if your response to an article being released by (woman i’d never heard of until now) is to claim that it is a ‘cognitohazard’, that it has ‘already driven people to attempt suicide’, that is is awful, that it is intolerable, that it is the most transmisogynistic & ableist thing to ever grace this earth — and that, thus, absolutely everyone must avoid reading it no matter the cost and simply take your word for all of this egregious badness, because you’re trustworthy of course, and there’s no need to check the contents of said article independently because it will ‘cause you to spiral’ and ‘cause depression’ and this that and the other — it becomes incredibly clear that you are non-reputable and in no way harboring good intention. This is very simply the manufacturing of a campaign against a trans woman.
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.)
