About that other open letter...
Is it any surprise to find terfs fighting hand in hand with and for Nazis, yet again?
A few days ago, I, along with over 100 other writers on substack wrote an open letter to substack leadership asking them to take action on the amount of Nazis organising on and profiting from this platform - and thus also helping substack itself profit from this hate. Since, over 200 publications have signed on.
So far, Substack leadership’s only response (via the media, mind you) has been to point to a second open letter defending their position - one of free speech, of moderating your own experience, of (as
puts it) “if you can ignore the Nazis, then ignore the Nazis”.As I was reading through this letter, I could somewhat understand where they’re coming from - they’re right in that Substack is maybe the only platform where I haven’t had the algorithm deliver hatred into my feed. This is great! But the problem of profiting from this rhetoric still stands, and that’s not okay.
And then I got to the list of names, and it all started to make sense.
Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, a book pretty universally panned for reasons I’m sure I don’t need to explain.
Bari Weiss, host of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling and a series of unsubstantiated and dangerous hit pieces on a gender affirming clinic in St Louis.
Julie Bindel, who loves to talk about the all-powerful trans lobby and how we’ve got such power and control that women basically don’t exist anymore, actually, and that we’ve wiped out lesbians entirely.
Why might authors like this be pushing for no-moderation, be aligning themselves with Nazis - to the point that they’re out here saying things like this:
The connection between terfs and the far right is pretty well established at this point - I don’t think I need to spend a lot of time on that. But if you haven’t already, it’s well worth giving this investigation on how well-organised (and well-funded) the anti-trans lobby is:
On a Saturday afternoon in August 2019, South Dakota Republican state Rep. Fred Deutsch sent an email to 18 anti-trans activists, doctors, and lawyers with the text of a bill he planned to introduce that would make it a felony for doctors to give transgender children under 16 gender-affirming medical care. “I have no doubt this will be an uphill battle when we get to session,” Deutsch warned the group. “As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the better.”
Some of these signatories, like many of the Nazis profiting from this platform, have rightly been run out of other platforms for their views and the tangible contribution they’ve made to the suffering of our communities around the world. It’s no surprise they’re digging their heels in here, too.
Like I’ve said before - there is no such thing as an ideologically pure platform on the internet. We will always encounter people with abhorrent views. What we can and should push against is the ability to turn those views into a paycheck - both for the people expressing that hate, and for the platform it lives on.