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Notes -
This is probably too "boo outgroup", but given the direct relation I felt it was probably worth sharing.
Our once and former (?) moderator TracingWoodgrains has been called out as "a sociopathic troll" who exists to create anti-transgender drama. This is according to transgendermap.com, a pro-trans website which has built a list of communities toxic to the transgender movement.
The focus on Trace comes from their look at Blocked and Reported, and includes a list of ideologically affiliated subreddits, including:
It seems that the move came at the right time, since if we weren't particularly noticeable before, we likely are now.
Where exactly is the list of idealogically affiliated subreddits? I couldnt find that list anywhere on the links you posted.
You just need to scroll down on the first link, it's at the bottom
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first link, scroll down the page.
Thanks! I erroneously thought the first link went to the website's homepage, and so didn't directly click it.
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Wait, wait, wait, /r/politics is considered toxic? Isn't that place basically a left-wing-dominated subreddit? How does that figure?
That sub is mostly trans posters. If a place isn't a total hug box it's "toxic." I guess this is how all pressure groups operate though.
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not enough radical left? :shrug:
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Well, it seems like they are implicitly admitting that open, uncensored discussion of the transgender movement with the possibility to criticize it is toxic to the transgender movement.
Shame, then, because I'm trans and found this space perfectly welcoming.
I mean, this isn't unique or even unusual to the transgender "movement" within the broader left/"progressive"/SocJus movement sphere. I'd even call this standard operating procedure at this point. It's just the inevitable result of grouping emotional harm with physical harm so as to attach the negativity of the latter to the former and of categorizing "disagrees with me in this issue" as causing emotional harm. It creates a chain of "logic" that allows the activist to say that someone who disagrees with them is being literally violent towards them, and so it follows that any environment in which people are free to disagree with them is one that is toxic to them.
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It doesn't even need to be criticism. Simply having gender dysphoria and and saying "this is not the place for me" because the narratives don't line up with your own personal experiences is also apparently toxic to the movement in the eyes of at least some of its members.
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Yeah, so that's neat.
It's hard to be frank on this topic without sounding conspiratorial. The reality is that there is a small but obsessive cadre of 'activists', mostly a distinct subset of Extremely Online trans women, who hate my bosses with every fiber of their being. I knew that coming into the B&R job, of course. It was priced in, and the question was not "will they hate me once they notice me?" but "when will they notice me?".
The answer seems to be approximately when the podcast decided to cover the recent Keffals/Kiwifarms kerfuffle with care and in detail rather than jumping on the "Kiwifarms must go" train (link). They don't care at all about me qua me. I'm a nobody still, some random with a tiny platform who mostly just bloviates on obscure forums. But they do care about my bosses, very much, and in the recent scuffle it seems they've finally identified me as another angle of attack.
This can mostly be attributed to everyone's favorite AgainstHateSubreddits moderator, who has a personal and longstanding feud with rdrama. She spammed Jesse's replies and her own Twitter account with six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon links between rdrama and Kiwifarms, using my prank as an excuse to link Jesse to Kiwifarms to try to discredit his reporting. See: Exhibit A and Exhibit B as the most relevant—per her, I carried out "fascist terrorism" in league with Kiwifarms and Libs of TikTok, working with them to terrorize trans people and push teachers out of their jobs. This is now Established Fact on a certain corner of the internet. One obsessive in particular who has a long history of spreading particularly unhinged malicious rumors about my bosses (eg baselessly accusing Jesse of assaulting trans women) has tried to amplify it further (see here), having cracked the code that I am a "right wing monster" who is "laughing at the thought of his contributions to queer people and school teachers facing armed violence", indicated in part by my dogwhistling username reference to Known Bigot Orson Scott Card.
Any amount of engagement with this set encourages them, of course. Responding to out-of-the-blue false accusations from people I've never met gets morphed into "screenshotting the posts of trans people who have them blocked to try and rile mobs up" (see here) and becomes more evidence that I am a "creep" connected to a "dangerous stalker".
Andrea James is part and parcel with this group, and has a long history of genuinely unhinged harassment in this domain. She was discussed in Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger (1, 2, 3): in 1998, for recommending Blanchard's book and commenting on her own autogynephilia; in 2003, for posting images of J. Michael Bailey's children with lewd captions parodying his book, and later in her own interactions when James referred to her kids as her "precious womb turds", among other things. My bosses have been stalked by her for a while on this front—see here.
Inasmuch as I have an official statement on the matter, it can be found on my Twitter over here. I knew this sort of thing was inevitable, and while it's definitely an irritation, it's just chatter from people who were going to hate me no matter what I did, looking to wield me to undermine reporting they'd rather my bosses not do. Quite frankly, in the circles I travel in and care to travel in, having that sort of enemy is more likely to help than it is to hurt. In candor, it felt much worse to be called a Weapon Of The Cathedral in league with Taylor Lorenz by people I'd been chatting with on good terms for years (eg here). This, in contrast, is just Business As Usual. It's frankly not even worth correcting the explicit factual errors on the page, since nobody who is likely to like or respect me in any capacity is particularly likely to trust James, Oaken, or the rest. I'll just take note and move on.
My only disappointment is that she didn't commission a caricature of my character like she did for my bosses (here).
What's the reference?
I talk about it here:
https://tracingwoodgrains.substack.com/p/tracing-woodgrains
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You should clarify that your bosses are Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog. I finally figured that out but only after reading your entire post and following several links.
Since the article linked in the OP mentions it, I figured emphasizing it more would be redundant.
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I worried the move here was premature, but am surprised by how much a breath of fresh air it is being able to read a comment which can just speak plainly and link plainly.
No "[ Removed by Reddit ]" like Exhibit B causes, no codewords for kiwifarms, or cryptic hints followed by a cryptic reply seeking some cryptic clarification, the comment even links rdrama (directly!) for book excerpts. And no wondering about whether it'll get your account banned.
I found the railway wording funny, but that's just me.
A rich new culture of Soviet humor and Straussian reading of comments could have developed. Homophone slang rising above automoderation, perhaps culminating later with rhyming slang.
Alas it was uprooted before having the chance to blossom.
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This is the very last place I thought I'd hear about Jake Alley aka SecretGamerGrrl after the death of Kiwifarms. My condolences. I would link to KF to explain for those not in the know, but there's really not that much. Jake has the distinction of being one of the few non-retarded cows with fewer skills and accomplishments than Chris-chan, the high point of his life being involved with gamergate's CON. He is now blocked by most of his former associates in anti-gamergate/trans twitter, but that hasn't stopped him from vaguetweeting about them for years after the fact. He maintains that he is both undoxed (not true) and that he has had to move due to threats of neonazi violence at his home multiple times (impossible unless the first claim is false).
SGG's bete noire is Jesse. If Jesse were to die tonight, heaven forbid, SGG wouldn't know what to do with their life.
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I was extremely salty at you for the LoTT thing, I can barely stand Jesse Singal, none of what is happening is surprising, and you seem to be taking it well... and somehow I find all of this very sad. If this is what you get for being associated with Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog, is there even a chance for any form of sanity being restored?
Well, yes. I think so.
If you look at the specific people who do this sort of thing, they tend to be older loners with few close friends on- or offline who spend much of their time shouting mostly into the void on social media. Inasmuch as they have influence, it's usually mediated via a few more predictable figures who amplify everything that might advance their causes, or overly credulous/careless institutions that don't look closely at people who ostensibly align with causes they want to be seen supporting. It's real influence, mind. There are spheres where people will absolutely trust their word over mine. The broader leftist culture they take advantage of is dominant on social media and in several influential domains.
But the other thing I get for being associated with them is a general circle of Sanity around me, with people who have more reach and influence than any of those watching, already very familiar with this song and dance. If I examine the set of people who share and believe that sort of thing, they're all people with politics far from mine in domains far from mine who would have no interest in what I have to say in the best of circumstances. I'd rather they not take notice of me, but they just don't have enough proximity to me to really matter, y'know?
I'm not interested in being defined by a struggle with a few fringe lunatics, but to be blunt, I'm confident in my odds in an Optics Battle in the eye of the broader popcorn gallery if it ever comes to something like that. They're the sort of people even their allies tend to tolerate at best, and you can only cry wolf so many times before most people start tuning you out. Like—Jesse can still have pitches accepted at the New York Times. Blocked & Reported can cover things in peace most of the time, with only occasional storms when people bother to notice. Materially, it's unlikely that these guys could close doors to me without raising my profile enough to open more and better doors. They're annoying, but at least in my position, that's about all they are.
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You missed a chance to list SneerClub (it made it on the diagram). I suppose this gives us license to tell them to Do Better when we see them around? (/s)
Reading Sneerclub is a guilty pleasure of mine.
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They also single our reply all podcast, which seems weirdly unfair.
But if they're trying to inform online trans people of what communities to steer clear from to avoid being tired out, I think that list is fair-ish.
I think they based this on user overlap rather than the content of the subs.
The big list of communities to avoid include a lot of things that aren't even explicitly carved-out as anti-trans--in fact, a lot of them are active culture war battlegrounds.
Some individuals might not want to be on a culture war field where they're the football. It's easy for me to engage with these rationally because it's not my ass on the line.
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Yeah, poor Trace (it's doubly hilarious in the light of the furry trolling of LibsofTikTok that he did; karma is a bitch or something?)
Also that Blocked and Reported is a fascist site, or Jesse is a fascist, or whatever along those lines. Including TheSchism in the list of terribad awful sites is even funnier, because this was the split-off site for the left-leaning, from liberal to progressive, who were getting dogpiled by all us unrepentant right-wingers over on TheMotte, so if any place is not going to be anti-trans, it's them.
This is just more grains of sand in the pile that the trans activists are barking mad. Unless you completely agree 100% with every tiny detail of a whole laundry list created by one specific person that caters to their own neuroses and applies to nobody else, then you are transphobic genocider sociopath fascist.
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Ugh, this is one of the things that most alienates me from many transgender activist communities. It's pure BPD black-and-white thinking. Anyone who isn't a perfect ally is a sworn enemy. This also contributes to the movement eating its own (e.g. the truscum controversy).
Not to be too cute, but isn't that the same energy as:
There's plenty of Catastrophizing outside of trans activist communities too. I see it most in gun threads.
Gun threads actually involve rules that if violated can get you sent to prison.
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Every now and again, someone in the gaming space goes complete insane. Maybe it's a "company" like Digital Homicide. And often times the gaming press lambasts their outlandish and deranged behavior, as is deserved. Especially once the lawsuits start getting flung around, and the unhinged threats begin.
But every so often, the press covers these events with sympathy. And proclaims that the person going off the rails, suing everyone, and telling people they will come to their house and murder them, actually needs sympathy. They never say so in the article, but 100% of the time this happens, that person is trans.
Nearly 100% of my exposure to trans individuals, is having direct or proximate exposure to people who are obviously mentally ill. I get the TRA talking point is that being trans is hard. And also that academic studies show no higher rates of mental illness in trans individuals than non. Because all the best talking points go "Feel sorry for me and also that's a lie." But from the outside looking in, I just see one more obvious mental illness, often on top of a stack of other mental illnesses.
It's entirely possible I'm wrong, and being trans truly was the root cause of all those people's mental illnesses. But my gut says SRS is going down in history a lot like lobotomies and shock therapy. A procedure that may have some limited utility in very extreme cases, that somehow against all science and reason became the first line of treatment for an overly broad range of mental problems.
I think there's a lot of selection bias on both sides of this matter: if you aren't in Blue Tribe communities you're mostly going to see the highest-heat-over-light nutpicking show up, and conversely I don't think the Fez guy transitioned.
I won't pretend the Quilt Minecraft discord isn't full of drama, but it's no worse than Fabric or Forge. You don't have to be a little nuts for dedicated games development, but it helps, and once you've got a box full of off-kilter people, some of them are going to end up being unproductively nutty.
I feel like even trans people and activists today probably fucking hated Phil Fish back then too. He's just a hard guy to like.
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I'm beginning to form an opinion that there are a minority of these people who aren't trans, not really, but they've got such a list of mental problems that there is no way they can fit into normal society and be functional, so they look for a group that they can fit into. And the trans movement is one such, especially with the very open welcoming stance around medical gate-keeping etc. that 'you're trans if you say you're trans, nothing more needed'.
So this gives them an avenue to explain what is going on: I'm not weird/crazy, I'm trans and I'm being persecuted! And they don't have to engage with changing their behaviour or facing up to the fact that no, you're got mental problems that need to be treated. They're trans and everything that goes wrong is because of cis scum and transphobes persecuting them, and that is why they are depressed and anxious and so forth. And now they have licence to make demands that would never be countenanced otherwise, and to claim the protection of being part of a persecuted minority.
I might get exiled for this, but I don't believe anyone is "trans." Some people are genuinely delusional and deserving of pity while others mimic delusion to gain social power.
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That's charitable. I'm pretty sure they are the majority given how the numbers of people identifying as trans have exploded by orders of magnitude.
A lot of the people identifying as trans seem to be deluded teenaged girls with no mental issues beyond depression and anxiety(that is, a severe case of ‘being a teenaged girl’) that isn’t helped by meddling in their hormones.
I’ve said before that I genuinely don’t know if trans activists are the majority of trans people, and I stand beside my claim that I don’t think anybody knows.
I mean, I do think a lot of the people making demands are just nutballs looking for an identity to cry oppression, and that not recognizing nutballs as nutballs is a very bad thing. But I’d shy away from saying that’s the majority of trans people.
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It is simply pure Conflict Theory.
The transgender movement is, at heart, a radical leftist ideology, and so they work to identify enemies, isolate and smear them, promising to be tolerant, and then smashing them.
As you said.
Some other people might say that transgender movement is radical capitalist ideology financed by billionaires and big pharma that works to achive final frontier of commodification - turning even your own body into consumer product of choice.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers
https://archive.ph/XH5v5
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Pritzker_family
In capitalism, I can choose my food, my clothing, my place of dwelling, my job, my hobbies etc... why cannot I pick and select my gender identity?
YMMV.
edit: link fixed
You could even posit some offshoot of Marxism that applies Marx's conflict-heavy take on the economic drivers of society and applies it to the cultural ones; thus becoming completely orthogonal to the economic left-right compass.
There must be some pithy name for this; it's on the tip of my tongue.
I chuckled, but I'm going to defend Tru Marxism on this one.
Progressive movements often use non-economic-class analysis to shield themselves from criticism, but there is another class of arguments that is more neoliberalish: Anything goes between consenting adults, people have a right to the pursuit of happiness, and if someone wants to embark on a journey through the Garden of Earthly Delights all the way to the man-made horrors beyond your comprehension, who are you to stop them?
This is the logic of dating sites, OnlyFans, and, at least to some extent, trans issues as well. In my opinion it has a distinctly capitalist feel to it.
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I know you're not directly claiming that the "transgender movement is [a] radical capitalist ideology financed by billionaires and big pharma" merely saying that "[s]ome other people might say" that, but I do want to reply to the archived Medium article you linked.
It questions whether a group that has support from billionaires can really be an oppressed, marginalized minority.
But it ignores that even during the 1960's civil rights movement, there were millionaires supporting certain figures in the movement like Martin Luther King Jr. (someone had to keep bailing him out of prison!) and Malcolm X even criticized this form of selling out in his Message to the Grassroots speech. Other posters may disagree, but I do think that black people during the 1960's civil rights era were a marginalized minority with legitimate grievances, and I don't think the fact that MLK Jr. was funded by white millionaires undermines his sincerity or authenticity, or paints him as a form of astroturfing.
Scott Alexander's libertarian defense of billionaires (here and here) is partially based on the fact that having a class of billionaires in society reduces the concentration of power in any one person or institution, instead creating a multipolar system where projects that aren't supported by (or even opposed by) current power structures can still get off the ground.
The fact that Jennifer Pritzker, a transwoman and heir to one of the ten wealthiest families in America, is donating money to pro-trans causes isn't suspicious or "astroturfing." This is a multipolar power system working as intended. The Right gets the Koch Brothers, and the Left gets George Soros and the Pritzker family - with plenty more examples on all sides of politics.
Now personally, I'll admit to having some misgivings over the "multipolar power" defense of billionaires, but the MLK Jr. example makes me think that sometimes this can be a legitimate argument. If the combination of a genuine grassroots, plus the money of rich people is what is necessary to end segregation, then so be it.
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I think this is where the distinction of socialism/capitalism breaks, given that in the original Marxist literature socialism and ultimately communism was supposed as an ideal against the reality of "capitalism".
In practice basically all radical left regimes collapsed into some form of what is called "state capitalism" - basically bigshots with political power call the shots and various corporations do their bidding. Of course there is also an incest with different "czars" of different parts of economy or bureaucracy using their influence or even direct ownership for political power struggle. But the state and politics have primacy, if powers at be decide to run "anticorruption" raid against your corporation or they decide to cut the corporations out of financial markets or regulate it to oblivion that is their prerogative.
The key understanding is that radicals do not have a positive plan, they have revolutionary zeal and faith that it pays off in the end. If corporations "wokewash" their revolution, that only means that "true revolution was never tried" and repeat. Filthy reactionaries won again, but only temporarily. To evaluate radical leftism by an outcome like "capitalism strong vs communism enacted" means adopting their own irrational logic. To many people with experience in such a situation across the world it is clear that these ideologies are unworkable and that having a new crop of cynical power brokers like nomenklatura is inevitable. Corrupt Chinese multibilionaires tied to political clans such as those of Xi Jinping or Jiang Zemin are a feature and inevitable result of Maoist revolution, not a bug.
In that sense rich and powerful using the new radicalism to get ahead and get wealth or power is nothing new.
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I mean, in a world where socialism realism is dead and planned economy is deader then ever and a failure, we can expect to see an infusion of leftism with capitalist values.
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Scott's attempts to clean his name were entirely for nothing.
That's just the subreddit though. ACX isn't mentioned anywhere, though I'm sure that the open threads contain plenty of things that could be deemed objectionable
I don't think it matters at this point what Scott names his communities, the NYT article established him the minds of everyone who matters as deplorable or deplorable adjacent.
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No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. After attempting to delegitimize an anti-grooming activist (LoTT), thus reducing scrutiny TRAs face when interacting with children, they are now deemed to harm the trans cause.
But perhaps this is a good thing, that the ideology of "no bad tactics, only bad targets" will be forsworn by TRAs and with it harrassment of political opponents.
If Trace did the deed against LoTT in order to "build up credits" or something, it was a complete loss.
But they really just seem to think that getting a journalist (or person who thinks they are a journalist) to clown themselves is its own reward.
This is about the sum of it, yeah. It is!
Not one worth the cost, mind. But it really was a lot of fun—definitely captured the 'heist' feeling in a way I'd never experienced. I got wholly caught up in the moment, for better or (ultimately, mostly) for worse.
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