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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   26211 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT,

Are they anti-trans, or just interested in a few laughs by stalking insane people making fools of themselves on the internet, a disproportionate number of whom are trans because of selection effects?

KF has had an influx of TERF refugees some years ago. The tone of many trans threads has shifted from "Haha, look at this weirdo!" to wall-of-text rants about how this man in a bad wig is an insult to womanhood and a threat to bathrooms everywhere.

The trend has abated slightly after the site has been harder to reach for a while and Twitter has become more permissive, but calling KF "anti-trans" is somewhat justified.

I agree, a lot of the cattier TERFs (for whom the main pleasure was bitching about certain transwomen lolcows rather than gender-critical advocacy) migrated to KF after Reddit (and, for a time pre-Musk, Twitter) cracked down on TERF content.

In general, they were always going to lean a certain way just because of the relatively lax moderation around slurs, throwaway insults etc (this is probably the only hard-right-leaning community I've ever found online where fully polite discourse is enforced). In addition to famous transwomen, a lot of other big targets are 'breadtube' (ie socialist youtuber) content creators, some of whom are trans like contrapoints and philosophytube, but others they hate for other reasons (hbomberguy). So naturally there's a general loathing for that kind of socialist ideology.

In general, making fun of reactionary youtubers (which still happens on the farms, but is mostly less popular) is more a pastime of rationalwiki users and a few other leftist online communities.

In general, making fun of reactionary youtubers (which still happens on the farms, but is mostly less popular) is more a pastime of rationalwiki users and a few other leftist online communities.

This isn't actually true. A huge portion of the site is devoted to going after Ethan Ralph and his ostensibly right wing crowd, and there's another devoted to Nicholas Fuentes and his bizarre cult. They make fun of a lot of the online/internet right, it's just that nobody cares about the internet right getting bullied.

Just in general, you’d expect right wingers to be a little bit less frequently the kind of in-your-face weird and crazy than lefties because of greater conformism. But the trans thing is probably a bigger part of leaning right/mostly targeting left wingers, you’re right.

I'm not a fan of the TERFs on the farms, they seem to have an actual political axe to grind rather than just laugh at the absurdity of the trans people who are posted there. Almost all of these people would still be scorn worthy even if they weren't trans, that's just icing on the cake, but TERFs treat the transness as the main issue with such people when in reality it's little more than an afterthought.

If your goal is to milk lolcows, then very online transpeople would be a great target.

Well duh, if you’re picking insane people on the internet to stalk, you’d have to deliberately exclude Trans people not to get a very disproportionately trans sample. That’s basically what I said, but it doesn’t make kiwifarms ideologically anti-trans(although I doubt they’re politically correct).

Kiwi Farms isn't a monolith; there are some people on there who are sympathetic to transgender concerns. That said, the overwhelming majority are definitely anti-trans. I'm not implying that this means that the site is deliberately anti-trans or anything; it's a combination of their thread subjects being disproportionately transgender (as previously mentioned), but also the fact that many other gender-critical spaces elsewhere on the internet have been shut down thus funneling many would-be GC Reddit/Tumblr users onto the site, as well as the fact that many don't even care about trans issues and just want to laugh at weird people but have essentially been forced into caring due to the many attacks on the site (no doubt by the same activists shutting down anti-trans thought on the rest of the internet). If they were left alone, half of the anti-trans sentiment would disappear overnight.

I suspect that a trans movement capable of producing activists that leave kiwifarms alone also would not produce so many lolcows.

"Anti-trans" in the same way that most people are "anti-trans"; which is to say they don't want to instantly and unquestioningly cede all ground to and meet all demands of the trans activists. They have a distaste for narcissism, entitlement and child transitioning, again, in the way that most people do.

KF users, like 4chan users before them, are not mutants that exist only on the internet. They are all around you. They are your delivery drivers, bar staff and doctors. Cashiers and postmen. They are just normal people who want to talk about things you're not allowed to talk about in public. That's it.

Mixture of both? But internet weirdoes who are also lolcows are more disproportionately "trans" lately. It's the mind virus du jour.

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