(The photo attached to this post was taken by @mypolyamlife)

So, I’m being accused of being a grifter, and I sorta found that funny, and I think this may be the perfect time to update y’all about some of my feelings about what I’m doing on social media.

Over the past few years, I’ve been shifting away from many of the topics I’ve historically discussed; mostly out of a desire to try new things. On TikTok right now, some people are barely older than my 20-year career of publishing informative content online, and they’ve begun calling me a grifter, essentially because I don’t align with them ideologically 100% of the time. What’s so laughable about that is that I’ve been in this very experimental space for the past few years with my content, and everything is telling me to withdraw from many of the topics that, in reality, do make me less successful as a content creator.

I think people don’t really register that I created a YouTube channel to seek community many years ago, when I was a lonely teenager. I found some of that community online, but offline, I mostly found men who were eager to exploit me as a transgender teenager. My experience with coercion and exploitation has given me a particular passion for feminism and women’s issues. It took me quite some time to register that the experience I was having was a reflection of the misogynistic culture where men exploit transphobia to get away with the sexual abuse of transgender women and girls. I felt very alone in my experiences as a survivor, so over the years, I’ve tried to pull myself through many of those feelings to have larger, more informative conversations about my experiences, which are often completely ignored. I have often felt like I was alone on an island advocating for myself, because in reality, the only person I’ve ever really had is myself.

Sometimes when I talk about this era of my life, it feels like I’m trying to ask my audience for pity, and to be frank, my upbringing makes this feel very distasteful to me. I don’t like pity; I really dislike people feeling sorry for me, and I am not great at asking for or receiving help. Similar to how it took me years to accept that I didn’t deserve to be drugged and raped by my first rapist, I struggle not to feel like many of the things that were, in fact, done to me were my fault. As a content creator, I’ve struggled with the idea that bias is something I have to face. I want to believe that people do not receive my content differently than they receive a white person’s content, but that’s something that I have not been able to be delusional about at a certain point.

Something I’ve noticed quite a bit is that many so-called progressives, and even some of the so-called leftists, really resent it when I speak freely and contradict their narratives. In recent discourse about dating preferences, I’ve acknowledged the reality for many women where they are often used to increase a man’s social capital. I spoke about how many men do use women as wombs and how that’s particularly a touchy subject right now during a time when conservatives are attempting to pass a total abortion ban. I think people who are familiar with my work would be relatively unsurprised by my position; I am an outspoken feminist and spent the 2010s being dogpiled for the content I created for EverydayFeminism.com. I was one of many feminist content creators who spoke openly about misogyny, and we were not well received. Most of my colleagues have left the internet, and those who are still online no longer publish feminist content. What I’ve learned as a content creator is that if you want to find a quick way to sabotage your content creator career, talk about feminism. Better yet, be openly transgender and speak about feminism.

There was a point in time when I could have disappeared even after establishing myself online as an openly trans feminist content creator. As I’ve spoken about many times, I was stealth in my 20s; hiding that I was transgender while living in a conservative community. I am an illustrator, animator, writer, and I have a performing arts background. My YouTube channel started as a sewing channel during the time in my life when I used to make almost all of my clothing. I can run several blogs on different subjects and be relatively successful at it, but I’m stubborn. To be frank, I have a very hard time moving on from subjects like misogyny and rape culture. As a survivor, I find so many of these conversations hard to disengage from because it does feel like we are never really heard in these conversations. As a black trans woman, I especially feel like there aren’t very many people who listen to people like me. Being stealth felt like cowardice; a new closet where I was isolated from the larger queer community. As I’ve moved to LA, begun organizing queer spaces and attending them myself, I’ve started engaging more deeply with the people who were touched by my work.

It’s slowly registering to me that people have a very high opinion of me, and that was quite hard to conceptualize with how isolated I’ve been through most of my career. Part of why I repeat that I’ve been publishing content for most of my life about these topics is because I often forget about that myself. I still feel very young. I still feel like some of my thoughts and ideas are forming. Still, in all reality, I’ve been publishing content long enough that there are people who were watching me in middle school (omg why weren’t your parents monitoring your internet?), who are not going to college for degrees that I partially inspired them to pursue. I’ve met quite a few people, not just in LA, but all around the country, who walk up to me, recognize me, and say that I’ve influenced them to do good work. From other content creators to activists, social workers, therapists, writers, and educators, I’ve literally met people whose work I’ve directly inspired. There are so many people whose content I see on TikTok who get excited when I follow them because my content partially inspired them. It’s actually a genuinely hard thing for me to conceptualize, but I’ve heard it enough times to realize that I’ve been quite influential.

I get caught up in loops because I am pretty passionate about the topics I discuss, which is partially why I was so insulted that a white content creator and their supporters have taken to describing me as a “grifter”. What’s interesting to me about this accusation is that I’ve often had grifters surround my content because they needed something to respond. My experience is that I get ire from both anti-feminists and people on the so-called left who are transmisogynistic and anti-black. No, I don’t think that correcting me when I’m wrong is racism. I draw a pretty distinct line between harassment and criticism, and, for clarity, I don’t feel harassed in this particular conversation. That said, I do feel disrespected. It’s one thing to disagree with me, but to insinuate that the last 20 years of my life, where I’ve been uploading this content online, holding largely the same positions, is quite annoying.

The subject of dating preferences is actually a great example of a subject where people have actively grifted from the content I’ve created. My position on dating preferences has always been an area where I tend to diverge from other people who, frankly, have fewer concerns in their own romantic lives when it comes to navigating around bigotry. Many years ago, I made one of my first videos about the subject, where I spoke about some of my earlier feelings about being rejected as a transgender woman. I spoke about how I was compelled to speak directly with those who rejected me about their bias and suggest that maybe they should indeed give me a chance, and how ultimately I shifted my opinion about that once I actually had experiences with those who aren’t attracted to me. I spoke about how those relationships were degrading and how ultimately. At the same time, I could grant that there is bigotry in a culture that excludes transgender women from people’s dating prospects; ultimately, it felt unhelpful to use dating preferences as a metric for allyship. I have often affirmed that I don’t exactly think accusations of phobia are useful. What was the response from anti-feminist grifters? To say that I wanted to bully men into sleeping with me. Back in the 2010s, it was incredibly common for larger content creators who had misogynistic audiences to make content misrepresenting the ideas of much smaller creators who were marginalized and were unlikely to be truly listened to. Many of my colleagues left the internet during this time. Misogynists hated that we were speaking about these topics, and this was the era when the far right was forming many of its foundations. Even in my own experience with these people, I saw how men and boys online joined in on misogynistic harassment campaigns where they would misrepresent what someone said so that they could get the best engagement. They’d copy each other; some content creators watched other content creators speaking about my content but never actually watched it for themselves to see that it was misrepresented. According to some of these people, I was essentially a black tranny who wanted to enslave white people and force heterosexual men to fuck me or suffer execution. I’m not even being dramatic when I say that’s how it was often presented. So I spent my 20s, as I was coming out of stealth, being massively harassed online for the subjects I still haven’t moved on from.

The interesting thing about my online presence is that, because I’ve been around for a very long time and was one of the first and only people discussing these topics, I have influenced much of the discourse we have online and much of the language people use about these subjects. I’ve uploaded educational content about race, gender, sexuality, and so much more. However, people rarely want to give me credit, and I saw a bit of that when people were recently reposting my quote without mentioning my name. It is very strange to be in the position I am, where so many people are familiar with my words and my ideas, yet they all act like acknowledging me would put a stain on their argument. Large content creators support me in whispers, and on more than one occasion, I’ve been told that if I withdrew from the subjects I discussed, I’d be more successful.

I am at an impasse right now. On one hand, I share what I do because of the life I’ve lived—a life where, yes, I have indeed had experiences that may contradict or complicate theory. I cannot pretend that life functions in the neat way we often conceptualize. I cannot pretend that some of my own experiences contradict common narratives. Though occasionally, I wonder how useful my voice is. As I said, I’m quite stubborn, and I speak about these subjects because I care deeply about them, but transparently, within this strange time we’re in, everything is telling me to move on. As I said, I have more I can do, and I have genuinely wondered what it would be like if I stopped focusing on the topics I have. The reality is, they sabotage my platform, and in a way, I’ve sorta said most of the things I want to say. Meeting people who’ve been following me for over a decade who have been inspired by the work I’ve done has also kinda given me the sense that I can, in a way, rest easy.

The grifter accusation insults me mostly because for the first 15 or so years of creating this content, I made very little money doing it. I often feel the pull to make content about more advertiser-friendly topics because I do have that in me. I’m feeling very creative and inspired right now, and I’ve partially wanted to shift back towards the original goal of my channel. What’s funny is I never really meant to go down this path. I went down this path. After all, I figured out that I developed good communication and public speaking skills because I’ve been making YouTube videos since I was a teenager. YouTube was one of many things I jumped into as a teenager to increase my confidence. Ironically, I did it back then explicitly because I didn’t have an audience and no one was watching… at least I thought. Even back when I was a teenager, my content performed well enough for my classmates to find it, which was mortifying. A decade later, it turns out I was an early adopter of a career many people are just now attempting to get into. I left the animation industry and stopped illustrating to pursue YouTube full-time, and since 2015, I’ve supported myself entirely on my YouTube and speaking income. I’m recognizing that I’m in a very good position right now, and I’m thankful for it.

So, while I know that I’ll never fully withdraw from these topics, I’m definitely curious what it would be like if I shifted toward more overtly creative endeavors. The reality is, discourse has robbed me of my time. I woke up one day, and I was 35, still having the same conversation I had when I went full-time as a content creator at 25. In many ways, I feel the message that I need to move on, so I’ll be focusing on that in the coming months. I will be thinking and moving with more strategy, and focusing on creating content that is not just monetizable, but easily shared across platforms. The reality is, for a while now, I’ve been off-script because I did need to learn that I don’t always need one. Some of you will remember my heavily scripted content, and I needed a phase where I was less scripted. But the reality is, i’ve been doing this long enough to know how to capitalize on my platform and while that hasn’t really been my focus in many of these unpopular conversations I’m passionate about, every year, I have to kick myself in the ass a bit about getting my platform together, and for a while now I’ve been speaking about placing a certain degree of distance between myself, my audience and my online persona. It feels like it’s just about that time…