Tumblr sucks

Not to traumatize anyone with the comparison, especially in light of the new trailer, but us Tumblr refugees are a lot like the Asgardians, on a ship in space wondering where we head next.

I'm agender, pan, and, much more recently, figured out that I'm also on the aro/ace spectrum. And here's why that's a problem.

It would seem as if the bigger social media platforms are hunting us down and eliminating us. Or at least making us less visible. Despite Twitter having improved its reporting methods so that people can no longer harass trans folks by misgendering and/or deadnaming them without consequence, it's not like it's booting off most of the Nazis, anti-sjws, and TERFs that made it unsafe for trans folks in the first place. Sure, it has banned some high-profile ones, but big whoop.

Facebook is still terrible for trans people. It lets harassment still go on, it still lets people post transphobic memes, and it doesn't do anything about it.

Now we get to Tumblr, which has now decided to effectively ban all NSFW content. It doesn't matter if you're a trans person in poverty and sex work via blogging was your only source of income, out you go. Furthermore, it's open season on all openly-LGBT content, as innocent wlw drawings and even a post about Freddie Mercury's AIDS diagnosis got flagged as explicit. Yet on the flip side, search "white power," "white nationalism," "white genocide," and many other alt-right/Neo-Nazi dogwhistles and you'll still see all of it, completely uncensored, seemingly not of staff's concern.

And that's why, tomorrow, I won't be using Tumblr. So won't a lot of others.

Ultimately, I'm leaving the site because it did nothing to mitigate the harassment I received, either from exclusionists, TERFs, and truscum who found it "cringe" that I was a 30 year old otherkin, nonbinary person using neopronouns, or those drifting over from KiwiFarms. (A notorious transphobic troll forum who rose to public consciousness after the suicide of Chloe Sevigny. She was on there, I'm on there, most trans people you know are on there.)

But also because (ironically) tomorrow is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. Maybe it isn't ironic that Tumblr chose then to completely and permanently crack down on sexual content on its platform. Maybe it was planned that way all along. After all, trans people involved in sex work are some of society's most marginalized people, most often victimized by rape, murder, and other forms of violence than anyone else in the LGBT community. Rates of anti-sex work violence have only skyrocketed since the passage of SESTA-FOSTA, a law that was designed to crack down on sex trafficking but has only made life hell for sex workers, those who sell their wares both online and off.

This isn't just about porn. This is about discrimination. This is about federally-sanctioned violence against a class of people.

So Tumblr can suck it.