Losing the Fight

Feb. 12, 2025

I think most of the people closest to me have noticed that I've stopped using tumblr nearly as much as I used to.

I'm back, now! I took a break for around a week, and now I'm back - of course, under certain stipulations.

I'm barely active on instagram as it is, but for the most part I'm trying to severely reduce my time spent on social media. Part of it is for my mental health in regards to current events (it is a very scary time to be a USAmerican right now, especially one that is first generation and also queer), but another part of it is just that social media-based communities for marginalized people just don't feel safe. And this isn't new! They haven't felt safe for a very very long time, I honestly doubt they ever really were safe, actually - but my point is, they don't feel safe and I've lost the fight in me to forcibly carve out a space for myself.

I am tired. I don't have it in me to engage in the discourse that targets me directly, and as much as I will always extend a hand out to show my love and support for other marginalized people, I simply don't have it in me anymore to fight and argue and try to shut down in-fighting. I cannot emphasize enough that this is after over a decade of dealing with multiple dfferent kinds of bullshit, there is no one issue I can or will even try to pin this amounting exhaustion on. I will, however, leave this warning to those who will continue to live and breathe tumblr the way I have for the longest time: we've reached the "only trans women experience transphobia" event horizon of trans discourse on tumblr, in which I can observe that posts that blatantly imply this but do not outright state this will go unchallenged by the community at large. I can say, as someone who has seen this happen with neogendered people, non-dysphoric people, with asexual or otherwise a-spec people, with bisexual, pansexual, and other m-spec people, language and posting exclusionary of trans men and non-binary people will get more blatant as time goes on. You will be pressured to accept concepts like this as truth. And I do not want to be here for it.

I find it sad that I have to disclaim this, but I know the internet is home to a number of incredibly confusing and contradictory people when it comes to their belief system: I do not at all deny that transmisogyny is real, I understand that trans women have a unique type of oppression that they face specifically for being trans women. The problem is, then, that I also do not deny that trans men also face a unique type of oppression specifically for being trans men, and so on for people on the non-binary spectrum. As someone who is a transmasculine non-binary person, I have dealt with this first-hand, and I've also had to deal with transmisogyny directed at me because not every bigot clocks a trans person as being the type of trans person they actually identify as. Life sucks. Bigotry sucks. Transphobia fucking sucks - perhaps now more than it has for a good while. It feels like everything's getting worse, and the cockshit-for-brains insistence that we divvy-up the community into certain tiered levels of oppression is only exacerbating that worse-ness. It won't make anything better, that's for sure. Several trans women have come forward stating that this type of discourse makes them uncomfortable specifical as trans women, as it recycles a lot of rhetoric that has been used against them, and I personally refuse to subscribe to any belief system that is built upon "that rhetoric", regardless of who's perpetuating it. I don't think that type of thinking really benefits anyone but the actual oppressive class.

It's also increasingly frustrating to me how much of this concept of "tiered oppression" is dominated by white people. Queer infighting is dominated by white people, discourse about which disabled people are more oppressed than others is dominated by white people, the fucking discussion about which fucking RACES experience the most oppression is dominated by white people. I don't know if this is because I'm on the English-speaking side of the web, in real-life English-speaking spaces you'll find a myriad of people of color who don't subscribe to the concept of tiered oppression (intersectionality is an especially prominent topic among the disabled and people of color in real-life activism spaces, at least where I live). Maybe it's just that western, white, socially christian people see life as a system of hierarchies, I really couldn't fucking tell you. The reality is that life isn't a system of hierarchies. Life is a vast number of spectrums and oppressive powers at play will punish anyone who does not fall within a specific, pre-approved place within that series of spectrums. Marginalization is intersectional, privilege is intersectional. The vast majority of humans on this earth are both marginalized and privileged in different aspects of their lives. It's important to be aware of that, and it's important to see in-fighting as harmful. I am fucking tired of having to say this every few months because people have decided "oh, yeah, that old type of discourse was harmful and wrong, but THIS type of discourse is worth having!"

No. Grow up already and learn to have some actual goddamned principals.

So yeah. I'm tired of the cycle of discourse, namely queer discourse, though there's still definitely a lot of bullfuckery that goes on within racial and disabled discourses, it's just generally much harder to feel safe in social media-based online queer spaces. So I think for now I'm going to stop living and breathing on tumblr. I still adore the place, despite staff's complete and utter lack of competence or even morals (mostly because their lack of competence prevents them from taking as much action on their lack of morals than the staff of other social media sites). It's moreso that the userbase itself is such a unique form of autistic hostility that I vibe with, but vibe with you guys, I will have to partake in much less often.

I think that's ultimately going to be a net positive for me, it will allow me more time (rather, less excuses to waste said time), and give me space to focus on personal projects, like this site, like my art, like the small business I'd like to grow.

This website will be chock-full of my own opinions, and I'm not opposed to recieving feedback on anything I post, hence why I openly post an e-mail address people can send things to. But this is not a space of discourse, I will not allow this site to become a platform for people to debate subjects that directly affect the lives of the marginalized. Please, leave that stuff to the social media spaces. Thank you.

EDIT: so I slept like absolute shit tonight, and therefore I apologize if this isn't as coherent as it should be, but in my sleepless stupor I came to the realization that I was WAY too lenient on talking about tumblr as a platform in this post. Honestly the staff are deplorable, photomatt especially is a monster of a man. It is genuinely fucking scary how many queer people of color, especially black and trans people, get completely erased off the site.

I'm bringing this up because I am aware that in the past I have advocated for supporting tumblr monetarily - and I need to make it clear that I have not held that belief for a number of years now. Like, do not support that site, and do not trust that site with your billing information. SOME of tumblr's population is great and I vibe with them, but fuck tumblr. Fuck them.