transgender cuz im tradin u pussies in for a sack

I will never forget those who saw our cries for help and chose to ignore them. Just ask yourself for one moment… if this were your mother, would you stay silent and walk away as if nothing was happening? Or would you do everything possible to save her before it’s too late?

with that said, I think it is necessary to understand policing of online public space as a dimension of the policing of public space more broadly. there is no ''just go outside'' solution to these issues, because ''outside'' is policed as well.

for example, the way that sex workers have been ruthlessly and structurally targeted for social death online is completely in line with how they are treated offline as well. these things work in conjunction. if you make sure someone cannot find and vet clients online, they must do so offline. if you make sure they cannot meet clients indoors, they have to meet them on the street. if they have to meet them on the street, police have more access to these workers (to harass, assault, sexually violate, abduct, and kill them). the whole system works together. every prediction I heard from sex workers in 2016 is the reality today.

so when transfeminized people are talking about being relentlessly harassed off of every social media platform, that is not just an "online" issue. it is happening alongside their being driven out of all public space, online or offline (e.g. with bathroom policing, denial from employment, housing, and shelters, etc.)

when people from the global south are being labeled as "scammers" or "foreign bots" and getting their accounts banned repeatedly, it is part of the exact same ideological justification for border policing, detention, and deportations--it is the constant reinforcement of the idea that these people are "criminal" and here to "take what's yours" and "might appear to be someone struggling but they're not really human."

when images of people with racialized features, fat bodies, facial and skin differences, visible disabilities, intersex and transsexual sexed traits, etc., are repeatedly hidden by algorithms, marked "mature," and censored, this indicates a resurgence of "ugly laws" as part of the broader ascendant eugenics movement. this cannot be divorced from the stigmatization, defunding, dismantling, and criminalization of healthcare for "undesirable" populations.

i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with drawing or writing boy characters as girls or liking those kinds of fanworks, in fact sometimes i do it myself and quite enjoy it. i also recognize that a significant portion of fandom creators are female and/or lesbian, and are in part likely seeking to project their own identities onto the characters comprising the main yaoi ship (often some of the strongest and most-developed characters from the source media). however when this becomes widespread as a phenomenon i personally cannot help but think of it as a version of (largely) sfw a/b/o - of trying to subvert or vent about the struggles of misogyny via fanworks without addressing the underlying misogyny in the space itself; a way of achieving "women without women".

this is why the fact that these interpretations are usually contextless genderbend alternate universes and rarely explicit specific trans headcanons is particularly significant to me. in my mind, an obvious way to imagine "what if this male character was a woman" would be not to necessarily create an entire alternate universe where this cisgender male is her cisgender female "opposite", but instead to consider the implications of the idea that she was a closeted woman all along, and what effect this would have had on the narrative. however, this necessarily involves confronting misogyny and specifically transmisogyny in the text and in fan spaces, something that many genderbends seem unwilling or unable to do.