micah says bugs are cool

Reading + responding to this post on substack.

"For queer people, finding community can be challenging. Especially for young people, who may not have many other queer people in their class, or even school. This problem intensifies if the young person lives in a rural area, where they interact with fewer queer people overall. Or if they live in a household where they have to hide who they are or face abuse, physical violence, and homelessness. This problem intensifies when people are also marginalized by other factors, such as their race, gender, disability, class, etc."

Want to note that gender is a marginalized factor for all trans people.

"Many queer people end up seeking community in online spaces on various platforms - tiktok, insta, reddit, twitch, tumblr, twitter, discord, etc - but the patterns I wish to discuss here are not simply online phenomena. It is easy to discuss their online aspects for various reasons - there is often a paper trail that we can look at, plus, you are reading this online, which means the community that we share, as author and reader, exists online. However, it is extremely important to note that the patterns I’d like to discuss exist in offline spaces just as much as they do in online ones. The people in offline spaces also use online spaces, and are therefore influenced by the types of beliefs which are assumed and taken for granted in online spaces. Many times, especially for trans women, specifically, spaces, which initially give a welcoming or accepting presentation, end up overselling the safety of their space, which, when push comes to shove, find that the extension of solidarity falls just short of supporting trans women."

Trans people as a general group of people experience this. What supports your idea that this is especially an issue for trans women and not trans men?

"Porpentine discusses this phenomena in her infamous Hot Allostatic Load:"

"If you spend any time in community with trans fems, specifically, you will end up hearing countless stories of this process playing out to individuals in queer spaces, online and offline, over, and over, and over, and over… The reason that Hot Allostatic Load has become so foundational in transfeminist spaces is because of just how deeply relatable it is to so many trans women. When a girl reads it for the first time, she starts immediately connecting the dots in the events that she experienced when she attempted to find community with other queer people. It, tragically, seems to describe the closest thing to a universal trans feminine experience that exists, outside of gender dysphoria itself. All of this raises the question: how did we end up here? I’d like to suggest that it is the result of something we have been watching the rise of the transmanosphere."

The quoted section itself states "...they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time."

This is a reality that trans men deal with as well. What specifically leads you to believe that this experience of trans women is a result of the "transmanosphere" instead of, I don't know, the cissexist society we live in?

That being said: If you spend any time in community with transmascs and trans men, specifically, you will end up hearing countless stories of this process playing out to individuals in queer spaces, online and offline over and over and over and over. Is this also the result of the "transmanosphere"?

Does Hot Allostatic Load push the responsibility of transfem reality onto trans men the way you have here? If not, what makes you feel comfortable turning it into something primarily about trans men? Do you think that this reality in queer spaces is somehow a different, better, experience if you’re a trans person who isn't a trans woman?

What is the "transmanosphere"? What does it mean? I still haven't seen a proper explanation how you came to feel comfortable making this claim and what actually supports it.

"Many of the websites that people congregate on today got their start in the 00’s. Back during the Y2K era, before the internet as we know it today, people were beginning to use the internet as a way to connect with other people. The early internet consisted of myspace pages, geocities, livejournal and deviantart blogs, and AOL sending out free cd-roms with their web browser install file so that you would use their bad internet.

4chan, one of the places most strongly tied to “incel” and manosphere “culture” was founded in 2003. In 2004, facebook was launched as a way for zuckerberg to rate the attractiveness of students on his college campus, and it quickly took off. It was not the only website designed for submitting photos of women to rate their “attractiveness”, but some combination of privileged start up conditions and the implementation of certain features which developed into a usable social media platform caused facebook to outcompete them.

In 2005 we were introduced to reddit, and its competitor digg, which allowed individual users to upvote or downvote forum posts, giving control of the order that posts appear to the userbase, democratically. This was before it became easy to use bot armies to control the outcomes of this democratized algorithm. We also got youtube, indicating development of improving internet infrastructure allowing people to more easily download and stream videos. In 2006, we got twitter, which prioritized being concise. And in 2007, we were blessed with tumblr. (And pornhub.) Over time, each of these social media platforms has moved through various stages of usage and development. Usually, they start off as relatively neutral platforms which are discovered by users and adopted. As more people adopt them and make using them part of their daily routine, they become entrenched as institutions in our capitalist society.

Following their adoption, and generally overlapping with the process of entrenchment, these platforms go through a monetization stage. Although they don’t always start out making money, once they begin to grow a user base which is active on the platform, they begin trying to exploit the user base in order to generate profits, as that is their purpose under our capitalist system. For social media platforms, this usually means targeted advertising. As it turns out, if you have a database containing thousands of data points on individuals, you can analyze them, algorithmically, and find out a lot of very specific things about people. This information can be very valuable for advertisers trying to sell you a product. It can also be used for even more nefarious purposes, such as to exploit one’s political leanings to inspire a specific action, such as voting, or acting in a more direct and/or violent way. (see: cambridge analytica, jan 6, etc) It is also being packaged by corporations like palantir and sold to government and policing institutions worldwide as well as private companies which use it to train AI LLMs.

The inevitable end point of this, for the corporations which own social media websites, is to keep one engaged, reading, liking, commenting and posting. The more data points that a company collects on each of their users, the more valuable their dataset becomes. And, as was famously researched by facebook, the type of content which keeps users most reliably engaged is content which makes us angry or outraged. As a result, we have seen the algorithms which sort the posts that users see end up tending to favor content which makes people angry. If it picks up on users engaging in certain types of posts, it is incentivized to connect those users with other users who are upset about the same things as them, while occasionally feeding that group posts for them to be angry about, together. In other words, social media sites are incentivized to algorithmically create echo chambers. Angry ones. And, when you get a group of people together, and make them angry, we start to see certain types of maladaptive group behaviors. Facts begin to get overlooked, as users begin seeking and receiving validation for their emotions, which are shared by those in their echo chambers. Usually, this results in very toxic social spaces. Users log in and get angry. They log in to get angry. The platforms encourage this, actively. Because it is profitable.

This creates an environment which can be easily manipulated, if one has the resources. We saw this take place as a result of the actions of Cambridge Analytica, who weaponized it in order to influence users’ political behavior, for profit, to the benefit of their extremely wealthy clients. We have two truths: lgbtq and trans people rely strongly upon online communities as “safe spaces” to build community with each other and develop a sense of identity and belonging, and that people with undue influence over social media algorithms and how they work are keen to exploit them for profit, regardless of the effect on the health of the user, the community, and society as a whole. Both things are true. Both things are supported by empirical evidence that has been compiled into research and documentation by academics and journalists over the past decade or two. We can therefore conclude, already, that, at a very minimum, there is a need to further investigate the way that these two truths come to collide and interact in the online communities where trans people spend their time, and the impacts it has on the health and well being of trans people, especially young ones who are more vulnerable to a wide array of exploitation. This is a call to action for researchers."

Ok. Relevance to the idea of the transmanosphere as a concept? Is this post a call to action for researchers? If It is how does this article pointing the finger at trans men assist? Who is this for?

"In the 2010s, when I was a teenager, a movement emerged from these online spaces which was centered around young men, specifically socially awkward ones, who had trouble talking to women. I use the term “movement”, here, not in the sense that various civil rights movements are considered such, but more in the sense of the movement that happens after one’s first cup of coffee in the morning. A bowel movement. Poop from a butt. Ten years ago, instead of andrew tate, we had roosh valizadeh. Instead of “incel”s, we had “puas” or “pick up artists”. Both are men who have been identified as the figureheads of “movements” of young men and boys who have gathered as fandoms for men who tell them, not only that it acceptable to target women with sexual violence, but also tell them exactly how to do so, and will teach you, and they have built a strong and growing industry around doing so. (Futrelle) (McCullough)

The groups of people who gather around these men, and others like them, are what we now refer to as “the manosphere”. The manosphere is usually defined as a variety of mens’ groups which operate both offline and online and share a variety of common beliefs based around the perpetuation of sexism and misogyny. It exploits mens insecurities and mental health struggles in order to recruit young men and boys in order to indoctrinate them into extremist, often violent, positions. (McCullough) These spaces are known for reproducing the ideology of male supremacy, which is upheld by what we refer to as “mens rights activists” or “MRAs”. MRA’s share a belief that they are “fighting against a feminist conspiracy to oppress men”. They believe that we live in a “gynocentric society” which favors women. Therefore, their activism centers around attacking women, feminists and feminism. (SPLC)

In addition to holding deeply misogynistic views about women, these spaces are also often deeply transphobic. The bioessentialism that they apply to the gender roles of women under patriarchy extends to trans people. Trans men are unwelcome, as they are seen as women, and trans women are unwelcome because of deeply held, violent transmisogynistic beliefs held nearly universally. They are also characterized by a deeply disgusting view of sexual violence. The puas sold books on how to rape women. (Futrelle) Andrew tate sold instructional courses on how to traffick women for sex. (Valdez)

Many manosphere “communities” and influencers got their start during the gamergate movement in the mid 2010s. Gamergate was a movement based around getting unreasonably upset at a few key events, all involving women either having sex with men or turning men down for sex. It was sparked on 4chan in response to journalist Anita Sarkeesian’s ex boyfriend spreading a rumor that Sarkeesian had a sexual relationship with someone who she also wrote a story about. Shortly after, video game developer Zoë Quinn’s ex boyfriend made a post that alleged Quinn had a sexual relationship with a man in exchange for a positive review on a game that they had published, which received many positive reviews. Both of these people were subject to severe harassment at the hands of gigantic, vitriolic mobs of men who believed that they were pursuing justice. Both faced large numbers of rape and death threats, as well as doxxing and in person harassment, causing them to take extensive steps in order to protect themselves. (Johnston)

During gamergate, the harassment was coordinated on 4chan, 8chan and on reddit. (Johnston) (Salter 47) It is estimated that there were around ten thousand people who participated in gamergate on reddit alone. (ip)

In the following years, these spaces continued to fester in their corners of the internet, spreading their pro-rape propaganda to young men and boys who were eager to have them validate their fragility and hatred for women. Creating reactionary propaganda always pays well and sells way more than viewpoints which push against them, which allows these spaces to financially reward their toxic views and behaviors. As the #metoo movement unfolded, the manosphere, or at least its precursors, were there to coordinate harassment against the brave survivors speaking up in defense of sexual violence and those who commit it.

(if you appreciate content which pushes back against these narratives, please consider supporting the artist with a monthly subscription or a one time donation to her kofi) The manosphere continued to fester for the following years, receiving its next large bump from the 2022 american trial which adjudicated whether Amber Heard had defamed Johnny Depp in her 2018 Washington Post article that Heard penned about her experience dating Depp in which she described physical and sexual abuse.

Although a 2020 trial following a similar suit filed in England in 2020 had already found that Heard’s claims were “substantially true” and that there was “Overwhelming evidence was filed to show Johnny Depp engaged in domestic violence against his wife Amber Heard” (Bowcott and Davies), the lack of televised court process which was a feature of the American trial, that was largely overlooked when the American trial took place in 2022. The American trial allowed cameras in the courtroom, which resulted in a huge amount of media attention on the trial. Simultaneously, there was a coordinated smear campaign directed at attacking Heard’s reputation and laundering Depp’s abusive actions. The harmful rhetoric that was validated and legitimized by the manosphere during that time did immense harm to all victims of abuse and violence. The attacks on the credibility of Heard have been reproduced countless times to discredit countless victims in the years since."

Note: not a single thing described here has to do with trans men as a group of people.

"Much like how 4chan and reddit spawned misogynistic echo chambers where anti-feminist thinkers could meet and validate each other’s reactionary feelings about women and other minorities, at the same time, a similar process was unfolding on tumblr. Although lgbt communities did exist on reddit, and, to a lesser extent, 4chan, the english speaking user bases inhabiting those platforms tended to mirror the more general demographics of internet users, which, at the time, meant that they skewed heavily towards boys and men who were usually somewhat technologically inclined and also privileged enough to have both free time and access to computers. As computers and internet access became more normalized and universal, these demographics shifted to reflect that, however, the userbases of reddit and 4chan still remain predominantly white men. Therefore, racist and misogynistic attitudes and behaviors were normalized and existed as the norm. This created an atmosphere that was off-putting to marginalized people, who were pushed to form communities in other spaces. For lgbt people, and specifically trans people, this space often ended up being tumblr. (Jacobsen) (Haimson et al.)

In its early days, tumblr gained traction as a niche microblogging platform which fostered a safe space for the lgbt community. The site offered users the ability to tag their posts with hashtags and view others posts posted under hashtags they were interested in. This led to communities growing and flourishing under various lgbt community related hashtags. (Haimson et al.) (Fink and Miller)

After some time, the active and committed userbase began to look very attractive to the venture capitalists who made a killing off of the booming stock market of the dot com bubble and the 2008 financial crash. In 2013, David Karp, the website’s founder, sold ownership of the platform to yahoo for $1.1 billion in a deal that allowed him to remain on as CEO. (Fink and Miller) However, many users point to a December 2018 change to the platform’s Terms of Service which banned pornographic content, prior to it’s acquisition by verizon, as the point that fractured the trans userbase on tumblr, leading to a significant drop in the number of users. (Haimson et al. #) This was due to the number of trans women who are sex workers which results from the systemic employment discrimination that we face. (Jackson) (de Luna) (Robertson) Tumblr went on to settle multiple lawsuits as a result of how the policy disproportionately targeted trans women, but the damage was already largely done. (Robertson) However, that was not the only reason that trans women were pushed off of the platform. In 2015, fans of the childrens show ‘Stephen Universe’, or more accurately, perhaps, members of the Stephen Universe fandom on tumblr, bullied a 15 year old girl to the point that she was hospitalized following a suicide attempt. (Pulliam-Moore) In 2018, following the verizon sale, tumblr was declared “a joyless black hole”, with users reporting that they felt as though “Tumblr staff doesn’t care about any abuse or harassment that goes on in the community. (Jackson)"

Relevance to the idea of the "transmanosphere"?

"At that point, in 2018, one tumblr user reported: “I’ve literally been stalked by people I have blocked in the past because the way that works is totally fucking useless”. The reason for this is that the block feature is easily circumvented due to the features that originally allowed communities to foster: the pseudo anonymous nature of the platform and the use of tags. (Jackson) Tumblr faced a controversy in 2024 due to “transphobic moderation practices” after a ban targeting a trans woman. The company blamed the incident on a third party contractor it had hired to moderate it’s platform. (de Luna) (Know Your Meme) At that point, users reported that there was rampant sexual harassment, stalking, abuse, as well as rampant transphobia and transmisogyny taking place on the platform, that it was being reported using the tools provided by the website, and that those reports were being ignored. (de Luna)

Now, in 2026, it is not clear that much has changed. Over the past few months, I have been using tumblr, as a trans woman, to post relatively milquetoast transfeminist posts, mostly reposting tweets that I made which I thought were well worded or had sparked interesting discourse on twitter. During this time, I have faced an intense amount of harassment. Tumblr users have told me, in graphic detail, exactly how they would like me to be raped and murdered. There is an account impersonating me right now that is going around posting rape threats to other users in an attempt to discredit me. One post of mine has received over 1000 comments, mostly from trans men, upset that I, a trans woman, would dare assert intersectional feminist principles."

How does this relate to the idea of a transmanosphere? You continue to talk about a lot of things but have failed to tie it back to your claim each time.

I'm not sure what this image is supposed to show other than individual comments with no likes. I can show you terrible comments I have received for my trans posts as well from all genders of trans people. We are on the internet.

"The thing which struck me the most, from this experience, is that the way that these trans men have treated me, and the way that their arguments are structured, are nearly indistinguishable from the attitudes and rhetoric that we saw emerging from the manosphere."

How? Explain? You have made statements but still haven't actually connected what you're talking about back into the idea that there is a "transmanosphere".

Is this supposed to make you look good and trans men look bad? Who are these people? How are their comments indicative of a transmanophere?

"It is particularly frustrating to see trans men repeating the exact same arguments as cis men who populate the manosphere in order to avoid grappling with the relative privilege that they hold over trans women."

What arguments are being repeated? What relative privilege do trans men hold over trans women and how are trans men meant to "grapple" with it?

"It is equally frustrating seeing cis feminists, who are intersectional in their analysis, and supportive of trans women, failing to recognize that this is what is happening."

What???

"On one hand, trans men are men. As men, they hold male privilege."

Are you suggesting that the simple reality of being a man gifts someone male privilege within a cisnormative society? What supports this idea? When does a trans man get granted male privilege? What does that look like, structurally?

"They are also men in the sense that they can be just as ignorant and bad at listening as their cis counterparts."

This suggests that ignorance and being bad at listening is directly related to being a man. Do you intend to suggest this? Is lack of listening and ignorance something that men do rather than something that exists within any group of people?

"It is, of course, disappointing to see the lack of solidarity that some of these trans guys show towards trans women. One would hope that the experience of being trans would lead one to extending empathy to the experience of trans women."

This is something experienced by all trans gender groups. We would like to think that our shared identity would grant us solidarity and empathy but that simply isn't reality.

"However, like cis men, most of these guys aren’t going to magically be good transfeminists by default."

Any group of people that exists at all are not going to be good transfeminists by default. This is not a man-associated issue, this is a human issue.

How does it mirror the rhetoric? Examples?

"On the other hand, we have cis women who are well grounded in feminist theory, sometimes extremely so, who fail to recognize this for what it is. This happens, seemingly, because they end up seeing trans people as their AGAB, and it shows in their analysis. This demonstrates the need for a much deeper (or any) understanding of transfeminism in feminist spaces and in the analysis of cis feminists. The fact that there are trans men quoting lines from gamergate and depp v heard verbatim and feminists who were vocal about those movements are completely unable to recognize that for what it is because they see trans men as girls and trans women as imposters should be fucking embarrassing."

Who is doing this? What examples support what you are saying? Where is the transmanophere? Is it with the cis women feminists?

"Now, if this phenomenon was occurring only on tumblr, that would be one thing. However, just like any other radicalization pipeline, it spreads into anywhere that it is not purposefully opposed. These attitudes have spread out to everywhere that trans people are online. If a young trans woman ventures onto tumblr, of course, she will find these deeply, deeply transmisogynistic trans guys. However, if she instead goes to reddit, she will also find them. Same, too, on twitter, instagram and, to a lesser extent, twitch. The problem is especially bad on tiktok, whose algorithm rewards the same type of toxic behavior that happened to grow out of tumblr. It has also spread into offline trans and lgbt spaces."

What is the radicalization pipeline? Where is the proof that this exists? How is transmisogyny from trans men different from transmisogyny from non-trans men? What makes this different from the experience of transphobia that any openly trans man online also experiences from others, including trans women? What makes this a movement? Why is there the suggestion that this developed or was created on tumblr?

"Trans men who engage in this sort of transmisogyny find these attitudes very easy to fall into. Due to their existing biases, formed as a result of privilege, it is very easy, cognitively, to engage in any number of thought terminating cliches which act as a defense mechanism, an immunization, if you will, preventing one from reflecting on their own position in society and the privilege it offers them. However, this behavior is also very highly rewarded by the algorithms which determine what posts get seen on these social media websites."

Explain. What existing biases, what privilege? What trans men are rewarded by the algorithms in a way that non trans men are not?

"It is not simply that there is some nefarious transmisogynistic sentiment held by the owners and executives of these platforms (there is), but these types of transmisogynistic sentiments mirror the sentiments of our society. This means that the userbases on these platforms are happy to engage with trans men who are willing to attack their sisters, because their attacks on us conform with their existing biases. TERFs on tumblr see trans men attacking trans women and click like, just like misogynists on reddit see trans men attacking trans women and upvote. Some, surely, will even create fake personas or even bot fake engagement in order to get in on the fun."

You understand that platforms are happy to engage with transphobia in general, right? Does it not count or count less when those attacks are being done by trans women toward trans men?

"This has resulted in a very unique radicalization pipeline aimed at radicalizing trans men against trans women. Although it may have began on tumblr due to the specific history of that platform, it has spread out onto other, more populated platforms where they have received huge waves of uncritical support. This not only presents a clear and obvious threat to trans women looking to find community, but also to trans men, who are also often vulnerable and looking for supportive community. This creates a hunting ground for people who want to take advantage of young and vulnerable people, grooming them into hateful ideologies, but also into much more nefarious situations involving self harm and sexual exploitation."

You have continued to fail to show any sort of radicalization pipeline being reality. Why do you feel this originated on Tumblr? Did transmanophere not exist before tumblr? How are you determining its existence? What trans man has uncritical support by cis society online? How does the second half of your paragraph here relate to the idea of the transmanophere?

"It is clear, therefore, that we need to start talking about the transmanosphere. We should be looking at the process of radicalization this pipeline has created. We should be looking at it in relation to known movements such as the traditional manosphere, TERFism, and even white supremacist and misogynistic terror groups such as 764. If we don’t, the problem will only get worse. Potentially, much, much worse."

You should start by showing anything that supports the idea that there is a transmanophere that exists and functions in society. What is the radicalization? What is the pipeline? How do you feel that trans men use male privilege to achieve this? How do the things you've talked about relate to the manophere, TERFS, white supremacist and misogynistic terror groups such as 764? You have made these claims but failed to back up any of them.