I've been seeing a lot that people are really surprised and upset that pissvortex got banned, and while I think it's fucked up and shitty that he did get banned, I also don't think it's very surprising because- and here's something I think a lot of non-TERFs don't understand- TERFs navigate this website very differently from the rest of us. The standard reaction to any non-TERF encountering a TERF is to block them, and generally not engage. You know, we have block lists of TERFs that go around. TERFs themselves, they don't really do this shit. They don't have huge block lists of trannies- I mean that would be like 80% of the fucking site- what they do is they keep watch of accounts that they really fucking hate and they hang out in their little discord servers because they're petty and vicious and have nothing better to do than fill their lives with poison and venom, and they harass you to provoke you, and when you say some shit about how terfs should kill themselves or be scalped, they share it around between themselves and mass report it. And absolutely no large social media website, not Tumblr, not Twitter, not Facebook, is going to see a post that received hundreds of reports where you said that somebody should be scalped and think, "Oh but was the other person being like a real huge asshole though?" That's not how they work. They just ban you. Whatever moderator is managing that shit does not care enough to look into the larger societal wide context of why you said that. I'm not saying this to say that you should be kind to or play nice with TERFs, I'm just saying this so that you can perhaps have an awareness of how some of your posts may look to a moderator who's received hundreds of reports about them. They're playing a different game, so play smart
When I was a substitute teacher, I had a 4th grade class once with a really INVENTIVE bully. This kid would talk shit, but like. Quietly. Conversationally. He'd sit there and in low, pleasant tones designed for the teacher to not notice, say the most hair-raising things about the other students and their families, shit that if you said it as an adult to another adult might get your ass shot. And he'd watch, smiling, as the other students would get loud and angry and upset, as one boy eventually jumped up and started screaming cuss words at him, as a girl lost her cool and ran around the room knocking chairs over because she was so angry. And he'd sit back, smug, waiting for the teacher to punish the students who acted out, secure that his goading would be ignored or downplayed if it was even noticed at all.
There are people on this website playing the same game. They and their buddies will "death by a thousand papercuts" you, a million tiny harassments, none of which are big or obvious enough to be actionable, until you're so pissed off and overwhelmed that you lose your cool and say something you know you shouldn't, something that can get you in trouble. And then they strike.
