𝓝𝓪𝓽𝓪𝓵𝓲𝓮 𝓦𝔂𝓷𝓷  💎

And it's funny, because I thought I'd get more leeway with this kind of thing when I came out as trans. "I'm recognized as a member of a marginalized group"—I very dumbly thought—"leftists will be more trusting of my good intentions." Exactly the opposite has happened.

My perception, anyway, is that I'm now held to a 10x higher standard. We kind of expect cis white guys to fuck up a lot, to have grandiose debates with dinguses. And we're more forgiving of their shenanigans. A trans woman is expected to be perfect. So it currently seems to me.

Now I don't want to imply that people who side eye me when I talk to certain people are all just over-sensitive or unreasonable. Actually I very thoroughly get it. A lot of my audience belongs to groups that YouTube is often a very bad experience for.

It's not just a matter of my "talking to people who disagree." A lot of anti-SJW YouTube (just one example but a big one) has spent years leading nasty, personal campaigns to defame, hurt, and humiliate individual people in my community.

So anything I do to appear chummy with people who have behaved that way, or are publicly friends with those people, makes me look like an alibi. An enabler. An apologist. Someone, at least, willing to associate with people who have caused a lot of pain (& are in denial about it).

Now for me, personally, engaging those people isn't a big strain on my mental health. I find it helps—makes me safer online, even—to show up on those platforms & just be like "hi, I'm a human being, it's possible to have a conversation with me."

What is a strain, however, is feeling like I'm potentially betraying people who've put their trust in me and hurting people I don't want to hurt e v e r y time I do this.

It's a weird paradox, because I'm now in a situation where I could just choose to appear on pretty much any right-wing YouTube channel I want. I'm constantly invited to debates by everyone from centrist liberals to outright fascists.