I spent a lot of time during Transfem Voices Project thinking about what I would do if someone made a submission that espoused bigotry against another marginalized group as part of their disclosure
TVP had a carefully designed set of principles and rules that I followed behind the scenes. a scenario where a survivor espouses bigotry would create conflict between the principle that every survivor's voice deserves to be heard and centered, and the principle that I must do what I can to prevent TVP being used to launder bigotry. I did not consider the immediate response to a survivor's disclosure to be an appropriate place to challenge them, so, in such a scenario, I would have to make a judgment call about which principle took priority--do I platform this or not?
...fortunately, no such dilemma ever came to pass! in 330 survivor stories, I never once had to make such a judgment call, possibly because I wasn't holding up a neon sign inviting anyone and everyone to share stories about one specific minority committing abuse. the core design of TVP was such that it did not foster or invite bigotry on its own
transgender voices project, who platforms stories exclusively of transfems committing abuse, has admitted that the core design of her project does foster and invite bigotry against transfems, but she claims to be doing the work to root it out and challenge it. she does not actually do this, having stated herself that she does not believe the response to a survivor's disclosure is the place to challenge them... which I also believe! but she has platformed multiple stories that repeatedly misgender trans women and express bigoted beliefs about us, including speculating that some of our transitions are merely ploys to escape allegations
so the conflict between the goal of centering survivors' voices and the goal of rooting out bigotry is not just a hypothetical for transgender voices project. it's a fundamental contradiction at the heart of her blog, one that she cannot resolve even if she had the most honest intentions (and to be clear, I do not believe she does), because it's baked into the very premise of her blog. she will always, constantly have to make calls between platforming dangerous, transmisogynistic bigotry, or denying survivors a platform
there have been numerous times where she has deemed the bigotry not severe enough to warrant ignoring a submission
she has no way of knowing whether any submission is legitimate or just a terf generating something with AI and trying to skirt the line of how much bigotry she will accept. the legitimacy of a submission, however, is not something you even need to regularly speculate on if your project is not designed to foster and invite bigotry. you don't need to worry about fake submissions if you don't design a project that, by your own admission, incentivizes hate groups to make fake submissions
the core design of your project HAS to resist allowing such things on its own, or else you WILL have to constantly speculate on the legitimacy of individual submissions, and you WILL have to choose between platforming bigotry and potentially ignoring the submissions of real survivors. not even the best intentions in the world can solve this contradiction. it is fundamental to the design of such a project. this is one of the reasons it's impossible to do such a thing ethically, even if you believe its designer when she says she has honest intentions. the purpose of a system is what it does. a responsible designer knows this
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