An Opal A Day

we're expected to be understanding about how it's definitely just a joke because if it bothers us they will not be understanding about it. it's just a joke, after all

how many people on this website like actually absorb the fact that race is a social construct? that race is indeed assigned at birth and reinforced socially through an entire lifetime? that race is fluid and racial privilege is granted and taken away arbitrarily based on what white supremacist power structures benefit from the most? that racialization is relative and changes over time and space? that there is no genetic evidence that race is biological, that it’s a farce in the same way the idea of biological sex is?

I do think most childhoods are pretty traumatic just, by default. even run of the mill taking your shit, grounding you, setting strict rules (which would be absurd for an adult) style parenting. Physical and sexual violence on top of that is more fuel to the fire, and certainly contributes a heavy mental load, but children are fundamentally not treated like people by most of the world. They're an investment; a form of useful property that might someday become an endebted human being. This is the context under which all child abuse occurs; but the context itself is rather deplorable, don't you think?

if they go through with this--and i can't remember a single time tumblr dot com course corrected in recent memory--i will genuinely be really really sad. one of my absolute favorite parts of this site was being able to look at the notes of a post and see the conversations it had sparked, see if someone had already raised a point i was planning to raise, see if the op had responded to a response i found interesting. this will massively hinder this from happening, while also making it much harder to use the notes of posts as blocklists (a basic proactive safety precaution to be a trans woman with any kind of following on here) and much easier to direct harassment at whomever one pleases

and you know how it's going to go. we've seen this happen a thousand times, tumblr will see the overwhelming negative feedback and make an announcement saying "We appreciate your concerns and have taken them into consideration! We will not be making any changes to our plans and still intend to shoot ourselves in the foot."`

OH thats why they didnt ditch the reblog graph

what if instead being able to see all the things that people have added listed out plainly readable, you had to Click through a Shape. That Wiggles.

Not only will this ruin a core element of Tumblr, it will make it very difficult to tell where and when a post is getting traction. People are on this website because it isn't Twitter. Making it more like Twitter will turn people away.

The last thing this website needs is a culture of catty twitter-style quote-retweets. This will actively encourage more toxic users to interact with your posts because their traffic will be more difficult to track.

this actively sabotages the core benefit of tumblr over other platforms, the ability to have nuanced longform conversations. this change will make the website drastically worse

the amount of goodwill you could earn with your userbase by saying "okay nvm" right now is astronomical

"Trans women are actually women for real, not in a metaphorical sense, not in a "anyone can be anything" sense, but genuinely actually make more taxonomic sense to classify in the category of women than any other group you could classify them in" is a position you'll find is pretty radical even in queer spaces

no carceral sentiment or raised minimum sentence or punisher-logo-adjacent slogan or mob enacted justice could lower abuse rates 1% as well as just providing all people of all ages the financial and legal ability to separate themself from any living situation, regardless of familial or marital status, with ease and with the security of knowing they'll still be housed and fed

insane how common the sentiment of "I don't like tma/tme because I use it incorrectly" is

this is also what i mean when i say callouts are the least effective ways to root out even genuinely bad actors (and that is assuming they're made in good faith to genuinely unmask harmful people). it universally descends into sprurious claims and appeals to a "base" morality and normalcy, and things like "this person has fabricated their history" or "this person has actually molested a child" get lost in all the "this person likes to smoke pot when having chronic pain" and "this person once made a discreet dick joke in a public server where a 16 year old might have seen it" which all get treated on the same level of severity. often very petty personal grievances from spiteful people will be thrown in too. and then as a result genuine harm victims have faced is obsfucated and it's entirely easy to dismiss the whole thing as fabrication when the ops of the callout are clearly frothing at the mouth with a bloody grin in their excitement to Drop A Bombshell

"non-binary people" don't really make a ton of sense as a sociological grouping to include in your studies on pay gaps and whatnot because its a category literally defined by not fitting into others. its going to be a mixture of generally transmasculine and generally transfeminine people, as well as well as a bunch who aren't really described by either of those two groups, which I is the one you actually want to study, but is going to be drowned out by the average of the other two

also sometimes it'll be subject to issues like if you group in two-spirit with nonbinary, your nonbinary demographic will have a disproportionate native population, and now you'll be seeing effects of white supremacy more than any sort of gendered effects (which is important to study of course but something you want to control for whenever you're looking at gender specifically)