soupy

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.

her outfits called bouncing rhythm for an amazing reason.

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYBODY*

here's the lgbtq tag trending as it does regularly due to multiple porn bots catfishing using the same stolen pictures of the same trans woman on the same page

remember the year in review? this was one of the featured tags. note that despite neither the image nor video in the posts in this screenshot being marked as mature content, this screenshot of them is going to mark this post as mature content as soon as I post it

here's some of the lovely messages of positivity you can expect to get if you're a transfem on this platform! I cropped the real-life gore images out of the first one, the person in the second one has made multiple posts like this + pedojacketed me and still has that same account and does that same shit, and the the person in the third took weeks for tumblr to do anything about, because:

here's tumblr staff stating that making explicit death threats towards transfems is not a violation of the ToS or user guidelines!

and here they are stating it again! and while we're on the subject of who the user guidelines apply to:

here's SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY CONTENTLESS REBLOG of a year-old post with 15,000 notes being flagged as sexually explicit (over 100 times in case you thought it was maybe a fluke) despite the image in the post not actually showing anything, SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY CONTENTLESS REBLOG of a heated rivalry gifset showing two fully nude dudes fucking center frame getting flagged as sexually explicit, which it is according to tumblr's definition, but despite that it has tens of thousands of notes and in fact is so popular and shared that if you look over to the third image you can see that same gif as one of the trending tag thumbnails! and on that note:

here's an episode of an anime available on youtube with a TV-14 age rating that I posted a screenshot of that got flagged as sexually explicit, had the appeal denied twice, got fully nuked off the site, and then got my entire blog marked as mature for posting!

and here's that same already-marked-as-mature blog curiously being marked as mature a second time out of the blue 15 minutes before they dropped the age verification update that would hide mature content!

and here's my first blog of 13 years getting a SPECIAL type of mature flag that marks all of my posts as mature content individually and separately from the actual mature content label!

you don't get to appeal these terminations btw! they automatically and instantly deny your appeal and send you the rejection before you even get the email telling you they got the appeal and will carefully review it

not that appealing will do anything anyways! here's tumblr staff terminating me for explicit content when I appealed the explicit flag on a post that they accepted the appeal on after terminating me for it,

and here's tumblr staff denying my appeal on that termination, lying about why i was terminated, terminating my already-and-still-terminated blog a second time to change the termination reason to one i can't appeal, which they then upgraded from an account deactivation into a postmortem full account nuke! isn't that wild?

here's them doing it to me a second time

and here's tumblr staff terminating me FIVE TIMES in multiple weeks it took them to do anything about a burner blog and a post pedojacketing me and encouraging people to harass me forever over completely fabricated claims that everyone spreading it around admitted were false on the post itself by the way! note also how only the burner blog got deleted - but the main account? just a post removal. after weeks of it being reported and spread around. the fastest of my terminations during this period was three hours after making the account by the way!

which isn't an isolated occurrence, either! they'll pass over multiple open, avowed nazis posting swastikas and slur-filled nazi race science shit about how they think black people are biologically inferior subhumans for months on end to nuke some random transfem off the site in as little as 10 minutes after account creation, then take MULTIPLE MONTHS to respond to your report of someone sending you harassment messages to tell you that the content you reported has already been removed (because it's an ask in the inbox of an account they already terminated along with four others in the time it took them to respond)!

And to really send a clear message about where they stand, they've REALLY ramped up the termination of transfems since the start of pride! And everybody will act like you deserve it and are a subhuman unworthy of life if you don't openly support the multiple ongoing harassment campaigns against transfems, all enabled and quietly endorsed by tumblr staff and moderation!

You know what IS an important issue? Getting called a fucking birthday boy. They get all hands on deck about it. They will write VERY long posts about how important it is you not use it, and that anyone who does must be punished as severely as possible

There's only one explanation. The lives of trans women are so worthless to them, so fucking disposable, that a trans man getting invalidated is actually more important to them. That's how these people, who demand we view them as family and allies, who think we should be ready to die for them, view us.