Abolishing gender is not transphobic!

I’m about to write a whole-ass post about some chat room drama. Am I embarrassed about this? Not as much as I should be. Also, if you’ve ever wondered whether creativity really does thrive under constraint, since I decided to focus on gender I haven’t once sat down and wondered what to write about. I have only wondered which idea to prioritize. Should this idea be this high up in the pecking order? Probably not. But I’m having big feelings that I want to process and this is where I do that. So here we go.

The long and the short of it is that the mods of a feminist discord recently put me in time out for transphobia.

If you read that and thought, “I’m out,” I completely understand. I’m not trans. I can’t fully understand that experience. But I do understand that transphobia is rampant and deadly and awful. I have nothing but respect for anyone who wants nothing to do with anything that even kind of almost resembles transphobia or anyone who would engage in anything that even kind of almost resembles transphobia.

At the same time, I don’t think I can do what I want to do, what I think is the most worthwhile work I am likely to do, without ever saying anything that one person or another could interpret as transphobic.

For example, among other things, I genuinely want to understand whether gender is worth the trouble. And not for me. I mean writ large. As a concept, is gender providing more value than it destroys? Could it? I may very well be wrong, but right now I think the right thing to do is to keep chipping away at that question until I get an answer that satisfies me.

After I got the timeout I took to Bluesky to complain with a screenshot of my last post. The mods responded there to tell me the screenshot (which, by the way, only contained what I wrote and not even who or what I was replying to) violated the group’s rules so the mods were changing my timeout to a ban. I made excuses for myself and then said fair enough and good luck. And I mean it. Volunteer moderators are the backbone of the UGC universe and I am sincerely grateful for their service. I fully believe in blocking and banning liberally and on vibes alone in order to protect everyone’s time and energy. Anyway, someone else from the group then DMed me to more fully explain what I’d done wrong. For this, I sincerely thanked them.

I want to hone in on one thing this person said in the DM because it’s just gnawing at me in a way where I’m just like, “This is so obviously batshit that either she or I or both of us must be missing something big.”

I’m just going to quote one part of a much longer message. While I think it stands alone okay, it’s possible that it really needs the context of the whole thing.