I recently left the radqueer community
Hello, My name is Peyton and I recently left tje radqueer community I've kind of wanted to get this out of my system but I don't have anyone I feel like I can talk to this about so I'm making a Tumblr post.
Now I am an adult (19) leaving the community and I joined the community 3 years ago when I was 16. When I initially joined a community I was very vulnerable I didn't have many friends I felt like I didn't belong anywhere and I was pretty miserable. I'm autistic and I'm also a system and have NPD and another big one is I have a restrictive ed (relevant) I also struggle quite a bit with masking. Due to my struggles with masking I got bullied quite a bit at school and even more so when I started expressing my queer identity by doing things like putting nonbinary pins on my bag the bullying just made me become a less social and more online.
Are they became increasingly online and I would also spent more time here on Tumblr. And this is where I found the radqueer community at first I was sceptical of it but the more I looked through tags and the more I saw the community I felt kinda good about it and eventually decided to join it because I felt like this could be the only place I could truly be myself and not get bullied and it was but I didn't realise this place was doing way more harm to me than good.
Now when I mentioned the restrictive ed would be important this is why it's important this community has a big sense of be able to do what you want with your body regardless of what it is if it's your body you should be allowed to do whatever you want which I do agree with to an extent but this includes things like encouraging sh to people if they want to do that or encouraging eds to people if they wanna do that encouraging people to kill their selves if they want to do that and at the time I was very against the idea of recovery so I mostly use this community as ways to validate myself and the disorder, I used this mentality as a way to encourage my disorder with the fit well it is my body and if I want to harm it I should be able to which only hurt me more mentally and physically in the long run. When I was radqueer I also did just stop trying to make connections in real life because I wanted to be online every day I wanted to be engaging with the community all day so I would mostly be on discord or Tumblr because I wanted to interact with people that thought like me even though I didn't agree with a lot of people's ideology I just got addicted to the feeling of feeling valid and wanted it for once because I wasn't used to that and I needed it once I got it I needed it.
A lot of people in these spaces were Pro-C I have never been pro contact I was always anti contact and I would spend a lot of time blocking pro contact people and reporting them but being in a community with so many of them did genuinely stress me out I just wasn't willing to leave for so long because I felt like when I leave I'm gonna be lonely again which to some extent yes I kind of miss the community because it is hard to leave something that you spent three whole years of your life in and then not miss it because I do but at the same time I don't want to be in a community anymore where the only thing that comes out of it is harm towards myself to other people, I do not want to be in a community where a cultural appropriation is normalised and ideologies such as "transnazi"is normalised or how normal pro contact sending people for harmful paraphilias are I can't be in that community anymore.
And yes being a system did kind of make being in this community easier for me to rationalise in my head. The way I saw it is well it might be good for us because different alters may have traits that we can't bodily have like wings or animal features and I would be like well that could be transids and either for them to express themselves which it immediately I understand the logic I had at the time but I also understand it's not the best logic anymore I was just desperately trying to rationalise why I was in this community at the time. Now we do have alters that are and always have been very anti radqueer and those are mostly protectors which should've been taken as a sign earlier than it was we do have some altars that are still attached to the community but collectively we are deciding to come away from me and try to recover from it as being in the radqueer community brought so much stress on us as a system and some level of trauma which has led us to split more which of course we don't want to do but we were in denail about that being because of our splits for so long.
Yes I did support transids and admittedly I did use some because I thought anytime I felt bad about myself or something I wanna change that would just be me being trans that thing and I did tend to use a lot of these (none like transrace or transabled but I did support thoes unfortunately).
And I feel like I've only recently left it hasn't even been a whole week but I have been questioning leaving for a few months I just didn't wanna get threats over it because some of these people did support doxxing in some of the discord servers I was in but now I have got to the point where I can't take it anymore and I feel like I have to leave because this community has done nothing but damaged me and it is damaging other people to this day and the one thing I'm worried about if I keep seeing this community on TikTok I found it on Tumblr on accident but TikTok it scares me because that app is largely kids and it is an algorithm based app meaning all it really takes is one mention of sans undertale or whatever and it will just be on random non-related fyps and expose kids to the radqueer community and with how prevalent things like grooming are in that community this can only harm people. And I really really really hope that people can wake up and see this and more people can be aware of the community before it's too late.
I have had some experiences with being groomed whilst in the community I guess to normalise it more when I was 16 because I was so so vulnerable it was probably not that hard honestly to groom me and they probably saw that I was pretty much groomed into believing all this was normal and it wasn't harming people when it was it was harming me and it is harming others and not the best forming things or talking but I did just wanna get this out of my system this is just a rant (I don't wanna go into grooming details too much it is quite triggering for me).
I might make some more ex radq posts and go a bit more in-depth about it on my blog this was just something I put together because I really just need to get these thoughts out just cause I don't feel like I could tell anyone in real life this or that I would even in the community and I just had to get it out.
