One more poor unfortunate soul has to wander onto my Substack, read a sentence like “every community has a known rapist” or “bisexual trans women are annoying,” briefly consider whether subscribing will improve or destroy her life, and click the button.
Then we hit 2,000 subscribers.
When I started Bundle of Styx, I did not have some grand business plan. I did not have an editorial board. I did not have institutional backing. I did not have a wealthy patron gently placing a hand on my shoulder and saying, “Tara, the world desperately needs your thoughts on puppygirls.”
I had a lot to say, a bad attitude, and an apparently bottomless willingness to keep writing after people begged me to stop.
And now Bundle of Styx is one subscriber away from 2,000.
But the Substack is only part of it.
We are at 30,000 followers on Instagram.
We are at 2,000 on Bluesky.
We are at 400 on Twitter, despite Twitter being the website where I occasionally throw a sentence into a burning landfill and leave.
And the Bundle of Styx YouTube channel, which we only just started taking seriously, is already at 300 subscribers.
Thirty thousand on Instagram.
Almost two thousand on Substack.
Three hundred on YouTube.
At some point, I am afraid we may have to confront the possibility that people actually like my work.
Horrible news for everyone involved.
Especially because some of you have spent literal years informing the public that Tara Knight is finished.
Three posts away from disappearing forever.
Meanwhile, there are now tens of thousands of people following my work across platforms.
I do not know how to explain this to you.
Perhaps another callout post will do it.
Maybe this time the 4,000-word Tumblr essay explaining why nobody should read me will finally stop people from reading me.
Perhaps the fifteenth post announcing that I have “lost all credibility” will succeed where the previous fourteen somehow failed.
Keep trying. I believe in you.
I would especially like to thank the people who have spent years telling everyone not to look at my work while linking directly to my work.
You are some of my most reliable unpaid marketing staff.
I should really get you lanyards.
But genuinely, thank you.
Thank you to the people who actually read the essays.
Thank you to the people who send them to friends.
Thank you to the people who quote them.
Thank you to the people who disagree with them seriously instead of treating disagreement like a supernatural contamination event.
Thank you to the people who have been here since Bundle of Styx was much smaller.
Thank you to the people who found me through Instagram.
Thank you to the people who wandered over from Bluesky.
Thank you to the people subscribing to the YouTube channel while I build that side of the project.
Thank you to the people who followed me onto every new platform after the previous platform decided to misbehave.
Thank you to the paid subscribers who make it possible for me to keep doing this.
Thank you to the people who donated when I needed groceries, rent, medication, printing costs, or simply enough breathing room to sit down and write another ten thousand words about why everybody is wrong.
Thank you to the people who bought my books and zines.
Thank you to the people who joined the Discord.
Thank you to the people helping build the Trans Feminist Library.
Thank you to everyone who decided that trans women deserve our own institutions, archives, publications, arguments, history, and spaces that do not disappear the second somebody unpopular walks into the room.
You are the reason any of this exists.
And I do mean any of this.
Bundle of Styx has become a publication, an archive project, a growing body of trans feminist work, a library, a Discord, books, zines, video projects, and whatever other terrible idea I decide to have at 2:30 in the morning.
The numbers are nice because numbers are the crude little treats the internet gives us to prove that something happened.
But what matters more to me is that the project keeps becoming harder to kill.
Not fifteen minutes of everyone agreeing with me.
Something people can find later.
Something bigger than whether Tumblr likes Tara Knight this week.
And my absolute favorite part of all of this remains how many of the loudest “DON’T CANCEL TRANS WOMEN” people absolutely fucking hate Tara Knight.
That will never stop being funny to me.
“Stop disposing of difficult trans women!”
No, not that difficult trans woman.
“Trans women should be allowed to be messy and complicated!”
“We need to stop demanding ideological perfection from trans women!”
Tara Knight used the wrong phrase six months ago. Bring me her head.
“Community should have room for disagreement!”
“Punitive callout culture is destroying us!”
Here is my eighteen-part thread demanding that everyone stop financially supporting a trans woman I find irritating.
I have watched people explain, with tears in their eyes and Judith Butler somewhere in the footnotes, that we must stop treating trans women as disposable.
Then somebody mentions Tara Knight and suddenly they become a regional manager for the disposal department.
It turns out many people believe in not cancelling trans women in roughly the same way corporations believe in Pride Month.
Falls apart under the slightest material pressure.
Apparently, the trans woman you are not supposed to cancel is always theoretical.
She has never insulted anybody you like.
She has never made you uncomfortable.
She has never told you that your politics are stupid.
She never refuses the ritual apology.
Most importantly, she never survives your attempt to get rid of her.
The second an actual trans woman is loud, stubborn, difficult, ambitious, angry, funny, sexually impolite, politically inconvenient, or simply unwilling to crawl across the floor begging to be let back into community, suddenly everybody remembers the importance of consequences.
Suddenly everybody discovers accountability.
Suddenly the prison abolitionist has a little clipboard.
Suddenly the anti-carceral theorist is checking whether the electric chair is plugged in.
I remain extremely entertained by this.
Because while people have been debating whether I am allowed to exist, we have been building things.
Almost 2,000 on Substack.
A growing Trans Feminist Library.
An entire body of work that people can read whether or not the current social-media court considers me morally acceptable this week.
And that is ultimately what matters to me.
I am grateful to every person who helped make that possible.
The people who showed up later.
The people who disagreed with me and kept reading anyway.
The people who have watched me change my mind.
The people who have watched me refuse to change it.
The people who understood that supporting a writer does not mean treating her like a saint, a daughter, a therapist, a community mascot, or a perfect victim.
It means supporting the work.
You can find my work primarily at:
Join the Styx Parlor Discord:
Explore the Trans Feminist Library:
And because almost none of this is funded by institutions, nonprofits, universities, foundations, political parties, or a mysterious lesbian billionaire who has finally recognized my genius, donations genuinely matter.
Paid subscriptions and donations are what allow me to keep writing, publishing, archiving trans feminist work, maintaining these projects, and doing this at the scale I do.
You can support the work here:
https://ko-fi.com/bundleofstyyx
Or become a paid subscriber at:
Thank you for getting us this close.
Somebody go ruin their life.
Radical Feminism in an era of hyper misogyny.
Womanhood is a class condition under patriarchy. Click to read Tara Knight, by Tara Knight ⚢,
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