Hardly the spiciest of takes, I know, but I have to get things off my chest.
We all know what it feels like to have a community shut down, that's why (I would guess) most of us are here on Saiddit in the first place. But after almost a year of being steeped in TRA nonsense I have to say that the recent banning of SuperStraight strikes me as particularly egregious.
This is not to diminish the enormity of Big Tech censorship of lesbian and female spaces, by any means, but I know I won't be alone in thinking that straight people were... untouchable. We knew the TRAs would overreach one day, and when they came for straight people their nonsense would be shut down fast. And so it was. SuperStraight gained almost thirty thousand followers in three days.
Apparently, however, I was wrong. Heterosexuals who have the wrong opinions are just as susceptible to censorship as the rest of us. But now the gloating and the lies are spreading, since the narrative has been controlled.
It was no coincidence SuperStraight chose the abbreviation SS.
It was a meme started by a bunch of white supremacist 4channers.
lol stay mad superstraights.
and so on. And now all the proof that these claims are blatantly false has evaporated in a cloud of ones and zeros. Other subreddits that have disappeared down the memory hole have been facing the same fate, I was just unaware as I've not touched Reddit in months since it became a woke cesspit.
It's particularly irritating because, especially in our COVID times, social media constitutes so much of what might be considered the public square nowadays. This makes the typical pro-censorship arguments like
Reddit is a private company and can remove whatever content it likes
so grating. Yes, my freedom of speech hasn't been violated in the strictest legal sense of the word, since I have not been arrested or prosecuted by the government, but if I am banned from all conventional social media I am destined to become vox clamantis in deserto - a voice screaming in the wilderness.
As was highlighted in another post here from a couple of hours ago, if dissenting voices are all silenced, and one viewpoint is privileged as the truth, then people will second guess their own dissenting beliefs:
Am I the only one who who thinks a trans woman isn't biologically indistinguishable from a woman? Surely not, but nobody here is saying anything otherwise... maybe I'm the crazy one and should just keep my opinions to myself?
This is profoundly damaging for several reasons. Firstly, I believe in the power of human agency. I believe that people are able to make up their own minds about the issues that matter to them (and many more besides) given enough information. We all know the risks this could pose to younger LGB people.
But it's not just younger LGB people, it's our potential allies (as much as I dislike using that word) who are only tangentially related to the LGB 'community'. My own mother was quite surprised at the extent of my criticism of 'transsexuals' because she 'thought you were all part of the same thing'. No mother, absolutely not.
I don't need to tell you all how absolutely exhausting this bullshit is. I frequently want to disconnect from all of this and live in a cabin in the woods with my books. There are no howling transmaidens there.
SuperStraight may be gone now, but it was refreshing to see the shafts of light shining through the chink in the armour. The pro-trans subreddits might be fawning about validity and the beautiful femininity of testicle pubes, but it was clear that scores (literally) of people are just not having it.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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