unironically can't bring myself to hate her though because she was one of the people who made me start to see some of the cracks in capitalist realism
unironically can't bring myself to hate her though because she was one of the people who made me start to see some of the cracks in capitalist realism
Well i wouldn't call her an actual transmed, but her reaction to the whole Buck Angel controversy was extremly disappointing to say the least. To me, she mostly came off as a stubborn fangirl unable to admit that her favorite porn star nowadays spends all day kissing the asses of terfs (i'm serious, he's palling around with Sal Grover and the likes). It was an incredibly inconsiderate and dumb decision to feature him in one of her vids, and it was even dumber and more inconsiderate not to remove that tiny segment of platforming one of the worst traitors to our community. That she built most of her career on whining about cancel culture after that debacle rubbed further salt into the wound.
I wouldn't go as far as calling her transmedicalist herself. She has to my knowledge never come forth in favor of medical gatekeeping of trans healthcare, she's never tried to be one of the good ones for terfs, she's never been clearly enbiephobic or questioned the validity of other trans people, she's very openly and thoroughly spoken out about transhomophobic concepts like AGP, so she does not tick any of the obvious transmed boxes.
She does have the awful, self-defeating hangups of a former /tttt/ poster, tho, which is hardly surprising given that she lurked that hellsite early in her very public transition when users there would take apart her looks in every new vid she dropped. So she's to a degree stuck in pathologizing views of transness and i also constantly get the impression that she plainly does not get the concept of gender identity, which would explain a ton of things. I'm not gonna go into further detail here, this part of the topic isn't a conversation i'm having in spaces where cis people are present because they'll inevitably take flawed, incomplete assumptions away from that conversation due to having zero experience navigating dysphoria and the pressures of performing transfemininity, i'll just say that some of her views are dogshit and that her approach towards the trans experience is not one i would recommend baby trans to emulate.
I agree with this, it's frustrating how every time she gets mentioned we have to veer wildly between "she's a transmedicalist who hates enbies" and "people hate her because she's pretty".
there's also very clearly a lot of transmisogyny lumped in with it as well, even here (see the comment misgendering her). but she's also got pretty shitty views on NBs and comes a little close to the transmedicalist line for comfort. (+ liberalism, obviously)
Yeah, it's a messy, difficult situation. It's why i'm always very skeptical when online drama focusses on trans people, especially trans women. We're not above having crappy takes and we shouldn't be exempt from criticism, but people have this habit of immediately getting more vitriolic when the crappy take comes from a woman, and that goes doubly for women who are also marginalized in other ways. On one hand i'm like "there's millions of white cishet dudes with the same opinion and thousands of them have bigger reach than this girl, why not dunk on them instead?", but ofc you can raise criticism of public-facing women that aren't soaked in transmysogyny.
In regards to her "whining about cancel culture", I don't disagree that she handled it poorly but I don't think people here have perspective for what happened to her.
The community lost their collective minds over the controversy and overnight she went from the online left's darling to an enby-hating transmedicalist, I can't imagine how much shit she got from her community and everyone else. Haters affect literally every online figure that isn't a complete sociopath, especially left-wingers whose entire ideology is built on empathy and caring about others. The community reaction was completely disproportional to the mistake that it was, and for the love of god there are still people calling her a transmedicalist because of it, which is a conclusion you can only reach if you twist reality with as much bad faith as you can muster. Imagine thousands of people suddenly declaring you an enemy of the trans community, people which you have dedicated your career advocating for.
Contrapoints deserved backlash for platforming Buck Angel, but she did not deserve the ridiculous shitstorm that she got and I don't think any of us could handle the sheer amount of vitriol that was thrown at her. Hasan sounded like he was about to cry after people harassed him during his charity stream for the earthquake in Turkey, and he's a macho himbo not a terminally online transwoman. It's a lot easier to deal with "cancel culture" when you're a right-wing grifter who doesn't give a shit about anything, but if you actually care about these issues and other people in general, I have to imagine this can really fuck you up.
it started well before this. her video on the Aesthetic got a lot of good faith criticism and she ignored all of it, lumping genuine academic criticism in with trolls.
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idk how much worse it's gotten since then, but i rewatched her canceling vid some time ago because i had only seen it before my egg cracked and wanted to take a new look at it now that i understand that part of the debate. And well, she posts a collage of his tweets and ... they're just awful. Not as bad as the Sal Grover bootlicking i saw recently, but still inexcusable. I'm definitely holding it against her that she doesn't want to judge him on things like literally confirming the "transtrender" concerns of moms who try to keep their kid from going on HRT.
To clarify, i don't think people here would take it in bad faith, but i have some very strong opinions on certain ways of living with dysphoria and the odds a cis person would misunderstand them and say something dumb and hurtful to a trans person are very real and just not worth it. I'd only have that discussion on our queer boards where it would happen entirely uncoupled from any debate about streamer drama. Today's Contra vid actually has a good example of what could happen when it shows that clip from V*ush where that slimy fuck weaponizes Natalie's substance abuse problems when he's telling his fanbase to harass her. She seems to be in a lot of pain cis people cannot understand and will never be in a position to criticize, and that's different when you've walked a mile in her shoes and can tell her in good faith "girl, you're hurting yourself when you think about your transness like that. Don't do that to yourself." Cis people need an incredibly high amount of second hand experience with trans people to make a call like that, i'm talking stuff like having been in a longterm relationship with a trans person or being a competent gender therapist.