Transmen4tmapeople

one of the most effective surface level criticisms of kiwifarms you can make is that you'd have to be a cruel, asocial yet drama obsessed, and reactionary loser to post on the site, and you can tell how effective this is because many if not most kiwifarms users will happily cop to it. in contrast, not one of taxxon's stalkers will give a single inch to people who recognise how deeply strange and cruel their behaviour is - they are entirely convinced of their moral righteousness in ceaselessly posting about her

I didn't know that Patty had been banned but I have seen the awful attacks that had been aimed at her for months that echoed other types of isolating harassment that I know she'd been subject to for years.

The people who have been harassing her have been using weaponized social justice language to demonize a young woman who who has spent her whole adult life in public on the internet. She is in a tremendously unenviable position and there were times when she didn't handle that gracefully, but it's ridiculous to expect someone being flayed alive to perform ballet.

At this point it has to be clear to everyone that callouts say much more about the person doing the calling out than the person being called out, right? At this point we know that accusations about a person based on their kinks and sexual roleplay is sexual harassment, not 'community protection' right?

The trans community is full to the brim of traumatized people who are working through their trauma and realizing their fullest selves in complicated ways, and it is also chock fucking full of people who only 'feel safe' when they manage to unperson someone who likes things they think are icky or who was clumsy when navigating new territory.

From observation and secondary information, but not direct experience, I feel like trans women are more vulnerable to this because they are on average more vulnerable to any social attack: they have less people to rely on and those people are in the community they are being attacked from.

The inference I make from this is that all attempts to see the number of trans women who get chewed up by this and saying "we need to make this space less transphobic" are doomed to failure because the problem isn't that the space uniquely hates trans women, the problem is the space hates anyone it can punish, and trans women are unavoidably going to take punishment worse. You can't get people to hold off their urge to punish because a particular person is trans, you have to go upstream and cut off the norm of universal, omnidirectional punishment.

And people want to focus on "we need to make this space less transphobic" because that doesn't require them to give up on omnidirectional punishment, and any similarly vague We Need To directive is a great justification for omnidirectional punishment.

I also tend to think that we see it a lot in leftist spaces generally because people are a lot more reactionary than they believe they are and even if they are aware of structural violence, they haven't teased apart distinctions between discomfort and danger and haven't thought about whether punishment actually creates safety. They don't think they're a part of the structure that creates violence.

One of the reasons that this whole thing has been so awful to watch is because Patricia has been uniquely willing to discuss how the punishment purity spirals mirrored her experience of moral OCD. She talked about how the need to perform perfection and banish wrongthink was harmful to her and to the people attacking her, and that resulted in people calling her a manipulative abuser trying to normalize [incest/pedophilia/insert scare word of the week] to groom her audience. She was accuately describing the way that the punitive urge damages society and the way that reactionary scrupulosity damages individuals and people were cheerfully crowing "well maybe i *like* being damaged, maybe a damaged society is safer for antiwrongthinkers and we don't care if wrongthinkers like it, did you ever consider that?"

We do need to make the space less transphobic (less transmisogynist specifically as well) just like we need to make it less racist and less ableist because a space or a world with less bias is a better world, but I do think that people are misdiagnosing the central problem as transphobia when the central problem is the ape urge to bare your teeth at any transgression against the group and rip it to shreds in the name of ingroup safety.

It *feels* like you're making yourself safer by banishing the threat, but all you're doing is creating an incentive to become the person who gets to label other people as threats.

This isn't Omelas, this is The Lottery, and people are appeasing the punitive tradition in a way that ensures no one will protect them from it (and in fact will call them dangerous abusers if they resist) when their name is drawn.