The immediate move to not only sensationalize, but also sanitize the context of the work is notable. (eg the article is by a transgender woman, yet the mass of the criticism regarding the ‘extreme transmisogyny’ pointedly avoids this.) The sensationalizing aspect is easily seen in how people will claim all of these very nebulous, very ‘evil’-esque notions about the work, all the while refusing to name it (Dump Your Puppygirl), refusing to name the author (Tara Knight), refusing to add the necessary context that the author is herself a transgender woman, that this was published on a personal website, that this was a self-described vent piece. They are baiting over the idea of the article, to promote negative engagement by people who have not read it and instead formulated their opinion via loud and popular people online. This sensationalization is also seen in how the people making these sorts of response posts engage with their own audience: by assuming they are not mentally capable of reading the work for themselves, by claiming that that are performing ‘harm reduction’ by telling that audience not to read the piece, but instead mindlessly amass to criticize it using their rehashed talking points. The usage of therapy-speak and misplaced terminology is hauntingly idiotic, nearly as idiotic as the hypocrisy: People are criticizing a personal post on the personal website of a transgender woman, encouraging people to dogpile her, and then claiming this is… in the defense of transgender women? That this is the real transfeminism? And nobody seems to be questioning this even remotely — because the loud and popular people say ‘if you do, you must be the real transmisogynist, because you won’t attack this transgender woman with me. You must be the real bad guy, because you won’t do as i say unquestioningly’. The easiest tactic in the world, and people eat it right up. It’s beyond disappointing.

(A personal piece of writing by a transgender woman on the internet, which she posted to her personal website, is not going to materially harm you. She can’t kill you with her personal post on her personal blog. If you sat down and spent 30+ minutes of your time reading her article, You Did That. She’s not holding you hostage. She doesn’t even know you and you don’t even know her.)

So now you have an entire tag of people engaging in copious group think. ‘Popular Poster A said XYZ, so it must be true.’ And nobody has even read the article. They just nod and smile and go on the attack because, well, someone else told them to.

…And then you have swaths of people coming to defend and meme-ify the dynamic of abuse and manipulation which the article was critiquing and venting over. ‘puppygirl positivity’, and they mean positivity and support towards those akin to the abusive figure in the article — the one who could not be criticized, the one who waged that inability to be criticized as fragility, as softness, as purity: if you criticize her, you will kill her. It will be all your fault. The figure who had to be coddled. Who engaged in sexual abuse and coercion. And this figure is reflected back in the real-life responses of backlash. All of these people saying that the article, the criticism within it, will most certainly kill readers, some claiming it nearly already has, and that you should be so very angry at the transgender woman who is the author, because she is being oh-so-transmisogynistic by daring to publish a vent piece on her personal website.

You also have people claiming that the abuse as described in the article was completely morally fine, because the described perpetrator had anxiety. There are legitimately people in the tag claiming that anxiety is a ‘severe disability’ which should lend to partners being required to just suck it up and take the abuse given, because oh, they might upset the anxious person. How ridiculous, genuinely, and frankly how stupid. As a proper real-life physically disabled person & as a neurodiverse person, this type of crap is very literally just crap. Anxiety isn’t a ‘severe disability’, and even in exclusion of that fact, no disability grants you permission to abuse other people. Your trauma and personal past do not give you free reign to treat other people in any way you so desire. Grow up. Turning a transgender woman into a digital punching bag because you didn’t like the fact that she dared to open her mouth isn’t the ‘transfeminist win’ people are acting as if it is.

(And all of this combined with the fact that so few people see the irony of an article which criticizes the abusive tactics and behavior of the puppygirl figure being met with swaths of self-proclaimed puppygirls decrying how, because they happened to see criticism pertaining to their own behavior, they are going to commit suicide and spiral and die and xyz — perfectly mirroring the criticized abusive behavior within the article. The joke writes itself.)

but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs

anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.

about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.

now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.

this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.

in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.

so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.

you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,