My Head is Still an Animal

This kind of response to things I say about sex work, which isn't always phrased like this but almost always focuses on me being male or a man or my pronouns, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why mansplaining is bad.

I am a sex worker. I have been for a decade. The majority of people I know are sex workers and I'm embedded in sex worker community. I started before 18 and have done it in brothels, cars, my own home, clients' homes, saunas, and hotels.

There were folks here that I know elsewhere now who literally help save lives in their communities and have online safe spaces in other places that they were able to build and cultivate. Seeing Black people who became huge when they left here will always be my perception of Tumblr. It is a place that Black people started great work and were put out because the work wasn't valued by the white Tumblr population or was straight up sabotaged by them.

I FINALLY got back in touch with Cashawn, who was the first person who got "Black Girls are Magic" poppin. I hadn't been in touch with her for nearly a decade! Because she fucking left here. And there are a few, very few who tap in and see what's up over here every now and then. But a lot of them simply let Tumblr kick rocks and they were correct to do so.

And it was the central place, not just for Trayvon's story, but everyone's. When other sites were not giving information or giving construed information, there were so many boots on the ground activists who used THIS SITE to communicate their situations and tell you what was real. In fact, one of the main points of the purges were getting rid of activists who were using the site to keep others informed.

This WAS the site people came to for things, and then it had to become Twitter and there are still ignoramuses on here who chuckle "Twitter is having old convos from Tumblr lol" Twitter is having PRESENT convos that many of the same people who were having them on Tumblr had to go have them on Twitter instead, because Tumblr became unsafe for the work that they started here. Twitter is STILL having conversations that Black people have had to have in every space we occupy and are often run out of.

the humanity of the AIDS crisis: the ward by gideon mendel

But thanks to government indifference to AIDS and HIV, never benefitted from safer sex information programming that I did in the late 80’s.

A few years is all it took to go from men dying alone and uncared-for, ignored by an ignorant and hateful government, to our community angry and outraged, launching the safer sex and AIDS awareness campaigns that saved lives like mine.

First part is them staring at the camera in exasperation. Caption says: "white transmascs appropriating black culture after transitioning because they associate blackness with masculinity." Theres music playing and they mouth along the words "that is not the baby!"

Second part is a response to the first. Slow piano music plays in the background. Caption says: "white queers have a weaponized incompetence problem."

The filmer says the following:

"The other day, I made a video talking about how white transmascs appropriate black culture in order to feel more masculine because they associate blackness with masculinity. And never before in my life, or posting videos about trans discourse, have I gotten so many comment from people acting completely oblivious or confused to the issue, even though the issue is a very simple statement.

I think this reflects the fact that a lot of white queer people are just incapable of thinking about issues if it is not personally affecting them.

And I think this reveals a weaponized incompetence issue in the larger white queer community when it comes to racial issues. When someone brings attention to intercommunal issues not about race, I never get these comments. I never get comments acting confused, or acting like what im talking about is so incomprehensible, or saying things like, 'well, I've never seen this happen,' because people accept 'maybe this has happened, just not to me.'

But the second someone brings up a racial issues, suddenly it's incredibly confusing and complex, and people need to explain to them five million different ways to where they get it. And obviously other people call bullshit to this, and they say, 'This is very clearly just you refusing to understand this, not you being unable to understand.'

And a lot of people in the comment seem to be resorting to the fact they theyre neuro divergent to excuse the fact that theyre not aware of racial dynamics in the queer community. And I think this is a larger problem. People like to flee into marginalized identity and talk about how theyre queer, or theyre neurodivergent, in order to get away from complex critiques about the way they ignore racism in their own community.

There are two possibilities. Either 1: these people are aware of this issue, and are pretending not to know about it because it allows them to escape accountability; or 2: theyre just generally not aware of it. But both of these things reveal a problem, because it means that white queer people either do not notice, or do not care, about the racism happening in their own community. Because the problem identified is not a niche issue, it happens all the time. But the refusal to use critical thinking —or even just look in the comments for other explanations, before jumping to acting confused and acting ignorant of the issue— is a bigger problem that white queer people need to examine in themselves.

Remaining ignorant on issues of race and acting like you've never seen this happen, or you've never heard this before, is a result of you ignoring it, not as a result of it not happening.

The fact that tons of people in the comments who are Black queer people are saying this happens all the time, but white queer people are saying they've never seen it happen, suggests that it's not that it doesn't happen, its that white queer people dont recognize it happening because they dont actually pay attention to racial issues in their community. Which is why when it gets called out, they act so confused about it.

End video transcript.]