Good Ol' Fashioned Bird Vore

Last year I watched two prominent Black disability advocates die due to unmet mutual aid needs. Both were well-known and well-loved, and neither of them were able to meet mutual aid needs they needed to stay alive.

The past three years I’ve been watching BIPOC and trans accounts slowly stop posting or disappear from Twitter, Bluesky, Tumblr, and other platforms. In most cases, I have no way of knowing if they departed for their own mental health, or if they’re even still alive.

For the past two years, I’ve been thinking over and over again “if these well-known and beloved people weren’t able to survive, to meet basic needs to stay alive, how the fuck are my friends who are Black, trans, AND disabled going to make it? How long until their mutual aid being ignored kills them?”

Because here’s the thing - for a lot of disabled people of ALL stripes, online sex work or mutual aid passed through online means is the only way we can survive and doing so to meet rent alone is often an equivalent in effort OR MORE to working other online-based jobs. When we can’t work anymore or are deemed unemployable due to our medical needs/symptoms, there’s only so much we can do if we cannot rely on a partner or family to keep us alive and housed.

But on another side, many trans people still “able to work”, especially transfeminine people, are considered inherently unemployable as well or are treated to such horrible working conditions that it becomes completely untenable. As an example, 47% of trans people without a degree are unemployed, and even trans people with a degree are five times more likely to be unemployed. 49% of trans people of color have been denied AT LEAST one job explicitly due to being trans, half experience workplace harassment such as being forced to present as the wrong gender or being denied access to appropriate restrooms, and 21% of TPOC report having been physically or sexually assaulted in the workplace.

For a lot of us, online spaces such as blogs are not just “online communities” or “nice places to waste time” but literal lifelines either regularly or when we lose our extremely tenuous grip on stability. Systemic or communal harassment campaigns that drive marginalized people off of sites repeatedly for real or invented slights or wrongs are more than simply denying them access to “community”, but can be quite literally a death sentence for them. Sometimes the ramifications are as “light” as meaning the target can no longer fundraise for gender-affirming care or surgery, or as heavy as leading to them becoming homeless or dying.

And frankly, the people who do it will often never know how many people they’ve killed, or are actively proud of “getting rid of the bad ones.” This can be over fandomite discourse, an invented harassment campaign, or actual actions. The point is the power, the punishment, the suffering.

Some targets are more tenacious than others - a couple people on tumblr have created upwards of 40 accounts out of pure spite. But when you add the strain, energy, and time of dealing with a harassment campaign to what they already needed to survive, most of their waking hours become devoted to the effort of surviving an attempted social murder.

Because that IS exactly what it is, an attempted social murder of marginalized people in one of the only spaces they may be able to use to survive. Systemic and communal attempts to kill the undesirables did not stagnate as we entered a digital era, they evolved along with our evolution of new ways to survive. They literally segregate away racialized community members via algorithms in some areas, while expending a deranged amount of comparative resources to directly sniping marginalized accounts in others. How many Palestinian bloggers have you seen constantly being account restricted or losing their accounts for the crime of trying to survive their extermination? How many trans women have you watched have their account terminated within a day of being made? How many GFMs from racialized trans people have you watched go unfilled and ignored for weeks to months?

Me: “I’ve been watching marginalized people slowly disappear or die due to mutual aid not being met for years, and harassment campaigns seek to make this worse historically and currently”

Anon: “every one of them was a pedophile-loving drain on society and-“

Like I ain’t even talking bout that, I’m talking about the fact that every fucking week I watch multiple marginalized people struggle or fail in trying to baseline survive, often while their blogs are constantly targeted or harassed by either other users or the platform for a myriad of different reasons, with the internet as their only real lifeline. To assume a social media account is just a luxury and not a critical facet of survival for many marginalized people is so fucking disconnected with the current state of things it’s wild. @chingaderita has been begging for money for her kids healthcare for MONTHS, as one example. I have friends who have to go without meds if their mutual aid doesn’t raise enough money for them because over half the time they CANNOT work.

“Oh but what about the white trans women we target-“ half the trans women, racialized or not, that I know on here are either too disabled to work or live in places it is not safe for them to get work (if they can even get hired at all as a trans woman) anymore. You all also relentlessly mock any disabled trans woman that tries to survive by asking for mutual aid or doing sex work while being disabled.

"Social death is used to describe the ways in which someone is treated as if they were dead or non-existent. Social death is distinguished from biological or physical death: when the body is considered to have died and ceased functioning for life. Social death can occur before or after physical death."

-Via E. Borgstrom

Thinking about how people think this is just transfemmes whining about losing a blog and not losing a means to keep a roof over our head, to be able to eat or access meds, how it’s all at the whims of transmisogynistic pieces of shit who harass us endlessly, and a staff that goes after us for fun.

There are SIX questions total in reblogs, the end will be marked by large green text. If you don’t see all six, check reblogs and grab the version with the ending note.

Answers amended from the 2025 census based on feedback. If you’re mixed, choose what feels right to you I’m not here to do phrenology or paper bag test you but don’t make it my problem either. When in doubt, ask yourself: would the whites kill you too in the race war?

This census is US-centric because so is tumblr, unfortunately. This poll is also starting with a heavy Black/racialized bias due to my personal followers. The main point of this census is to see how white-dominant the site is currently compared to prior years, as well

For the purpose of this census, Imperial Core will be defined as the following: United States, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa, basically all of Western Europe, Japan, and Israel. If you want to argue about any of these designations, too bad maybe they should stop colonizing.

Note for clarification:

*For those who don’t know, TMA means transmisogyny affected (such as trans women, some non-binary people, etc.) whereas TME means transmisogyny exempt (Cis men, cis women, transmasculine individuals, etc). If you want to ask for clarification for which applies to you for the purposes of this poll, feel free to ask and I’ll try to reply, but if you try to argue or quibble about the terms themselves, I’ll block you.

Thank y'all for answering, and a special thank you to @aceynk for doing the math on the last two questions. Please keep in mind, this is not a captive poll so not everyone answers every question, meaning that as we progress the number of responders decreases. This is obviously not authoritative, its a fucking tumblr poll, but it has a big enough response pool to be decently representative when comparing consistency with last year.

This poll was done with a positive bias for Black, nonwhite, and transfeminine (TMA) responders due to my initial follower pool, meaning these groups are initially represented comparatively more than other groups regardless of their population density on the site. Take this into consideration when viewing the below information.

Question one, "are you some flavor of white?" garnered 22,110 responses, over twice the 2025 survey results but slightly less than the 2024 survey.

Tumblr is 78.5% white this year, a small 0.3% increase from last year. Nonwhite dropped from 16.1% to 13.5%, but this can be accounted for in part by the addition of the "only considered white outside of imperial core" option and a 0.6% increase in people choosing the "mixed" category, from 4.8% to 5.4%.

Question two, "so is you Black?" garnered 19,013 responses.

Tumblr is 3.9% Black this year, whereas last year it was 6% Black. The category for "willingly identifies primarily as Mixed rather than Black" was split out into "Mixed" and "Only considered Black outside my own country", splitting last year's 1.4% to 1% Mixed and 0.3% "Black abroad" (no good way to shorten it lol).

Question three, "are you trans?", garnered 18,755 responses.

The major change in this year's question was splitting the non-binary category into TMA and TME, as there are significant cultural differences that change how each group marks their primary identity. I will elaborate about this at the bottom of this post in FAQS* - Additionally, I'd like to note that this year 78 people responded as being Two-Spirit and 28 as having some kind of culturally-specific gender. I'm glad y'all are here :)

Last year, Non-binary/Genderfluid as a singular unit was 25% of responders. After splitting it to be better culturally representative, we can determine that TMA individuals made up at least 23.1% of responders. Transfemme alone increased from 21.6% to 27%, Transmasc alone decreased from 20.4% to 13.1%, "Non-binary but not trans" increased from 5.6% to 6.5%, Agender had a small increase from 5.6% to 5.8%, Two-Spirit decreased from 0.6% to 0.4%, "Cultural Gender" decreased from 0.3% to 0.1%, "Other" decreased from 3.5% to 2.8%, and "Cisgender" increased from 17.4% to 20.7%.

Question four, "are you currently inside or outside the Imperial Core?", garnered 18,244 responses.

Tumblr is at minimum 6.7% people from the Periphery/Semi-Periphery, with 3.6% living in a Periphery country and 3.1% living in a Semi-Periphery country. 1.5% of responders said their current situation is complicated and they couldn't claim a specific place. 91.9% Imperial Core residents, with 1.5% of that being immigrants from Periphery or Semi-Periphery countries. This question is new this year, so I have nothing prior to compare it to. The format of questions five and six will be slightly different due to functionally having two question sets in each. I will not compare last year and this year because I changed the way I asked it this year to account for people having few friends, as 1-2 out of 8 and 1-2 out of a couple dozen are wildly different percentages of total friend group.

Question five, "How many Black friends do you have?", garnered 17,595 responses.

Non-Black responses (pop. 15495):

24.98% (3871 responses) said they have 0 Black friends.

36.08% (5591 responses) said they have 1-2 Black friends.

17.12% (2653 responses) said they have 1-2 Black friends, but less than 8 friends total.

18.4% (2851 responses) said they have 3-6 Black friends.

3.41% (529 responses) said they have 7+ Black friends.

Which means that 78.2% (12115) of non-Black responses voted as having less-than-or-equal-to 2 Black friends.

Black responses (pop. 703):

8.25% (58 responses) said they have 0 Black friends.

18.78% (132 responses) said they have 1-2 Black friends.

24.18% (170 responses) said they have 1-2 Black friends, but less than 8 friends total.

24.18% (170 responses) said they have 3-6 Black friends.

24.61% (173 responses) said they have 7+ Black friends.

Which means that 51.21% (360) of Black responses voted as having less-than-or-equal-to 2 Black friends.

Question six, "How many TMA* (Transfemme, some non-binary, etc.) friends do you have?", garnered 16,693 responses.

TME Responses (pop. 9860)

13.17% (1299 responses) said they have 0 TMA friends.

25.63% (2527 responses) said they have 1-2 TMA friends.

17.57% (1732 responses) said they have 1-2 TMA friends, but less than 8 friends total.

29.79% (2937 responses) said they have 3-6 TMA friends.

13.84% (1365 responses) said they have 7+ TMA friends.

Which means that 56.37% (5558) of TME responses voted as having less-than-or-equal-to 2 TMA friends.

TMA Responses (pop. 5461)

5.6% (306 responses) said they have 0 TMA friends.

9.14% (499 responses) said they have 1-2 TMA friends.

11.77% (643 responses) said they have 1-2 TMA friends, but less than 8 friends total.

28.77% (1571 responses) said they have 3-6 TMA friends.

44.72% (2442 responses) said they have 7+ TMA friends.

Which means that 26.51% (1448) of TMA responses voted as having less-than-or-equal-to 2 TMA friends.

Last year, 11.9%/11.4% of responders reported they had less than 3 friends total. This year, only 7.9%/8.2% did. I'm proud of y'all for going out and making friends.

FAQS (below cut)

Solar doesn't compete with agriculture, and can be beneficial to it.

I have like $14 in my bank account can anybody please help me pay this back I really need some help. I’ve been having to borrow money and pay it back just to pay my bills for months now. ty, sry.

but it's also important to remember that at least in the US, where I write from and where many of you clutch your pearls, virtually every aspect of existence, no matter how fundamental to human indignity and comfort, is criminalized for people who are experiencing homelessness. sex is illegal, asking passerby for money is illegal, sleeping outside is illegal, standing around any one location for too long is illegal, urinating or defecating outside is illegal despite a critical lack of public bathrooms to use instead.