this.
I want to have that discussion about transphobia in fandom.
But how do you expect it to go? That we all reflect on it and discuss it, and there will magically appear a way to make fandom a safe space for trans people without banning transphobic people?
Because what we are discussing here is the Paradox of Tolerance. I recommend googling it, it is a philosophical argument that has been around for a really long time but was codified in the 40’s by someone named Karl Popper.
The paradox goes like this: “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must remain intolerant of intolerance.”
And it’s just true. You can’t invite two parties to a table for a good faith discussion when the central tenant of one of those parties is that the other should not exist.
TERFs or “gender critical people” or “anti- trans rights activists” or “I don’t understand what TERF even is, I just believe *insert transphobic statement here* people” being accepted into this community makes it an inherently dangerous and toxic place for Trans people.
If what you want to discuss is “is Venwe a TERF?” you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. Check out her blog. I did. I found TERF content. I blocked her.
I am grateful for the heads up! I have been being recommended TERF posts by tumblr recently, which greatly upset me and was a negative impact on my experience here, and I couldn’t figure out why. I interacted with Venwe’s blog when she reblogged one of my posts, just about when that started happening. Hopefully it will stop now. I doubt it’ll be that simple, but I’d rather live in hope.
And, to clarify, I’m cis. Transphobia makes me angry, but I don’t feel gut dropping fear when I see it, I don’t feel personally attacked, I don’t have to question whether I can even stay in this community, or if it’s about to be flooded by people who are hostile to me personally.
I don’t have to worry that the place I go online to have fun and engage in my interests with like-minded individuals will suddenly decide that blatently hating me, and people like me, is more okay than pointing out that that hate exists, which is what is happening right now.
@lie-where-i-land didn’t bring this issue up randomly out of nowhere, he wasn’t responding to just seeing venwe’s name on his dash, he was informing @cycas of the nature of a user that @cycas had actively boosted with a reblog of a request from Venwe to get back in touch with the community on here.
And then he has responded reasonably. Honestly, I’m confused why you’re begging for discourse and discussion… there is SO MUCH discussion happening. I see @lie-where-i-land working really hard to inform people about why including TERFs pose a threat to the diversity of our fandom, providing a lot of explainations to a lot of people.
This does not strike me as a witch hunt for the sake of outraged victimhood, or striking out over jealousy like you’re describing.
I haven’t even seen him lose his temper, which as someone who has people I love who are trans, who I have watched deal with this shit, and seen what it does to them- I’m pretty sure I could not be similarly calm.
Probably this is because my head is not the one on the chopping block if we all decide TERFs are welcome here actually.
And my reactions aren’t the ones being picked apart to decide if I’ve brought up the issue of my own dehumanization respectfully enough to deserve being listened to.
If you want to discuss this with me, please do. But please lead with how you think all of this discussion will end, because I’m curious how you think we can solve the paradox of tolerance.
Hi @mainecoon76, I sympathize with your concern that call-out posts can sometimes be used to target people who haven’t done anything wrong. But I think that’s why @lie-where-i-land used screenshots - so people can make up their own minds. You mentioned that it’s concerning when people reblog call-out posts without actually knowing what happened. I agree; that’s why I think including screenshots is a reasonable thing to do.
When person A says, “Hey, you did something that hurt me,” person B will usually feel uncomfortable. It would be hard not to. That doesn’t mean person A is attacking person B. In this case, @lie-where-i-land has made an effort to discuss this topic with a lot of people, calmly, rationally, while providing sources, and has, from my point of view, been met with some responses from people that were either off-topic, missing the point, or minimizing the issue. I think many of these people engaging in discussions with @lie-where-i-land do mean well and don’t want to cause offense or cause harm. But they haven’t yet come to the understanding that including transphobes in the fandom community makes it harder for trans people to be part of the fandom community, and that is harmful.
I’ll admit I’m a bit confused by your stance, because you say that call-out posts are “poison,” but your post can be read like a call-out post aimed at @lie-where-i-land as well, since you say he’s “attacking” people. You’re encouraging reflection and discussion, but that’s exactly what has been going on, and what he has screenshotted in his posts on this very issue. These are the discussions about how to make fandom a safe space for trans people. Making fandom safer for trans people is exactly why @lie-where-i-land informed cycas in the first place that cycas had reblogged a post from a known TERF, and asked that people not boost transphobes’ blogs.
You wrote above, “Let’s not spread hatred and contempt.” That’s actually the whole point of what @lie-where-i-land has been saying. Transphobes spread hatred and contempt in the fandom. When trans people stand up for themselves and say, “please don’t give transphobes a platform,” that is not spreading hatred. That’s just them trying to be part of the fan community like everybody else.
@aragornsrockcollection: thanks for bringing up the paradox of tolerance. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
You know, what’s happening here right now is actually proving my point. People reblog it and are enraged about transphobia while my post… wasn’t about transphobia. I made no single comment about transphobia. There’s literally no way to deduce my stance on terfs from this post.
It was solely about the way callouts encourage mob mentality, quod erat demonstrandum.
I did consider whether or nor my post was a “callout”, but decided to approach the subject - very politely - because the damage had already been done in a very public way, and I was trying to undo a bit of it. If you’d check the comments, people are already confusing someone who initially refused to cancel someone on the basis of an anon ask with someone who posted actual transphobic content. They are not the same. But these things happen when people run on emotions and cease to listen.
Because, excuse me, but the things @lie-where-i-land said were… Let’s say, worded in a way to stir up righteous anger in others. “You want us to shut up”, for instance, when that is simply not true and the opposite of what I asked for in my post.
I’m disheartened to see that said post is now used to stir the anger further, instead of calming everything down. Not by you, specifically; I’m simply answering you now because you tagged me, and I don’t feel like reading everything else.
@aragornsrockcollection Yes, thank you, I’m familiar with the paradox of tolerance. I’m a social scientist and have been working in the field of social justice for years. My main field of expertise is ableism, but intersectionality means I’m dealing with transphobia, homophobia, racism and all that other assholery on a regular basis.
Which means that all those righteous people here are now attacking someone who is professionally - and with passion - fighting on their side. In real life. You know, the place where it makes an actual difference. There’s irony in that, don’t you think?
It also means that I have some experience in what does or doesn’t work against people like terfs. I know righteous anger, believe me, and it’s important because it gives us courage. (In real life. You need no courage to hurt people online.)
But I’ve also been at a place where I let anger cloud my judgement, and I’m grateful for the people who helped me keep my wits together. Wits are crucial because otherwise you may make mistakes … like fighting the wrong folk, as one example of many. Lashing out at people who are on your own side just because you are too angry to try to understand them hurts the cause.
@lie-where-i-land : contact me if you like, we can talk. Honestly, I’d like to work this out. Apart from that, I’m going to turn off the notifications for this post. I’m busy fighting assholes in real life and can’t let people who insist on misunderstanding me control my attention.
My point still stands, though.
@mainecoon76 You may not see my reply, since you’ve turned off notifications. That’s alright. Still, I thought I would respond.
Your post may not have mentioned transphobia, but transphobia isthe reason we’re all having this conversation in the first place. I have not tried to deduce your stance on terfs.
It sounds like you feel that lie-where-i-land worded his posts in a way that would stir up righteous anger in others, but… again, one could say the same of your original post. You brought up the cancellation of someone you cared about, who you feel was wrongly accused of racism, who you say was “violently bullied,” and compared it to the situation at hand. I know nothing about madamefaust, but it seems like an entirely different situation than this one. Venwe actually isa terf, which can be seen on her blog, so it’s not some sort of unfair attempt at cancellation to ask people to stop boosting her posts. Nor have I seen anyone bullied since this conversation began some days ago. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
I did check the comments, and yes, one single person confused venwe with cycas. That’s certainly unfortunate, but it’s hardly the fault of anyone else, though, and that person quickly corrected it. That misconception seems to have ended as quickly as it began; it didn’t spiral out of control. I don’t see any “mob mentality” unfolding around this issue.
“Which means that all those righteous people here are now attacking someone who is professionally - and with passion - fighting on their side. In real life.” I’m genuinely confused by this bit that you wrote, because you seem to be referring to yourself, but I haven’t seen anyone attacking you on this post? You’ve turned off replies, so most people can’t reply to this post - are people attacking you on anon? It doesn’t look like you allow anonymous asks on your blog.
I see that you want to calm things down instead of inflaming them, which I appreciate, but I think the way to go about that would not be to claim lie-where-i-land “attacked” others - he didn’t - or to compare this situation to one that has nothing to do with it (madamefaust) - that certainly inflamed the issue further. You seem to want to have people resolve these issues by “limiting it to a discussion among individuals” (that’s what you wrote in the original post), but again, you didn’t do that - you made your own post as well. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you making your own post. But it seems like a case of “do as I say, not as I do.”
I am glad you’re open to discussion on this. I may message you, I may not. I personally prefer to conduct these sorts of discussions via reblogs because the chat window is so tiny, and it becomes difficult to conduct longer conversations that way.
Hey, for some reason I’m still getting notifications and yes, the open hostility is getting to me. The situation is now at a point where I’m considering to leave for a while. You seem like a sensible person, so I thought I might as well reply. But I’m tired.
I think what many people aren’t getting is that I was never talking about venwe. I’m talking about cycas, mostly. She’s a friend. I’ve known her for many years. She’s not a terf, and not someone who sympathizes with terfs, just - as I’ve gotten to know her - a person who likes to really understand and consider what do, and not blindly react to anon asks.
Which, in this case, was enough to make her end up in a callout post. And no, I don’t think the confusion is a singular thing. As I said, I’m a social scientist; these things happen frequently. Lumping people into categories and labelling them regardless of what the person is actually like is a very common thing, obviously. If people get emotional, the nuance gets lost. The will to understand gets lost.
Madamefaustwas violently bullied, if you search for her username, you’ll find the whole story. In the end, after she had left, it turned out that the accusations were unfounded, andif there was a misunderstanding it was certainly nothing that couldn’t have cleared up in a single conversation. The persons who started the bullying did this to others too, including PoC. They made a blacklist of persons who shouldn’t be interacted with, and friends of those persons. After the whole thing blew up, they left the fandom. It was a truly ugly business, and people got hurt very badly.
This is the reason why I’m saying “we should not allow such a thing ever again. Please don’t make callout posts.” But that was literally all I was saying, and I was saying it very politely. That’s also why I was making my own post - because people had already been called out, and as I said, I was trying to minimize the damage. For some reason I hoped people would listen. I’ve come to know the fandom as an open-minded and friendly place.
Look what’s happening now. I don’t excuse terfs, never have. I’m professionally working for social justice. We are on the same side when it comes to trans issues. Now cycas and I - and the few people who take the pains to try and understand what we were actually saying - are labeled as transphobes, and invited to fuck off. This is precisely what I meant: people are not trying to have a conversation. They don’t even know us; they judge from what they think they understand, which is not what we said, or meant. It’s incredibly destructive. Maybe I was hoping, at some point, that someone would say “shit I think we overreacted”, but… well. Not going to happen.
I’m sorry that is your experience. I’m assuming the “open hostility” you’re referring to is that you feel that you and cycas have been labelled as transphobes? I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from, because you mention “open hostility” at the beginning of the post, and the other thing at the end…
I actually did figure you were partly talking about cycas at least in part. Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t say that cycas has been cancelled. She said some things, publicly, that rubbed some people the wrong way. That’s all. That’s my interpretation, anyway. I read her response to lie-where-i-land’s initial anon ask. What she wrote did not sit well with me. Do I think cycas is a terrible, evil person? No, I don’t. Do I think she is as bad as venwe? No. But I thought her response to the ask was ill-considered, and if I had been following her, I would have hit unfollow at that point. Still - not really a case of being cancelled. Or maybe some people do consider her “cancelled.” I don’t know.
I doubt that most people following this issue think that venwe and cycas are equally bad. I’ve literally had venwe blocked for years - so have many others; whereas cycas is just somebody in the fandom I knew of but didn’t follow. However, I think there is a very real frustration that people have - myself included - when people who say they support trans issues still say stuff along the lines of, “Well, we can’t exclude transphobes like venwe from the fandom, because… [insert reason here]”. This reframes transphobia as some sort of run-of-the-mill fandom disagreement, instead of a hateful ideology that does direct harm to people.
The thing is, I agree with cycas that the fandom is an international, multilingual and multicultural space. I agree with her that you can’t assume people will come to the fandom with the same background as you. And, like cycas, I do not only follow blogs with whom I agree. But. In the context of venwe specifically, I think these points were ill-considered, and I’ll explain a little bit more as to why.
To me, following people I disagree with means, for example, following people who are fans of a character I dislike, or have different interpretations of stuff, not… following people who actively hate minority groups.
If I met somebody and, let’s say, due to their background (different generation, maybe, different upbringing, etc.), they didn’t know anything about trans issues, and they had sort of outdated ideas about the gender binary and whatnot? I wouldn’t block them, I wouldn’t assume the worst about them - people are at varying degrees of understanding and knowledge on this stuff. It’s hatefulnessthat is a problem. People who are misinformed can learn. But people who are actively hateful - well, it’s not a simple case of giving them the right info, you have to explain to them how to care about other people, and that’s very hard. I’m going somewhere with this, I promise…
The point is, I’ve looked at many of venwe’s posts. She does not fit the description of someone who, through no fault of her own, has slightly outdated beliefs, or the wrong information, or something. She strikes me as an actively hateful person. She has made or reblogged offensive and mean jokes about trans people, and stereotyped trans people as predators, and things like that. There are some people in the world who just don’t have a lot of knowledge about trans issues. But then there are some people in the world who actually revelin punching down at trans people. Venwe is the latter. So that’swhy bringing up the idea that “well, there are people with all sorts of different backgrounds in fandom, there are people with all kinds of different ideas in the fandom” is, to me, not helpful or relevant when talking about venwe. I hope that makes sense.
I know this may not seem relevant, but I wrote all of this because I guess the bottom line is this: cycas defending venwe as somebody who justhappens to be misinformed or unaware of things for whatever reason, is inaccurate. Cycas - and others who share her viewpoints - may consider themselves trans allies, but to many of us, this isn’t what allyship looks like. If anybody is calling cycas a transphobe now, that’s why. It does lack nuance, yes, in the sense that cycas isn’t the same as venwe, as I said earlier. But this is how we got here.
It sounds like you’re concerned that you and people like cycas are being branded as transphobes, and you feel that’s unfair. (I’m still not clear on how many people have actually branded you that way, though). I can understand that that would be upsetting, since you work for social justice. I guess what it boils down to, for me, is this: labels aside, cycas did, in her own away, defend a terf, and that’s really discouraging and upsetting to those of us in the fandom who would rather create an inclusive space for trans people. We’re now having a conversation that is basically, “does cycas deserve to be cancelled? do you (mainecoon76) deserve to be cancelled?” and like… I’m not interested in those questions. I’m interested in how to make fandom a safer space for trans people. And if everybody could collectively notmake excuses for people like venwe, it would be a start. (Not you - I don’t think you made excuses for venwe - but others have.)
