Echoing Voices

Was thinking about social media today... notably Twitter and how it amplifies certain voices well beyond their true reach.

I'm not naive, of course, there is a far too strong transphobic world out there, but polls in most western countries point to more support for transgender rights and inclusion than against them. It's a sad state of affairs that this is even a topic for polling, it should be without question, but it's indicative of the hill we still need to climb.

However, as I became more active on Twitter, the echoing of transphobic voices come through way louder than they would have before. Twitter distorts the footprint that they leave. Now I realize that She Who Shall Not Be Named is a major amplification, but I don't think that is actually doing her any favours. She's losing followers, book sales are lagging, and the press is getting less generous as time goes by. In the end, the ones lapping up her words are the same that tell each other the same, tired, and well refuted arguments to each other. It's a circle of bigotry, each other patting themselves on the back for parroting the same rhetoric that racists and homophobes have used in the past.

Twitter also fails miserably at allowing their platform to be abused for hate. Report hateful tweets or hateful accounts, Twitter does nothing. A trans person gets fed up a swears at the bigotry? Their account gets restricted. Sure they sometimes get it right, as the did with a certain Irish "comedy" writer, but it's a drop in the bucket.

I am three weeks into HRT and I feel the wave of hatred from these people for the very act of existing.

It saddens me.

I have great support around me, from my partner to my sister.

That makes me happy.

You know what else also makes me happy? My country. You know what TERFs are calling it? Tranada! So it would appear that we're doing something very right and, as one of our sisters posted on Twitter, it has us saying:

I am all good with that. I may even create a few stickers on my Cricut of that one. I will also remind myself that history is going to be on my side, I just have to help work that along with the rest of us.