TL;DR I'm resigning as an admin of Chapo effective Sunday, January 24th, 2021.
So what's up, TCFunnySexNumber? Why are you resigning?
Well, let me break it down for you.
I'll start by saying the amount of messages I've received since The Great Pronoun Wars saying they would have left if there wasn't trans representation on the admin team has been not insignificant. It's a huge pressure and that shouldn't be what it takes to keep someone there. I'm tired of feeling like the Guerrilla GlueTM that's barely keeping this screaming metal death trap barreling down the highway. I'm not trying to jerk off my own efforts on site, but it's not hard to see.
But more than anything I'm tired of feeling like a pawn who exists to look pretty and give the illusion that we're a trans positive space.
We tell people to set pronoun tags to have a shred of solidarity with trans comrades.
Cissies throw a fit.
We tell the community we will be analyzing downvotes to see who is creating a hostile environment for trans people here.
Cissies throw a fit.
We remove the downvote button to stop people from using it as a means of shitting on trans people without actually saying anything.
Cissies throw a fit.
We ask people to put content warnings on posts with transphobia so not all of us have to see it or engage with it.
Cissies throw a fit.
Trans comrades leave the site and drop messages about how cissies have zero solidarity with us and don't actually give a fuck to learn about our issues or support us.
Cissies throw a fit.
We start banning people for being hostile when we bring up that the community is actively hostile towards us.
Cissies throw a fit.
We try to do literally anything to combat the reactionary environment.
Cissies throw a fucking fit.
I'd be hard pressed to look at all of that and say it's a trans positive space. Furthermore, I feel like it's fine that I exist as an admin so long as I don't stand up to any dudebro armchair leftists who vocally don't give a shit about us and genuinely want us to leave so they can have a pretty vaporwave Reddit 4chan hybrid without guilt or being told their "efforts" as "leftists" aren't good enough.
It's not difficult to see how the community has grown increasingly hostile toward us over the last few months. And for months the thought of snapping, going rogue mod, and banning everyone who has alienated us has crossed my mind infinitely more times than I'm willing to admit. I've seen calls for change get reduced to minor policy that eventually fizzles out and amounts to nothing and I'm tired of watching it happen and I'm drained by the amount of pushback and outright denial from the userbase that there is anything wrong in the first place.
Sure, the announcements of policy change could've been handled better, I'm willing to admit that. But to outright deny there are issues in the community and to make calls for admin elections in response to us saying we're banning people for perpetuating the hostile environment that's causing the site to hemorrhage trans people is fucking bullshit.
I'm tired of this community being like every other fucking lib space on the internet where it's just cis people meaninglessly shouting "trans rights!" into the void without any realistic understanding of what that means and without actively listening to us on how to be better allies.
I'm tired of us being talked over. The amount of times I've seen my argument of "go to !TEL and look at the first few pages and see the downvotes" repeated by cis users and be taken more seriously than others have taken that argument from me is fucking disgusting and I'm sick of it.
After Cass left and Confabulously posted about how she's thinking of leaving too, I just let the hatred that's been building up inside of me for months completely wash over me and started banning dissenters without much thought. My only regret is that I didn't ban more cissies during my purge spree.
I've dumped hundreds of hours of my life into this project. I'm grateful I did otherwise I wouldn't have met so many great people let alone all the trans cuties, but it's horrible that the aftermath of the most recent struggle session literally had me thinking about walking away from everything and starting my own record and coffee shop combo and living out the rest of my days as an NPC.
Over the next two weeks I'll be handing the other admins the keys to what I had done with the accounting software and files I'd been doing for us pro-bono but never really got around to finishing as a result of various scheduling conflicts, any accounts and passwords I made for various side projects here, and whatever else they need before I fuck off. I wish them all the best of luck. Maybe one day things will be different and I can return but I just can't see a clear path forward for myself here - and I definitely understand that this is a breakup cliche.
I left trans spaces because I fucking hated their politics and felt like I didn't fit in but now I realize I should've been trying to radicalize those trans spaces this entire time instead.
Dope ass posts by @TransComrade69 that everyone should read:
- The whole discussion series on Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
- This great post on how to get strapped
- All of her other posts
Sorry to lose your efforts. This place has a lot of promise, but we have to do better by our trans comrades.
:cat-trans:
Transphobia on this site is very much tied to ableism. People are primed to downbear and mock the cringey crisis posts that get made by struggling trans people, and the same viciousness never happens to the dozenth depressed cis guy that talks about how much work stresses them to their very limits.
Sometimes, posting cringe is okay, actually. This place has never been a replacement for therapy, but god damn are people ready to pile on whenever they see a trans person who is u n r e a s o n a b l e.
I've noticed this as well. I even remember the Rachel struggle sessions, and while there was clearly a line crossed, it could have been handled far, far better.
(For the people in the back who just don't fuckin get it)
Transgender People are Valid
An incomplete list of the reputable scientific & social organizations which affirm the validity of transgender people (that transness is not an illness, that trans people are deserving of respect and equal rights, etc).
List of organizations that recognize the difference between sex and gender
- American Psychological Association
- American Medical Association
- American Psychoanalytic Association
- Human Rights Campaign
- American Academy of Pediatrics
- American College of Osteopathic Pediatricians
- United Nations
- United Kingdom’s National Health Service
American Psychological Association pamphlet on transgender issues
In this pamphlet the APA affirms the psychological consensus - that transgender people are valid, have existed throughout history, are subject to discrimination, and that transness is not a mental disorder.[2] In 2008 they published a Gender Identity Resolution which expands upon those premises, supports total equality and specialized care for transgender people, affirms the institutional legitimacy of transness in psychology, and calls for a broader scientific, institutional, and legal recognition of these principles.[3] Additionally, a 2014 resolution detailed why and how to apply all of that to schools, with hundreds of specific actions they recommend be done to support sexual orientation and gender diverse youth in every aspect of their lives and education.[4]
Gender Transition has a Positive Effect on Trans People
Meta-meta-analysis: What does the scholarly research say about the effect of gender transition on transgender well-being?[5]
A systematic literature review of all 55 peer-reviewed articles on the subject (as of June 2017), of which:
- 51 studies found that gender transition improves the overall well-being of transgender people
- 4 studies reported mixed or null findings
- No studies concluded that gender transition causes overall harm
- It found a scholarly consensus that transition is effective in treating gender dysphoria.
- Additionally, gender transition and related medical treatments lead to an increase in quality of life, relationship satisfaction, self-esteem, and confidence, and a decrease in anxiety, depression, suicidality, and substance use.
Young Adult Psychological Outcome After Puberty Suppression and Gender Reassignment[6]
- A longitudinal study on the effectiveness of puberty suppression and sex reassignment surgery.
- Participants were assessed before starting puberty blockers (14 years old on average), when starting hormone treatment (17 years old), and 1 year (minimum) after SRS (21 years old).
- In young adulthood, the gender dysphoria was alleviated and psychological functioning had steadily improved.
- Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population.
- At the end, the participants were vocationally similar to the Dutch population except they were slightly more likely to live with parents (67% vs 63%), and more likely, when studying, to be pursuing higher education (58% vs 31%).
- Support from medical professionals and families is crucial to the future success of transgender patients.
- In this instance, 95% of mothers, 80% of fathers, and 87% of siblings were supportive. 71% of subjects had experienced social transitioning as easy.
- All young adults in this study were generally satisfied with their physical appearance and none regretted treatment. "the positive results may also be attributable to supportive parents, open-minded peers, and the social and financial support (treatment is covered by health insurance) that gender dysphoric individuals can receive in the Netherlands"
Pubertal Suppression for Transgender Youth and Risk of Suicidal Ideation [7]
- Study of self-reported history of 16.9% of over 20,000 transgender people regarding the mental health impact of pubertal suppression therapy
- The 16.9% reported that they wanted pubertal suppression as part of their gender-related care. 2.5% of those who wanted, received it.
- The paper asserts that patients that went through the suppression therapy "had lower odds of lifetime suicidal ideation"
Hormonal therapy and sex reassignment: a systematic review and meta‐analysis of quality of life and psychosocial outcomes[8]
- A meta-analysis of 28 studies, which in total enrolled 1833 transgender who underwent sex reassignment surgery.
- Most individuals reported significant improvement in gender dysphoria (80%), psychological symptoms (78%), and sexual function (72%).
- In general, participants "reported good satisfaction with the new assigned sex, physical appearance, had no doubts about their new gender role or their ability about maintaining this role in the future".
- Satisfaction with primary and secondary sex characteristics was significantly higher when pre- and post-transition therapy data were compared.
- Psychological functioning level was similar to the normal population and better than untreated individuals with dysphoria. Longer duration of hormone use was associated with better psychological adjustment.
- Suicide attempt rates decreased after sex reassignment, but stayed higher than the normal population rate.
- Financial, professional status and employment situation were satisfactory, and better than they were pre-SRS.
- "Individuals whose transsexual symptoms manifested at a younger age reportedly had better adjustment to the new gender role; and when reassignment procedures were administered before adulthood, favourable postoperative psychological and social functioning were noted"
Mental Health and Self-Worth in Socially Transitioned Transgender Youth[9]
- Compares the mental health of socially transitioned children to 2 control groups: their siblings, and age- and gender-matched controls.
- Its conclusions are based on self-reported information from the children themselves (instead of parents) to avoid measurement issues like confirmation bias.
- It also compares this to simultaneously recorded parent data to see how those biases could have affected previous research.
- The study found no difference in depressive symptoms and no significant difference in anxiety symptoms or self-worth across the three study groups, and when compared to the national average.
- There was also no difference between transgender children who were taking hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, or neither.
- This displays a strong contrast to previous studies on gender-nonconforming children who had not socially transitioned, which overwhelmingly found elevated rates of anxiety and depression and lower self-worth.
De-transitioning
The decision to return to your assigned gender is a completely valid one, but far too often people (especially TERFs) will make anecdotal horror stories out of people who de-transition to paint a picture of widespread over-diagnosis of gender dysphoria. This is usually accompanied by fear-mongering about "tricking gender-nonconforming kids into wanting hormones" as part of the nebulous "trans agenda". This is very far from the truth, as shown in the 2015 US Transgender Survey of 27,715 trans people in the United States.[10]
- 8% of respondents said they had at some point gone back to living as their assigned sex, and for 62% of them it was only temporary and were currently living full-time as a different gender than they were assigned.
- Only 5% of de-transitioners (0.4% of trans people) gave "it wasn't right for me" as any of their reasons.
- The most common reason provided was pressure from a parent (36%).
- Other significant factors included pressure from family members (26%) or a partner (18%), difficulty transitioning (33%), too much harassment or discrimination after they began transitioning (31%), and having trouble getting a job (29%).
Transgender Athletes
This section is very new and serves to guide future expansion. This section needs many more sources and edits, and could be entirely remade due to changing scientific consensus.
The topic of trans women is sports is very contentious and does not have a clear scientific answer. Any claims made about it (or added to this section in the future) should be heavily sourced with recent and peer-reviewed studies, and should be careful not to overstate findings (phrases like "at any stage of transition" should be clarified).
The apparent lack of trans men in sports is sometimes invoked to argue that biological differences make competition between people assigned female at birth and people assigned male at birth inherently unfair. While trans women remain the focus of the debate over trans inclusion in athletics, there are a number of openly trans male athletes, including:
- Patricio Manuel: "Patricio Manuel is the first openly trans male boxer to win a fight at the professional level, doing so in December 2018."[11]
- Chris Mosier: "Chris Mosier is a trailblazing hall of fame triathlete, All-American Duathlete, and a 6-time member of Team USA. In 2015 he became the first known transgender man to make a men's US National Team, and was the catalyst for change for the International Olympic Committee policy on transgender athletes."[12]
- Mack Beggs: "Mack Beggs, 18, a senior from Euless Trinity High School near Dallas, entered the [Texas girls' Class 6A 110-pound division] tournament in Cypress outside of Houston with an undefeated record. [...] Beggs is in the process of transitioning from female to male and taking a low dose of testosterone [...] Beggs had asked to wrestle in the boys' division, but the rules for Texas public high schools require athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificate."[13]
[sources]
and the first books the nazis burned, from that iconic picture we;ve all seen a billion times in school thats probably the first image search result for 'book burning'? it wasn't the communist manifesto. it wasn't the torah.
it was magnus hirschfeld's medical texts on treating trans patients.
true, but we know it was among the first burned. and yes, other queer history. but I knew a gay holocaust+reagan survivor growing up, and all my german friends from the old internet were super fucking gay, and prominent gay nazis were a thing untli the night of the long knives, so I forget that LGB stuff was burned.
prominent gay nazis were a thing untli the night of the long knives
As in "open secret" not openly gay. Nazis have never not been homophobic
that's... why they were a thing until the big internal purge, which happened when they were strong enough to literally cut out the openly gay bits.
ernst rohm was pretty fucking open about it.
The purge didn't happen because suddenly the party wanted to get rid of gay members. Gays were persecuted from day one and if Röhm had come out, he would have been gone before the purge. The reason SA was disbanded was because they lost the internal struggle for power in the NSDAP against the SS, which was much more elitist and not rooted in disenfranchised proletariat like SA.
Good information, but V*ush-posting is pretty :haram: around these parts.
Hey. As a cishet. I'm really sorry we treat you like this. It sucks so hard for me to watch trans and other marginalized comrades continue to leave. I personally want nothing more than for this to be a positive space for you and for everyone and it really hurts me to see and to know that it's not. I think you and everyone who has left lately because you don't feel safe and comfortable here are massive losses to this community.
I want to hope that it's not really the members of the community who are driving you away and instead it's the trolls and fake accounts but I know that's probably not true.
I hope someday we can somehow build this community back up so it's really a safe place for you and everyone else who is marginalized too.
And for the rest of us, maybe fucking think for 5 minutes about how much harm you're doing when you don't shut the fuck up and LISTEN. Just shut up and listen when someone who is more marginalized than you is speaking. Maybe you'll learn something about how not to be a shit person and maybe you'll stop hurting people.
If you're someone struggling with listening, listen to this. You are not a weak person for listening. It sucks to have other people tell you to be quiet. Remember, if you choose to listen, that is your choice. You are not being controlled by them. You are making your own decision to listen. You can choose to stop listening at any time you feel like.
I’m not trying to jerk off my own efforts on site
No please do, you've done an incredible amount for this site, thank you so much for everything you've done.
I'm pretty sure you were the first person who said something to me on this site, I'm definitely gonna miss you and I wanna wish you well in wherever you go from here :cat-trans:
For people like me who aren't familiar, what did TC69 do for the site, other than normal moderation stuff? (this question is not just for BMO but for anyone else in a position to know)
I mostly know her as the sometimes cranky admin who somehow wound up being the face of a lot of our struggle sessions.
But I suspect there are a lot of users like me who know her from her user facing role, but don't know about the kind of work she does (did) behind the scenes, and I don't doubt it was a lot.
I've definitely been crying on and off all night. Feels like a breakup that needs to happen.
I hope you find something more fulfilling and gratifying than working for this site. I hope we can make it better. And if not, and it goes away, and the "chapo" community gets scattered forever, well, it won't be that horrible, all things considered, and life will go on. But I'm not sure I'll find online community like this.
You're one of the handful of names I recognized from the subreddit. We'll miss you.
Fuck this sucks and I'll miss you, but I can understand. We got work to do that can't be done just online and I wish you luck in whatever your future endeavors may be. :cat-trans:
If you're looking around and happy that trans comrades are leaving and what we get to keep in return is a bunch of people jerking off over process and mod procedure and 'Well, Actually, As a Heterosexual' I don't know how to explain it that this a terrible fucking trade. Rather than do more as a community for people who felt marginalized or bullied in what is purportedly leftist, tolerant place, actual best posters are leaving.
I don't want to convince anyone to stay though, I don't want us to *need * convincing anyone to stay. It's easy enough looking around to pat ourselves on the back and say "at least I'm not part of the problem, I was always supportive of our trans comrades," but then things go back to business as usual. The problem can't be fixed just by banning transphobes (although we should be absolutely doing that). Let trans comrades go if they don't feel comfortable. The job now is to do the work on turning the place into somewhere that trans comrades can come back to and feel supported, which is only going to happen with active and sometimes unpleasant discussions about where we've failed.
The alternative to that is that we keep bleeding trans and non-cis people and this place doubles down on what's causing people to leave, and if that happens I don't see it recovering. I wouldn't want to stay around myself (not that that's a huge loss, I deleted the account I posted on regularly 2fast2war out of unnecessary fear of doxing) but every step outlined that has cishets throwing a fit is an observable point where we've *lost * marginalized comrades. If the community itself refuses to put in the work to make people feel safer and at home, no amount of banning or administration will change the nature of the space here.
going rogue mod, and banning everyone who has alienated us has crossed my mind infinitely more times than I’m willing to admit
Do it anyway, even if you're leaving :stalin-shining: Make no excuse for the Terror.
Otherwise, godspeed comrade :sankara-salute: Thank you for trying to help us, I'm sorry we failed you
Is it too late for me to vote for this ? I don’t know how this works.
I'll still be here for another couple weeks and you better believe I intend to swing the ban hammer a few more times. :)
Honestly, helping with the trans exclusive Discord has made me the happiest I've been in months. I'm literally filled to the brim with joy seeing us all coming together to make our own space.
Fuck yeah. Do what makes you happiest. Thanks so much for all your time here :trans-heart:
I haven't been posting on here for the last couple months so I missed all of whatever the fuck happened. I'm disappointed in all of you.
You're cool TC69. Good luck with your next project, I hope it's more successful.
We were raided a few times by transphobes posing as users and it sucks that people are falling for it.
Bearing in mind that I just admitted to not having been here at the time and thus having no actual information to go on, I would still caution against being too quick to pin the problems your community faces on an amorphous external force. More often there's some unexamined internal shit that's not being adequately confronted.
I would normally agree but keep in mind that stupidpol and cumtown have specifically been trying to get trans people to leave.
https://hexbear.net/post/69731
I wasn't saying is was all raiders but if it's as much as half internal then shit, you're right, we have a problem.
No, you're right. Thanks for pointing that out or I might not have realised. Sometimes things are subtle and if you haven't been put in the situation yourself it can be hard to see until someone sets it right.
I'll try to be a better lister then. It's not like you're asking much.
Reading through that stupidpol thread is a trip. Imagine calling yourself a leftist and regurgitating literally the same exact nauseating shit Republicans used to say about gay people, but about your trans comrades (and having the gall to say "but trans people are totally cool!" while you're at it). Imagine calling yourself a leftist and actively trying to wreck other leftist spaces. Un-fucking-believable.
Hiya BMO!
Yeah things are good for me, just got tired of this website. And, shortly after, posting on all websites in general. I've also just been busy on various projects. I still check in here once a week or so; I'll respond to DMs or whatever else becomes a notification.
Hope you're doing well too!
