Netflix has published a slew of new films recently and at the time of writing this, I Came By, a film written and directed by Babak Anvari is #4 in movies today. If you’re like me, you love a good thriller, but you’re skeptical of Netflix’s in-house roster, so I figured I’d give the film a view and let you know if it’s worth watching. This is a film that I figured would be pretty obvious and simplistic, but I found myself enjoying how it often subverted my expectations of what was to come next.
Toby (George MacKay) and Jay (Percelle Ascott) play a duo of graffiti artists who break into the homes of the rich and bomb their home with graffiti art reading “I Came By”. The film starts with would be the last home they’d hit together. Jay just discovered he’s going to become a father and he wants to put this whole thing behind him to mature for his future family. Toby, on the other hand, gets a great sense of worth from vandalizing the homes of the rich as he’s otherwise aspiring towards nothing. His mother, (Kelly Macdonald) is a therapist who is disappointed with the fact that Toby hasn’t been able to get his act together and find purpose in his life. Little does she know, Toby made a grave discovery in the basement of one his target’s homes that will change everything. The target, a retired judge named Hector Blake (Hugh Bonniville), is a champion of the marginalized in his public life, but the secrets he keeps, both in his basement and out make it clear he is anything but.
I won’t spoil the particulars of this film, but this film does a good job of portraying a villainous character who maintains a place in society where he is often seen as inherently trustworthy and admirable. Hector Blake carries a deep resentment towards the people whom he claims to advocate for, but hides it quite well. As a person of color, it reminded me of the people I’ve known in my life who publicly affirm certain groups while privately resenting and abusing them. The film touches on the position many immigrants are often in where very powerful people are allowed to do heinous things to them that will go unaddressed because of the power and influence of people who commit these crimes and the fact that coming to the cops may end in deportation. Especially for refugees, that can be a very terrifying threat.
I’ll be blunt with you. I enjoyed many of the aspects of this film, but collectively, I’m not so sure. The motivations for many of the characters are a bit unclear. We understand why Hector Blake does what he does, but we really don’t understand why Toby and Jay graffiti. We understand why Toby found purpose in trying to save the life of another, but we don’t understand why exactly he feels so aimless in life. We understand that Toby and Jay are friends, but we don’t understand why their friendship is so strong that Jay is willing to risk his life. We know why Toby’s mother would desperately search for him, but we don’t really understand why she would confront Blake head-on. All of these missing pieces left me feeling a bit hollow about the film. I enjoyed how the narration switched from characters and, again, I enjoyed how the film subverted some of our assumptions of how this would go, but at the end of the day, an end that should have satisfied me left me with more questions. A lot of the questions were left unanswered and while I’m a fan of ambiguity, I’m a bit confused by why they weren’t addressed. In many ways, the film felt rushed and incomplete.
So ultimately, while I don’t think this is the worst movie in the world, I also don’t exactly feel confident about suggesting it to you. So for this film, I’m gonna say Skip it.
I’ve got a confession… I love Idris Elba. Not only is he incredibly talented, but he’s also quite handsome and I would be dishonest if I didn’t start out this review by saying that I mostly wanted to see this movie because the thought of Idris Elba protecting his family and going toe to toe with an angry Lion is… very curated to my specific interests. However, while we’re being honest here I have to say that, for me, the only thing Beast had going for it was the fact that Idris Elba was on screen. Oh, and I went to see it in 4D, which I guess was also pretty cool.
Beast is a film directed by Baltasar Kormákur starring Idris Elba as Dr. Nate Samuels. Leah Jeffries and Iyana Halley play Dr. Samuels’ daughters whom are essentially estranged from their father after he decided to leave their mother towards the end of her life. The family visits Africa for a wild Safari led by Martin Battles (Sharlton Copley), who was an old friend of the late Mrs. Samuels. While out on Safari, they run into a Lion; an apex predator whose entire pack was murdered by poachers. The lion goes on a seemingly aimless rampage and starts killing every one in its sight and our characters are simply caught in the crossfire.
The stand out performance for me was that of Leah Jefferies who plays the youngest sister, Norah Samuels. I haven’t seen her in anything else, but I thought she did amazingly in this film. Apparently Idris Elba’s own daughter auditioned for her role, but didn’t get it because there wasn’t enough chemistry between her an Idris Elba. That was kind of a sad thing to find out, but I think they made a good choice.
One thing I enjoyed about this film is that it drew attention to poaching and the efforts many are making to maintain species in Africa. A main plot point of the film is that Martin Battles is incredibly invested in conservation and as an extension of that, raised many of the lions in the wild from birth. This has made him very defensive of the animals. This is never fully confirmed, but it is insinuated that in his free time, he hunts poachers and kills them the way they’d hunt and kill the lions he raised in the wild.
After those compliments for the film, I have nothing but criticism. This is one of those movies where if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve essentially seen the movie. The tension between Dr. Samuels and his children is interesting because we rarely see this specific family dynamic, but in my opinion, it simply isn’t enough to carry the film. This is a film that takes place in the wilderness of Africa, but it has a very small scope and scale. The majority of the film is spent with the characters being trapped in their Safari car and I think all in all, there’s probably only about 10 minutes of footage of Idris Elba kicking the lion’s ass. In a way, you also feel strange about him doing so because you understand that the Lion is only doing so because humans murdered his family. The lion isn’t a super charged, science experiment gone wrong, he’s just a particularly large lion that’s on a rampage. I guess I was just expecting a bit more, but hey, I came for Idris kicking lion butt and I guess I got what I paid for.
Since this is the first review I’m doing on my site, I wanted to introduce my rating system. I’m going to give each film I review one of the following ratings:
Watch It – A good movie I left not only wanting to see it again, but also wanting to dissect it even more.
Stream it – Decent movie, but I’m not sure I’d go to the theaters to see it.
Skip it – Wouldn’t waste my time with it.
With that being said, my rating for this film is….
I’m going to give Beast a solid Stream it, but purely because it has Idris Elba in it. If you don’t care about that.. It’s a solid Skip it.
I’m not sure how proud I am to say this, but I’m a massive fan of True Crime content on Youtube. Like a lot of people, I started really falling in love with this content during the height of quarantine. If you were to burst into my apartment in the middle of the day, there’s a high chance you’ll hear me blasting a video from one of the channels below. As dark and upsetting as this content may be, I appreciate it because it often sheds light on concerning patterns of behavior. It’s said that in order to avoid the mistakes in the future, we must learn from the past and True Crime content has a great way of capturing and often defining common patterns among some of the worst criminals in the world. I’m also a fan of a good story and as tragic as these stories often are, I appreciate how some creators have been able to masterfully present very true, but very upsetting stories in a way that is respectful to the victims of these crimes.
The following channels are my top 5 True Crime Youtube Channels, in my opinion. I tend to favor true crime content that isn’t overly produced or salacious so my picks are reflective of that.
JCS Criminal Psychology
I feel like this list absolutely had to start with JCS, since his style has influenced quite a few True Crime creators. JCS Criminal Psychology comes in at just over 5 Million subscribers and in my view, he deserves it. His videos are primarily interrogation footage with snippets of news footage along with his occasional commentary. He is incredibly talented at framing the footage and including context without inserting himself too much. The footage is edited in a cohesive, clear manner and he clearly puts a lot of work towards audio mastering and restoring. In my view, JCS is the cream of the crop for True Crime content on YouTube, but he uploads very infrequently, which gave birth to a slew of “JCS Crime Inspired” content, which led me to some of the following channels. At the time of me writing this article, he hasn’t uploaded a new video for over a year.
This is Monsters
This is Monsters was originally a podcast that later slowly transformed into a Youtube series. Because of its podcast history, there’s a large focus on presenting a clear and concise narrative and instead of letting the footage speak for itself, the narrator tells the entire, complete story often supplemented with interview clips. The videos aren’t necessarily visually striking, but in my view, they don’t need to be. There are 5 seasons of the show and previous seasons have focused on particular types of crimes, such as family annihilators, child killings, mass shootings and religious crimes. Of the Youtube channels on the list, this one uploads far more frequently and has a lenghty backlog of content. This channel often also focuses on less popular cases so you’re more likely to see a new or unknown case on their channel.
Dreading
Dreading is another great True Crime page that more certainly has become fairly active. Like This is Monsters, they upload rather frequently; sometimes twice a week; but that may be temporarily where they are now because they do not have the most expansive catalogue. They often cover more well-known cases but try to talk about things that aren’t often discussed by other sources. The narrator remains mostly within character, but sometimes breaks it to express their frustration with the subject being covered. Their videos are more edited and visually appealing than This is Monsters, but I personally digest the channels in a very similar way.
Coffee House Crime
Of all the channels on this list, Coffeehouse Crime is the only one with a talking head. Adrian plays an even mannered barista who calmly shares True Crime stories with an even tone. His videos are the shortest on this list, averaging at about 20 minutes. His videos are well produced and edited, but what shines is his ability to say so much in a much shorter time than these other channels.
Red Tree Crime
Red Tree Crime is one of the many JCS Inspired channels I found when seeking for new content. Over the years, they’ve found their own niche and it’s been a joy to observe their growth. They are the smallest channel on this list and in my view, are criminally under viewed. Like JCS, they predominately edit interrogation footage and use narration to create a cohesive narrative.
Of course, there are many other channels out there that could have been on this list, but these are the top contenders for me. I’d love to hear which channels you’re following and appreciate so please feel free to share those with me below in the comments.
Every other day I log onto social media and there’s an ongoing debate about whether someone’s personal dating “preferences” are “problematic”. The conversation tends to follow a very particular, predictable structure:
If you don’t want to date a trans person, you’re transphobic.
If you don’t want to date a Black person, you’re racist.
If you don’t want to date a dark-skinned person, you’re colorist
If you don’t’ want to date a fat person, you’re fatphobic.
These debates usually start when someone shares their dating “preferences” publicly. Usually this conversation is cyclical because once someone argues that it’s “phobic” or “ist” not to be attracted to certain people, it’s natural to become defensive. The reasons we’re attracted to certain people are often nonsensical. Most people aren’t trying to make sure that their attractions are inoffensive to others. My standard reaction to this conversation is that people will date who they want to date and really that’s no one’s business; but obviously if you make your “preferences” known, they will be criticized. Aside from that, this debate is interesting to me because as a Black transgender woman, I’m often outside of the romantic “preferences” most men have. This often puts me in a position where I’ve shared myself with people who do not exactly prefer me, and those experiences have left me with lasting pain.
Personally, while I’m deeply uncomfortable assigning bigotry to someone’s attractions or lack thereof, I’m also uncomfortable with the idea that the people who make this argument are trying to force people into their bedrooms. A huge issue with this discourse is that these statements of “preference” often do degrade into bigotry. It’s one thing not to want to sleep with a transgender woman; it’s another to suggest that she’s predatory for communicating attraction to you. That said, I can understand why people tend to interpret these arguments as citing bigotry to strong arm someone into including transgender people in their dating pool. If it’s transphobic not to date a trans person, and transphobia is bigotry, then the clear argument seems to be that it’s bigoted to reject a transgender person. However, what people are usually trying to draw attention to is that our dating “preferences” don’t develop in a vacuum. They’re usually established through our socialization; and for that reason, they’re often influenced by a culture that has historically been transphobic, racist, colorist, fatphobic etc. Because our culture has been so influenced by those isms, people usually digest those who directly experience them as unattractive. Our beauty standards almost always reflect the aesthetics of the privileged, so it isn’t farfetched to suggest that bigotry and the “preferences” people develop are related. The argument being made is these attractions should be examined for that reason. That said, while attractions can certainly shift as we explore beyond our initial socialization, there are plenty of things about it that will remain static. In truth, these conversations fall apart because they tend to ignore how attractions develop and shift in the kind of society where attractions are so deeply influenced by a culture with such history.
This isn’t a perfect metaphor, but I think dating preferences are quite like food preferences. There’s what you know you like, what you’re curious about, what you’ll eat on very rare occasions, what your religion says you should and shouldn’t eat, what you’ve had, but wasn’t a fan of and what you know for a fact you don’t want ever again. I grew up eating mostly soul food and other, standard American fare. I remember the first time a guy asked me out to a Thai restaurant and my immediate thought was “Ew, Thai food is gross”. I felt that way with absolutely no exposure to it beyond what I assumed it might be. However, when I had Thai food for the first time, I fell completely in love with it to the point where it’s one of my preferences to this day. While I may have expanded my flavor profile, there are still plenty of things on the menu that I’ll never order. I still have this strong aversion to very spicy food so “Thai spice” is my absolute limit. Similarly, with attraction, there are some things that are an “acquired taste”, but they may eventually become a preference, while other things will always be off the table.
On paper, I exist within one of the least desirable bodies. I am fairly dark skinned, I’m unambiguously Black, I’m transgender and I’m plus sized. I very much know what it feels like to exist outside of the idealized standards most people have for their romantic partners. It can be lonely because even when you’re not being romantically rejected, you’re often being socially rejected in very subtle ways. It materializes in how people never seem to invite you to certain things. How you notice that your white friends are just treated with more dignity. How often you’re put into a position where you’re completely desexualized and treated as though you’re some sort of mascot or caricature. This is a nuance I almost never hear discussed when we talk about these dating “preferences”. Most people want to twist the conversation to be about bitter ugly folks who are angry that no one wants to fuck them, but it’s much more than that. Existing outside of these standards commonly exposes you to bigotry. That rejection reaches wider than romance. That said, my position is that this is a symptom of these phobias and isms, but I struggle to feel correct in saying that they –are- those isms. While I recognize that, for example, a white person rejecting a Black person because of their race could be described as racist; I tend to think the actual racism is how much that white person will subconsciously exclude Black people socially because of that “preference”. To me, that would feel like a more useful description of bigotry because it’s about a general attitude of exclusion that affects more than just the people, they choose to build their lives with. In my view, dating is an inherently exclusionary practice and it’s not unreasonable to want to date people who share a similar background. Of course, there’s some degree of bigotry in assuming that the only people who you could have commonality with are people who look just like you, but that’s still probably a safe bet in most situations. While I get the emotions behind why people make these arguments about bigotry and attraction, I know from my own personal experience how much bigotry tends to exist among people who are indeed attracted to me. I personally understand what it feels like to be included into the sex life of a person who is trying to solve their ignorance by using your body to find themselves and it is a less than desirable reality.
I don’t think it’s necessary for anyone to be attracted to a transgender person and I certainly don’t buy into the idea that those who are could never be transphobic. When you’re a transgender person, you become hyperaware of the fact that dating you is complicated for most people because we live in a society that politicizes relationships between transgender people and cis people. When people wanted to attack former President, Barack Obama, they did so by suggesting that his wife was a transgender woman. This was supposed to be embarrassing and say something about his masculinity and sexuality. Quite often, people define themselves by their sexuality. While heterosexual men may feel like they don’t define themselves by their sexuality the way a gay person might, you see by how many heterosexual men fear the stigma that comes with being seen as gay, that this identity and the privilege that comes with it, is incredibly important to them. Offline, most of the men who express attraction to me are heterosexual and because this is such a central part of their identity, this often puts me in an uncomfortable position. When transgender women are murdered, society is quick to argue that she “tricked him” by existing as a person who he found attractive that existed outside of what he believed were his “preferences”. That rhetoric makes me incredibly nervous around men, but it hasn’t stopped me from dating. What I’ve learned through my relationships is when you live in a society with this degree of stigma and ignorance against you, it takes a very long time for most people who were socialized with that stigma and ignorance to reach a point where they can pursue you without shame. It’s unfortunate, but for me, part of existing in this society has been accepting that to many people, transgender women are an acquired taste. One that requires a degree of work and exploration beyond what’s readily presented by society. Transgender people are very rarely depicted in a positive way, which means they are very rarely seen as viable romantic partners. If you follow society’s messaging, you can easily reach the conclusion that a relationship with a transgender person could only ever be negative. So, for many transgender people this pushes them to only date other transgender people because the reality of dating a cis person who was socialized to see you as lesser than requires a lot of patience and the desire to educate. A lot of people don’t want to do that in a romantic relationship, so some transgender folks prefer dating other people who directly understand their experiences. Realistically, most cis people who been socialized in this way are going to have to do a lot of work to unpack those biases. For me, the complicated question is what exactly does that work look like and is there a version of it that doesn’t indirectly harm transgender folks?
Most people’s first attractions are reflective of the communities they were raised in, which, because of our country’s history, aren’t often diverse. It’s easy to write off an entire category of people when you’ve only been exposed to a few of those people or you’re only familiar with stereotypes. While I was raised in a racially diverse area, there were certainly groups of people I became more attracted to once I moved to the city, which is the most racially diverse place I’ve ever lived. It’s taken me a while to understand that quite a few white people are raised in communities where they never encounter people of color. In that environment, it’s easy to make statements that exclude all people of color from their dating pool, but attractions may or may not shift when they venture beyond their small towns. When people point out that your dating “preferences” may be reflective of society’s history of bigotry, the next natural step is to self-reflect and ask yourself if you’d date someone outside of your “preferences.”. The answer you come back with might be “no”, but maybe it’s a curiosity instead. For most people, that curiosity will be predominately sexual and sadly what often results is fetishism.
When you exist outside of most people’s preference, the flipside is commonly fetishism that never quite leads to more than a one-sided sexual relationship. A white person from a white town who was told all their lives to only engage in romance with other white people, might fetishize the idea of violating that taboo by having sex with a Black person. A society that rejects transgender people’s bodies as valid is also one that deeply fetishizes them. As a trans woman, most of the men I’d describe as “chasers” are men who get off on the social taboo of sleeping with transgender women and the fact that no one knows what they’re doing. Partially because they’re ashamed, but also because the secret excites them. Their secrecy also maintains their chances with cis women, who tend to be their preference. These men know that a lot of cis women would be repulsed if they knew they were attracted to transgender women, and this is the excuse they give for treating trans women how they do. Unfortunately, most chasers are in the position they’re in because they saw a trans woman who challenged their understanding of self, and they slowly but surely developed the habit of secretly consuming transgender pornography and contacting transgender women. They were curious, but then they learned they can prey on a group of people who are so used to not being preferred that they are often willing to go the extra mile to satisfy those who have privilege over them. In fact, because transgender women know that they are rarely preferred over cis women, the attention of cis men is very validating to transgender women who are in an insecure phase of life. It’s not uncommon for transgender women to feel flattered by the affection of a man who identifies as heterosexual because, to them the expression of attraction is also a validation of them as women. So, you have a group of heterosexual men who might otherwise be unimpressive whose inherent quality is now seen as impressive long before anything else is established. Some men become intoxicated by the idea that all they have to do is say they’re straight and gorgeous transgender women, who haven’t quite found their worth, will overlook all of their flaws, all of the reasons other women have rejected them all to feel more proximity to their privilege. This often leads to some very toxic and abusive dynamics that are very stressful for transgender women. These men are actively attracted to them and choose to mistreat them because they are transgender. For me, that will always feel more transphobic than someone simply saying no to me.
In these conversations, you’ll often hear the defense “everyone’s got a preference”. I’ve dated a handful of people who have argued that they were more highly evolved. They swore that they didn’t have preferences, but I’ve never found that to be true. Understandably, voicing your preferences sounds harsh and puts you in a position where you have to defend them. I understand why people struggle to openly state their preferences, but as a person who is often the least preferred, there are times I wish I didn’t naively believe that certain people saw me how they’ve seen others. I’m polyamorous and I only date people on the left; I guess that makes me “rightphobic”, but I’m okay with that. Who men tend to prefer becomes very obvious when you are polyamorous. I’ve dated men of various racial backgrounds who all denied they had a preference but were often primary partnered to cis white women. If they weren’t when I met them, almost all of them left or paused their relationships with me because of a new, cis white partner. Removing monogamy from the conversation, allows for these things to be seen more clearly because a monogamous person could easily argue that it’s a coincidence that they just so happened to fall in love with someone who fits the idealized beauty standard. When you live in a very diverse city and all of your partners are that idealized beauty standard, it’s obvious you have a preference; but these people will deny it. If you went to a Polyamory social and lined up every woman who was primary partnered, most of them will be cis and white; that’s not a coincidence. You’ll notice the “secondary” partners tend to be a bit darker skinned, often more queer, sometimes less cis than their primary. Often times, men primary their “preference” and keep their curiosities or the less socially acceptable partners as secondaries. To this day, I have never met a cis man primary partnered to a transgender woman with a cis woman as a secondary, but I have been the transgender secondary partner for many polyamorous men in LA. If you were to ask these men if they had a preference, they would absolutely say no, but you see their preferences clear as day and you notice how when new women of color come to the event, they don’t get swarmed with attention the same way a white girl would. None of these socially aware, left leaning people want to say that they have a preference, but they do. But being a bit graceful, another aspect of “preference” that isn’t often discussed is that sometimes their “preference” really isn’t even their own.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I coincidentally, started dating a lot of Jewish men. Not intentionally or anything, there’s just far more Jewish people in LA and all of the men who were pursuing me when I moved here were Jewish. These men all had different degrees of reverence for Judaism. Some very secular, others quite devout. They all had temporary, but adventurous relationships with me before ultimately leaving me to pursue a Jewish woman because that’s who they are expected to bring home. Frankly, it’s also who they tend to connect with the most culturally because they have similar backgrounds and often similar parental pressures. I know that I’m a badass and a great partner, but I would be a disappointing one for these men to bring home and these men know that. I doubt any of them were consciously deprioritizing me as a partner, but that’s how I felt each time they decided to stop seeing me because they met a Jewish woman. It felt like they had a preference but didn’t want to actually vocalize it because it would have given me the opportunity to decide not to spend time with them. What got me about these relationships was that I got along with all of them quite well. We had no real issues, and we had a lot of good times together, but that was it. I was the temporary fun partner before they found someone, they could bring home to their parents that would be less embarrassing. Intentional or not, dating people who deprioritize me has affected me very negatively.
I was in a monogamous relationship for almost 6 years with a white passing man in Orange County. This man told me constantly that he found white women to be unattractive. He had a “preference” for everyone but white women. I never needed to hear this, but he said it to me constantly. His parents were always very distant with me. His family was very conservative and for most of our relationship, they didn’t know I was trans, but they for sure knew I was Black. My ex would mention pretty frequently that he didn’t believe in marriage. Like a lot of modern men, he had a lot of reasons why marriage was a scam, a mistake, something he didn’t want. I’m not sure I wanted it either, but I know as we got closer to 6 years, I started asking what we were doing. We had a lot of other issues, and I completely lost who I was in that relationship. As I became more successful, he became lazier and less motivated. He’d lean into me and say that once I start making more money, he can relax a bit. I started paying all of our rent to support him while he was going to culinary school. I thought we were a team, but I would go on to pay most of our expenses for the last two years of our relationship. He quit culinary school, along with every job in a kitchen he got after, but he knew he could lean on me. I had enough once I saw him planning on getting an expensive tattoo that was about the same price as his part of the rent. I realized that he had accepted that I was going to pay for our way regardless and he didn’t care about the burden I had taken on. So, I dumped him and moved to LA. He married a white woman less than two years after. I’m sure his parents are proud.
Maybe it’s because I date men, but my experience with being less preferred has often been that I’m placed in a position where my intimate partners mistreat me and expect me to stay because they know I’m less preferred. It took me a while to understand that white men like my ex who very performatively trash white women to uplift women of color are doing so out of bitterness and a history of rejection. A lot of times when these men have low self-esteem, they’ll pursue someone they know they have more privilege than to prey on theirs instead. Through our relationship, I knew he had insecurities, but I didn’t make the connection that those insecurities meant that he was intimidated by the white women he preferred and that he saw me as easier to connect with because I existed outside of most people’s preferences. When he spoke about white women, it was always about how they were too prissy or high maintenance. He’d complain about women who had standards and were willing to say no and not settle for less. In retrospect, I can see that he knew he’d get away with relying on me financially because perhaps subconsciously, I did buy into the idea that a relationship with him was flattering, and I didn’t want to walk away from it. Chasers will often trash cis women in a similar way. They’ll talk about how much more feminine trans women are and how bitchy and stuck up cis women are. It’s all constructed to prey on the insecurities they know society promotes within you. These are often relationships where I’m expected to do a lot and to put up with more shit than the women they prefer. I cannot even believe that I spent all of this money in my last relationship providing for a man who is far more privileged than I’ll ever be, but that’s often the position you end up in. These men often expect you to do more labor for them because you do not have the same bargaining power as their preference. I’ve seen men who were broke for me, be rich for their preference. These relationships always left me feeling depleted and the only reason I speak so much about them is that they’ve left me with lasting trauma that has very viciously affected me and made me so fearful of men and their true desires. For that reason, it’s hard for me to hear conversations that attribute bigotry to someone rejecting someone they do not prefer. I struggle to buy into the idea that because a man is attracted to me, he’s less bigoted than the men who reject me on the basis of who I am and leave me alone. I wish so many of my former intimate partners simply left me alone and pursued their preferences until one stuck. I wish they’d stop using me as a stop gap between relationships with the kind of women they prefer. I wish I could stop being in relationships where I’m expected to settle for less, because of who I am. I cannot remember every man who’s rejected me for being a trans woman, but to this day, I feel the pain of being so intimate with men who mistreated me because I’m a transgender woman.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve entertained men like this, but a lot of the men who pursue transgender women will only do so in secret. I had many relationships through college that never left my dorm room because the men who were interested in me did not want anyone knowing we were intimate. There is a massive stigma against transgender people and those who date them, so I recognize that their fears do not come from nowhere. However, those men often made their fears my burden. I remember “dating” these men who’d make me feel so miserable about myself because they were obsessive about me passing as cis and not embarrassing them. Some of these men would very manipulatively say that I didn’t pass and that’s why they weren’t going to take me out. Always dangling that in my face as the justifiable reason they couldn’t be seen with me. It took me a while to see that was something they said to limit our relationship to secrecy, but it encouraged me to feel less of myself. Sometimes these men have to hurt a lot of trans women before recognizing the harm they’re causing. Some of these men are just trying to figure out if they can sexually enjoy a transgender woman enough to be able to actually date one, but whether they have a “valid” reason or not, the experience with them is still very demeaning. I want to encourage men to explore their curiosities, but I have no personal interest in being involved in that process.
One of my own dating “preferences” is for men who’ve already been in long term relationships with transgender women. If you’re still trying to figure yourself out in that way, I respect your journey, but would not date you. Doing so puts me in a vulnerable position where someone may be attracted to me, but not my body. Or they’re attracted to my body, but not really attracted to me. Men with experience have usually done the work of self-reflecting and researching to a point where they no longer have anxieties about dating a transgender person. That self-work requires them to unpack and examine the societal messaging that has dehumanized transgender women. It sounds simple to many transgender people who’ve spent most of their lives self-reflecting on things like gender and sexuality; but for people who’ve never asked those questions of themselves, it can be a daunting task. One most of them will avoid.
What I dislike about this discourse is that on one hand it acknowledges that the type of people we’re attracted to is linked to our socialization, but it downplays the depth of that socialization. Things you’re socialized to believe take a long time to unpack. A person who’s been socialized with fatphobia, for example, is probably going to require a lot of education, exposure and experience before they start genuinely seeing fat partners as romantically viable. They’re not going to get there by being told their attractions are bigoted. Maybe it’ll make them think, but it’s more likely to make them defensive. In my view, trans attraction is even more complex because unlike things like race and size, your sexuality isn’t usually something you’re truly socialized into. You certainly receive messaging from day one pushing you in one direction, but every gay person raised in a conservative Christian home can tell you that it didn’t change their sexuality. Most people have a very strong boundary around their sexuality because it might be one of the most solid things, they understand about themselves. I’ve known a handful of people who believed they were heterosexual for most of their lives who figured out they weren’t much later in life. The commonality between them is they had to unpack all of the messaging that shamed them from pursuing the relationships they wanted to pursue. Then they had to reach a point in their life where they’re comfortable swallowing the bigotry they may experience. It was a long journey and one that required a lot of self-reflection. It’s a path they had to discover for themselves. Unfortunately, this can take a lifetime and some of the men I’ve known who’ve reached the point where they fully include transgender women into their dating pools reached 50 before they stopped internalizing that shame.
There are men in my life that once rejected me because I was transgender who now very much include transgender women in their dating pool. For most of the men I’ve known who’ve felt this way, what usually changed is that they met a trans person who they were indeed attracted to, and surprisingly, they had a relationship with them. Once it ended, they understood that transgender women could indeed exist within their dating pool. However, most men will never get to that point. To me, it’s perfectly clear that the current status of our society influences how open or not open someone is to dating transgender women. I can say that as transgender visibility has increased, I’ve found dating to be much easier. More and more men are observing transgender women and realizing that they can indeed imagine themselves in relationships with them. However, for most of these men, figuring out how to get there will be complicated in a society that actively dehumanizes transgender women. When they research, they will be immediately fed hypersexualized images, and this will only feed the cycle of fetishism. You’ll notice that conservatives freak out when they see transgender women get representation beyond these types of depictions and they will often cite “grooming” or sexual predation if transgender women are ever presented the way cis women are. A society where this happens is not one where the statement of “attracted to women” will inherently include transgender women for most people. It feels more truthful to me, to argue that our society having such history is what makes it transphobic; but for me, it feels wrong to suggest that a person privately rejecting a transgender person is necessarily always going to be reflective of said culture. I know this is a sticking point for a lot of people, but to some degree, I think we have to accept that and move forward.
I’ve spoken about this topic many times and I know there are many other transgender people who disagree with me, and that’s fine. Everyone has their own experience and mine is that of a transgender woman who only dates men. I’ve been mistreated by too many of my intimate partners for me to buy into the idea that those people are less transphobic or racist than the people who simply rejected me because I was outside of their “preference”. I don’t need for people to find me universally attractive and I’m incredibly uncomfortable with adding “romantic/sexual access” to the list of human rights we should advocate for. As I said, it’s not like these romantic “preferences” don’t influence how we treat others outside of a romantic context, but that feels like a cultural practice that should be unpacked on its own. Dating is inherently an exclusionary practice and while I will not argue that rejection isn’t painful, I still struggle to define it as bigoted. I’ve observed that the people whose attractions are being policed pretty much never leave these conversations with an open mind. They leave feeling more assured by their preferences, but they understand that they probably shouldn’t share them out loud. While I agree that there’s bigotry in these unprompted confessions of how an entire group of people is universally unattractive, I’m not sure I feel the same about someone carrying that preference and keeping it to themselves. I don’t trust anyone who says they don’t have dating “preferences”. My experience with men who’ve said they do and said they don’t have been functionally the same. Perhaps subconsciously, people do indeed have preferences and I personally think that’s fine. We can sit and examine all of the various ways in which other people’s dating preferences are bigoted in some way and we will probably make some truthful points; but my point is: who cares? In my view, life is too short, and dating is too personal for us to devote so much time towards policing the attractions of others. Especially when we’re not even in those relationships. From my race to my size to my gender, groveling for affection from men who do not prefer me is degrading.
When I was younger, my ideal guy was reflective of my socialization. I didn’t grow up around many white folks, but I still idealized white men. This influenced a lot of my early ventures into romance. I started dating when I went away to a predominately white college so most of my partners have been cis white men. I can look at most of these relationships and say that to some degree, they were mismatched. Not necessarily because we were different races, but because we had different values, expectations and desires. I’ve spent too much of my romantic life trying to convince men with more privilege than me that I’m a viable romantic partner. Looking back, so many of these men were men I’d never date now, but it felt nice to feel desired and that’s all I needed back then. For years, I’ve mourned how some of these relationships ended, but I know they have no such emotions. When I get the occasional text from them, thanking me for how much I’ve helped them grow and understand themselves it’s always bittersweet. That’s all I am to the men who prefer me less. A fun story of self-exploration that fleshes out their own story line. A person to reference to a liberal white woman as evidence of them being open minded and not bigoted in their romantic histories. An inspiring, sexual creature that they never fully took seriously. These men will often contact me with facetious regret about how our relationship went, but each time I’ve been foolish enough to rekindle these relationships, they all end the same way. I am pushed aside for their preference. While that hurts, to some degree, I do it to myself. I’ve learned to become more discerning and to not feel bad about having my own standards; my own preferences. I know how I want to be treated, and realistically, while men of more privilege may have more freedom to do that, I’ve learned not to expect that they will ever see me as more than a good time or a charity case that feeds their ego.
As I’ve exposed myself to more diversity through my life, not only has my preference shifted, but it’s shifted to the point where I’m far less drawn to white men as a group. Perhaps it’s because of how many white men I’ve attempted to date who’ve left me for white women; or just the pain and othering of not exactly being their preference, but either way my preference has shifted. It’s possible that a white cis man could be aware enough and educated enough to treat me well, but it’s a bit too optimistic for me to assume that’s the average white cis man. As I’ve gotten older, it’s been more important for me to date someone with a similar world view, similar morals and similar experience with life being unkind to them. I have a hard time wanting to date someone who’s never struggled or had to fight the way I’ve fought through life. I’ve learned that teaching my partners about my own oppression isn’t something I want to do because if I have to, chances are, they’re unaware of the ways that oppression materializes in our relationship. My primary partner is Mexican and Palestinian. He has brown skin, ethnic features and, like me, knows what it feels like as a person of color in a society with a white supremacist history. This has become my preference. On top of it all, he is indifferent to me being transgender and doesn’t treat me like I’m a complicated moral question that sabotages his image. He’s far from ashamed of being seen with me. In fact, he loves hitting the town with me and the number of compliments we get from others. He’s proud to be seen with me. My previous experiences with men are surprising to him because it’s so far from how he’d ever treat me. I wouldn’t have said he was my “preference” in the early days of developing my own attractions, but I’m glad that the many ways my preferences have shifted have led me to what is the most loving relationship I’ve ever been in. I look forward to the time when transgender women aren’t an “acquired taste”, but for now, I’m going to give my attention and time to people who’ve read the menu ahead of time and already know what they’re ordering.
Dating is hard for everyone, but it’s been made easier with online dating. Websites like OKCupid, Tinder and Bumble are all great, free apps that allow singles to connect locally, and even internationally with each other. With technology, we’re no longer limited to the people in our communities, and for better or worse, online dating has changed romance forever. However, for transgender people, dating on or offline can still be quite complex. While there are several websites dedicated to transgender dating, these websites are not without their issues. These issues lead many transgender people to use dating apps that aren’t explicitly geared towards trans folks and those who date them.
In recent years, websites like OKCupid and Tinder have become more inclusive of transgender people by allowing users to self-identify and determine how they’re listed on dating apps. On OKCupid, you can list yourself as transgender and other members can select if they’d like to see transgender folks in their suggested matches. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s further along than other free websites like Plenty of Fish, which regularly bans its transgender users. Tinder allows for you to list your gender, but it’s more of a badge on your profile than a way of filtering matches. The website has a questionable history when it comes to removing the profiles of transgender women. I myself am currently banned on Tinder after having several of my profiles reported by men who matched with me, and were upset that they matched with a transgender woman. People who do not want to see transgender people in their suggested matches may ask themselves why transgender users aren’t using websites dedicated to them. Wouldn’t that be more productive? It may surprise you to hear that, at least for me, I’ve had more success with online dating on websites like Okcupid and Tinder than with sites dedicated to transgender dating, like TSDating. I figured that I would write about why that is; and why you’re probably seeing more transgender folks in your suggested matches.
I feel like it would be inappropriate for me not to acknowledge that I am a transgender woman who exclusively dates men and this very much informs my general perspective with dating. Dating predominately cis men means that there are certain dynamics at play that make dating complex. Dating in a culture that is actively antagonistic towards you can be quite daunting. I have defaulted to online dating through most of my romantic life because it’s usually safer for me and it allows me to explain everything about myself before getting too involved. As a trans woman who is often read as cis, I’m frequently in uncomfortable situations where men express attraction to me without knowing that I’m transgender. Those situations can be dangerous so most of the men I’ve dating in my life were men I met online. It’s worth noting that transgender dating apps almost exclusively cater to cis men and transgender women and not transgender men or non binary individuals.
While I’m experienced with using dating apps, it took me a while to understand the economics of them. Most of the users on dating apps are men who want to find women for romance or, more commonly, a casual sexual connection. While these apps are free, they all have membership options that allow you to see who’s liked you so that you can connect with them faster. This is particularly appealing to people who get very few matches and would like to see exactly who first expressed interest in them by swiping right on their profile. I didn’t understand for quite some time that men tend not to get very many matches on these websites. Most men I’ve spoken to get no more than 10 matches a week on apps like Tinder; and that’s a good week. In contrast, even as a transgender woman, I get hundreds of matches on these websites every few days. This disparity frustrates men to the point where many of them start mindlessly swiping right on every profile just hoping that they’d get a match. Even more frustrating is that many of the “women” on these dating apps are scammers using stolen photos. While everyone can buy an “A-list” or “Gold” membership, the primary consumers of these subscriptions will be frustrated men who just want the app to work as its intended, but these apps are often constructed to be just frustrating enough to purchase a subscription. That’s how these “free” dating apps make their money. Most online dating apps are geared towards satisfying the needs and desires of men and that takes on a very particular nuance when it comes to transgender dating apps.
When you start a new Tinder account, you’re greeted with a collage of people of various different genders and racial backgrounds smiling on their profiles. Nothing is overtly sexual and if you’ve ever tried to upload a bikini picture to Tinder, you know that even when you try to be a little cheeky, they tend to promptly shut that down. On the flipside, for years when you visited TSDating.com, you were greeted with a photo of a blonde trans woman, kneeling down, holding a rope with her legs spread revealing her erect penis. In recent years, they’ve cropped that image, but you still see the nature of the website from the newly created profiles that populate their front page. One headline reads “Submissive Bimbo Girly Girl”; another very humorously says “make me your toy…I like that”. As I write this post, the only men’s profile I see on the top of the page has the headline “I’m looking for fun…not love”. If you were a single transgender woman looking for romance, this certainly wasn’t the website for that, and you can probably make the same argument for Tinder. However, the stark difference in these websites shows the main problem I, and many transgender folks have had with transgender dating websites. By in large, they exist to cater to men who fetishize transgender women and are only seeking a sexual connection with them. These are men we commonly refer to as “chasers”.
Chasers come hand in hand with transgender specific dating apps because that’s usually the only kind of person who wants to be on a transgender specific dating app. I have a particular definition of “chaser”, but generally, chasers are people who fetishize transgender women and struggle to see them beyond that fetish. These men get off on the taboo nature of the relationship; and it’s society’s discomfort with transgender women that excites them. It’s positioned in the mind the way other taboos often are. It’s something they secretly desire and part of what excites them about it is that no one knows, and can ever find out. Most of these men are already in relationships and they enjoy sneaking around behind their partner’s back and sleeping with someone so taboo. These men usually never want to be seen with you, and they don’t want anyone to ever know that they have a history with you. I wouldn’t describe every man who’s curious about transgender women as a “chaser”, but generally when men are “curious” about transgender women, they are seeking a very specific experience with a very particular kind of transgender woman. They’re trying to use your body to discover something about themselves. The vast majority of these men are only looking for transgender women with functional penises that they eagerly use. Transgender woman using these websites, can expect most of the messages they receive to be from men trying to figure out if they’re that girl who can give them that experience. Most of these men only care about having that experience and couldn’t care who you are beyond what they want you to do for them sexually. They’re too busy holding their dicks in their other hand to even ask your name.
Transgender women are heavily fetishized, and fetishism has a way of stripping you entirely of your personhood and projecting a narrative onto you that is purely for the satisfaction of the person fetishizing you. It can be an incredibly alienating thing to experience and it is overwhelmingly present in online spaces that cater to men who fantasize about having sex with trans women. As a black transgender woman, I have all sorts of alienating narratives projected onto me on these websites. I joined a transgender dating app as I was writing this story and described myself as I do on every dating app I join. Most of the men on transgender dating apps are seeking a “top”, meaning they are looking for a transgender woman who would like to penetrate them. Like most transgender women, I have fairly severe bottom dysphoria so I feel the need to make that clear in my profile on transgender dating sites. And yet, this never seems to stop these men. One of the first messages, I got on this new profile was a from a man said that he’d love to “suck my BBC”. Not to overshare, but no such “BBC” exists on me, but these men can usually only comprehend transgender women as porn stereotypes and black transgender women are rarely presented as feminine, submissive and as bottoms. When these men see me, they see a dominant, domineering black shemale who wants to ruin their (usually white) asshole. It doesn’t matter that I couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to perform that role for them, it’s what they want and that’s what excites them. The fantasy of who I am. The reality of who I am turns them off. Taking me on a date would be too much trouble for what they’re really looking for. They don’t want to speak to me or understand me as a person, they want to fulfill their fantasy. When I felt limited to these websites, it gave me the impression that these men were the only men who would ever be interested in me. It made me feel bitter and disillusioned to feel like the only thing men ever wanted from me was the exact definition of what made me feel disconnected from my body.
For most men, their attraction to trans women is an offshoot of their attraction to cis women. Society has more than enough examples of cis men dating cis women, but there are very few examples of them dating trans women. This makes it so that men often struggle to understand themselves and their interest in transgender women. Most of these men identify as heterosexual, and for that reason they don’t want to carry the burden of possibly being seen as queer. This is the driving force behind why many of these men want to hide their relationships with transgender women and it takes a very long time for these men to unpack these anxieties. Unfortunately, because of where we are in society, some men have to hurt a few trans women before they realize they exist beyond their private sexual curiosities. My observation is that many of these men truly struggle to even imagine that transgender women do more than just be transgender and seek male validation from private sexual encounters. At least that’s the impression I get from most of these men on transgender dating apps.
Part of what inspired this post was a man asking me “which website has the best transgenders”. I told him that by the nature of it being a transgender specific dating app, most of the trans women he meets are going to be escorts attempting to capitalize on his fetish and most of the men are probably going to be men I’d describe as “chasers”. That will always be the case when the only reason a website exists is to sell transgender women to men because they are transgender. It frustrates me that many cis people assume that everything a transgender person does somehow relates to their transness. We go to transgender stores, drink transgender coffee, work on our transgender work and live in our transgender homes. For many of these men, they have a hard time believing that we go to the places they go or do some of the things they do. I’ve never been a person who felt the need to isolate myself from the rest of society because of who I am. If someone asked me where they could find me, the individual, I’d say a goth club or maybe a place with live jazz during a weekday. Maybe a karaoke bar or thumbing through vinyl at Amoeba. Maybe a comedy club or an open mic. Those are places that I regularly exist in because I am a person with interests who socializes around those interests like most people do. While I’ve done a lot of online dating, most of my current partners are men I’ve met out and about. I’m a bit of a socialite and there are men in the various communities I’m part of who pursue me loudly, openly and without shame. In all reality, those men are far preferable to the men who troll transgender dating apps trying to find someone to fulfill their fetish. The ultimate disconnect with transgender dating apps is that most transgender women do not want for someone to pursue them because they are transgender. They simply want to date people who are open to them.
While Tinder and OKcupid aren’t perfect, I have more success on those websites than I do websites like TSDating. I’ve found that if I’m looking for a man who wants to take me out, show me a good time and connect with me in a more than just sexual way, OKCupid is probably where I’d go over TSDating. When I first moved to LA, I went on a ton of dates and each of these men knew I was transgender and were more than comfortable taking me on a date. It would be unreasonable for me to expect to find those men on TSDating. Frankly, men who aren’t interested in fetishizing transgender women tend to feel uncomfortable on those websites. However, because those men are generally also attracted to cis women, they likely already use “normal” dating apps like OKCupid. So if they see a transgender woman in their feed, they’re usually open to connecting with them. Appearing next to cis women helps men understand that trans women are not a specialized fetish, existing on a far corner of the internet. We are individuals, not a fantastic, hyper fetishized ideal. I respect that some people dislike seeing people outside of their preferences in their suggested matches, but the great thing about most of these apps is you can swipe left on people you don’t want to connect with and on most apps, this will prevent them from contacting you. I’d be dishonest if I said the occasional chaser still didn’t appear in my OKCupid DMs, but it’s incredibly uncommon. I cannot say the same for transgender dating apps where those messages clog my inbox.
Reality TV has always been mindless fun for me. From Blind Date, to Rock of Love, to The Bachelor, I remember some of my earliest ideas of relationships, unfortunately, came from reality television. Imagine my heartbreak when I’d learn that most of these shows weren’t reality at all, but heavily edited shows where good-looking actors would pantomime tableaus of idealized or salacious relationships. I fell out of love with Reality TV for years, but more recently became obsessed with a show, which is slightly more based in reality, called 90 Day Fiancé. A particular couple on the most recent season of the spin off, Before the 90 Days, has me thinking about some of my very real experiences with dating as a former sex worker.
The story of Mike and Ximena starts just like most of the couples on the show. 34-year-old Mike met 24-year-old Ximena on a dating app by changing his location from New York City to Colombia. The couple dated virtually for over a year before he decided to finally visit her in her hometown of Pereira, Colombia. When they first met, things seemed to go well. Mike had been supporting her, her two children from a previous relationship, and her family in the small home they shared for much of their relationship. Ximena’s father is protective of her, but it’s clear that Mike is a trade up from her previous spouse who was a hitman. In the situation she’s in, it’s clear that Mike can provide Ximena with much-needed stability.
When we first meet Mike, he’s presented to us as a bumbling fool with extremely limited relationship experience. He lives in New York City taking care of his father and grandfather and it’s clear that he’s ready to move beyond this phase and settle down with a wife and children. In Ximena, he finds an instant family; so, when her father gives his approval for their marriage, we’re excited to see things trending in a positive direction. However, cracks start to form in the relationship when Ximena notices habits that she isn’t too fond of. Namely his cleanliness and how frequently he passes gas in front of and sometimes even on top of her. Mike begs Ximena several times for sex and while she doesn’t’ seem enthusiastic about it, she eventually relents, and they have sex a few times on his visit. The first visit ends on a positive, yet unclear note. When he returns to New York City, Mike hears less and less from Ximena and the passion between them seems to have waned. When he returns, she seems less interested in being around him; even telling him to stop following her around, at some point. This confuses Mike, and as the audience, we become frustrated with the fact that Ximena seems to have taken his money but didn’t want to be around him. She becomes, like many other cast members before her, simply a gold digger looking to use him for a green card. Quite abnormally, he takes her shopping for a wedding dress. While she enjoys trying on the dresses, she says that the money he wants to spend on the wedding should instead be spent on her $5,000 breast implants. Mike refuses and starts to feel used, and as the audience, we feel bad for him because he was presented as a decent, innocent guy who was naively swindled by his international bride. But this wasn’t exactly the case.
When Mike and Ximena break up for the first time, we discover a truth about their relationship. For many audience members, this revelation would completely shift the narrative around the relationship. Before the breakup, we heard that Ximena stopped working when they became official, but we don’t really know what her job was. Tempers flare when Ximena clearly communicates that she wants absolutely nothing to do with him and that she’d like for him to leave her home. This is when Mike’s mask really starts slipping. He tells her that she’s making the biggest mistake in her life. He could have helped her learn English, move to America, have a better life for her children, etc., but she’s walking away from it all. He threatens to take away everything he’s ever given her, including the things he’s purchased for her children. Ximena does not seem phased by these threats at all, so he tries to twist the knife deeper by outing her on the show as a cam girl and saying to her “so are you going to go back to that adult modeling job?”. This was, of course constructed to upset and hurt Ximena, but she has absolutely no shame in her game and responds back with “That’s how you met me. What’s wrong with that?”.
See, Mike didn’t meet Ximena on a dating site like he had said. He met her on a cam girl website where he was her top doner. When they decided to become serious, he told her that the condition of him paying for all her things was that she stopped camming and remained exclusive to him. For me, this completely recontextualized their entire relationship. It explains why she was hesitant to have sex with him; he believed he was entitled to it because he was paying her rent. It explains why she expected him to pay for her breast implants; he told her to stop working, so she could not pay for them herself. It explains why she was so willing to maintain the fantasy of a person who wanted marriage, when, she didn’t. On the recent tell-all, she was bombarded with insults from other cast members; some of whom have relationships worse than hers. It’s clear to me that many people do not understand their dynamic, nor the complexities of being a cam girl so I figured I’d give a bit of insight into what can frequently be a very confusing world.
I’ll preface everything I’m saying with the acknowledgement that I only did sex work for a very short period; 3 months. I didn’t last very long because the job was far more than I could handle. It really taught me just how much sex work was work. Contrary to what a lot of people would like to believe, camming is not easy, and it is not as simple as sitting in front of a camera, looking cute and getting paid. When you’re a cam girl, your job is about 20% looking good and I’d say 80% maintaining relationships with members of your audience. For many cam girls that often means having to really engage in these deep parasocial relationships with men who need to feel as though they are truly in a relationship with you. The audience of cam girl sites have very short attention spans so being a cam girl also means constantly having to change your appearance or aesthetic to either keep your current audience engaged or to find a newer one. In that way, your body can sometimes feel like it’s not exactly yours. A lot of girls will go as far as to getting plastic surgery to change their image and to have a new gimmick for their customers. The goal for most cam girls is to find a few dedicated clients they can regularly do private shows with, and those clients often pay them enough that they no longer have to do public facing shows on websites like Chaturbate. Those types of clients are also more appealing because these days, there are websites that automatically record and repost public cam shows, which tend to satisfy the casual browser who isn’t looking for the interaction some other clients seem to need. Those clients are frequently very lonely men who want to feel like the girl they’re paying has some sort of true investment in them. You learn quickly that some of these guys just want someone to talk to, and I remember some of my private shows felt more like therapy sessions than actual cam girl encounters. I didn’t last long because I couldn’t maintain the façade of a woman trying to date these men and frankly everything, they wanted from me, made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and camming drastically altered my sexuality to the point where I didn’t enjoy what I once enjoyed sexually. However, the girls that accelerate at this job are great at compartmentalizing and I believe what we saw on this season of Before the 90 days was someone no longer being able to do that and trying to “fire” her client.
Clients like Mike are fascinating in a way because they end up in this position because they want to believe that they aren’t like the other men in the audience. They’ve convinced themselves that somehow the girl on the other side of the computer doesn’t want their money, but their companionship. While there are plenty of cam girls who enjoy exhibitionism, you usually don’t end up working as a cam girl just because you enjoy being looked at. Frankly, there are easier jobs that are far more enjoyable if that’s your desire. I started camming at 19 because I was desperate. A man approached me at a party and offered me the job. I meditated on it for a while before deciding that it was the easiest way for me to make money without leaving my dorm. I would still be able to keep up with my studies and I could finally afford books for school. My family stopped supporting me after I came out to them as transgender, and I needed money; I was desperate. Not every cam girl is like that, but that’s not all too uncommon. Often, these men are also desperate, but they have what these girls usually want: money. This places them in a position of power and for some men, that’s why cam girls appeal to them. They enjoy feeling needed and desired and most men are socialized to believe that providing financially for a woman makes them more masculine. When you mix all of that together and add the numerous intimate conversations they have over an extended period, these men can very quickly feel like they are in an actual relationship. And of course, this is the goal of most cam girls. With little exception, cam girls cannot just sit and demand money without being seen as money hungry and these men, paradoxically, don’t want to feel as though they are being used for their money. It’s in a cam girl’s best interest to maintain ongoing relationships with their clients that feel like an actual romantic relationship. These men are more likely to become personally invested when they get the impression that they are needed and desired by their favorite cam girl. Mike wanted Ximena to become exclusive to him because he felt emasculated by other men paying to see “his woman.” Partners of sex workers usually must accept that their partners are working and what they do isn’t connected to their sexuality in a way that impacts their personal relationships. As I said, sex workers usually compartmentalize in this way, but that’s hard for most people to understand.
I understand how this is all seen as very manipulative because, in a way, it is. However, cam girls provide a service to men who tend to struggle finding relationships that many would consider to be “normal”. You see in the way Mike approaches Ximena that he believed his money would buy intimacy and closeness. He very uncritically accepts the responsibility of being a father, but then expresses callousness at the idea of tossing Ximena’s children on the street if she doesn’t comply. That isn’t the mindset of someone who wants to form a deep, meaningful, loving relationship where he knows and understands his partner. These are the actions of a man who simply wants to exchange his money for intimacy, not truly build it. On top of that, the unfortunate reality is that cam girls very rarely show you the reality of who they are because they are selling a fantasy to their audience. I failed as a cam girl because I couldn’t simply come on camera, be myself and do what I wanted to do and nothing else. That’s boring to these men, and I made very little money doing what I did, which of course made me feel very exploited and terrible about myself. Being a cam girl often means taking on a character and this character just happens to be complimentary to whichever client is willing to pay consistently and the most. So, while these men certainly feel like they’re making a connection, they aren’t really. It’s clear that Mike has a very hard time comprehending this and most people do, but at the end of the day, Ximena didn’t join a cam site to find a boyfriend, she joined it to make money. Assuming otherwise is naive.
Mike using Ximena’s sex work history against her is a clear sign that he doesn’t truly accept her as a sex worker and it’s obvious that he would have preferred for that to have remained a secret because he was ashamed of how they met. Mike demonstrates the very bizarre way that many men who pursue sex workers romantically live within this dichotomy where on one hand, they appreciate and utilize sex work, but truly look down on those who do it. Mike couldn’t believe It when Ximena seemed completely comfortable going back to sex work and frankly, I see her desire to have breast implants as a sign that she may have already been planning to do so. From what I can tell, Ximena enjoys doing sex work and its sex work that has helped her provide for her family and children for so long. It’s what she knows and she’s comfortable doing it. A lot of men, like Mike pursue sex workers and international relationships because they enjoy being in relationships with women whom they assume will need them because of how financially destitute they are. It’s clear to me that Mike struggled to process that someone like Ximena could have the audacity to reject him, which is why when she tried to break up with him, he listed off all the things he could do for her financially and not his loving feelings for her.
According to the Tell-All show, Mike and Ximena haven’t broken up and he’s still financially providing for her and her family. You can tell watching how Mike shrinks into his seat during the confrontation on the tell-all show that he doesn’t exactly appreciate people criticizing their relationship. He wants to be with Ximena despite the many times she’s said to him that she doesn’t love him; even on that very tell-all show. While he struggles to say it out loud, he knows to some degree that their relationship is transactional and that the only way it will continue is if he continues to financially provide for her. This seems like a dysfunctional relationship to most of us, but for him, it’s the closest he’s ever been to being in a “real” relationship and he’s terrified of losing it. Like a lot of people on the show, Mike is willing to stay in a relationship that isn’t great because he probably believes it’s the last time in his life, he’ll be able to be in a similar relationship. Ximena isn’t going to turn down a good thing and she couldn’t have been clearer about her disinterest in him. At this point, it’d be hard to argue that she’s been dishonest.
To be clear, I don’t want this post to sound like a huge defense of Ximena because she certainly made a lot of mistakes in this relationship; but their relationship demonstrated what occurs in relationships where one partner is a sex worker, and the other doesn’t quite accept it. Mike’s façade fell when he realized Ximena was willing to walk away from him and that she wasn’t desperate or destitute in the way he imagined. When he said her children could have been on the street, she simply laughed and said that was never going to happen. Mike struggled to understand that wasn’t her situation. It was hard to watch so many people yell at Ximena for not falling in line because Mike paid for her rent for over a year. My perception is that Ximena might have been willing to try to truly fall in love with Mike, but his habits and his pushiness turned her off and annoyed her. The most realistic thing said between them was that “love” is a very big word. She couldn’t say she loved someone she barely spent physical time with. That’s a reasonable thing to say, but other cast members with completely unreasonable relationships, of course, saw it as reasonable.
Personally, I respect that many people would not want to date a sex worker, but I think it’s silly to start a relationship with one, offer to pay them enough money that they no longer need to work and then shame them for needing your money and taking it when offered. We now know that Ximena has moved on from Mike and is engaged to another man, but I don’t think Mike will be making any such plans any time soon.
I started a YouTube channel in 2005, which means I’ve been a YouTuber for most of my life. Growing up, I felt very isolated in my community. I was one of the only Black kids and one of the only openly queer ones. This made me feel very alone, so I turned to YouTube to vent about my frustrations at school. My classmates often considered me to be “one of the good ones” because I didn’t act how they assumed all Black people did. I remember going out of my way to distance myself from all of the negative images they associated with blackness because it felt good to be accepted in a situation where I was one of the few. They’d say stuff to me like “you’re so well-spoken” with a subtext that made it clear they weren’t expecting me to be. It would take me years to unpack that specific type of anti-Blackness; but long story short, it encouraged a certain degree of “respectability” that to this day is still a central part of how I move through the world. No matter how much unpacking you do, sometimes old habits die hard.
Ten years later, in 2015, my YouTube channel went from being an emotional outlet to a very unexpected career. After graduating from Animation college, I realized Animation wasn’t what I wanted to do so I turned back to blogging and started using what I learned in school to make more elevated YouTube videos. When I graduated college, my goal in life was to be “stealth.” I wanted my transness not to be at the forefront of my life, and simply be known as I am now. I was in a relationship with a man with a very conservative family and living deep in a very conservative part of Orange County. Stealth was, in many ways, safety for me at the time, but as I pursued YouTube as a career, I had to accept that stealth probably wasn’t going to be a possibility for me anymore. My channel was small, but I had a dedicated following. One day a Youtuber I admired whispered to me that I could be a “mainstream” transgender YouTuber if that’s what I really wanted. I wasn’t sure If it was, since being “mainstream” has never exactly been a focus of mine. However, when I sat with it for a while, I realized how desperately I needed representation when I felt isolated in my small town. Representation can be so powerful and there weren’t, and still aren’t, many well-known black transgender YouTubers. I realized that I had not just the foundation, but also the privilege to be able to put myself out there to help others and so I started making more elevated content about transgender issues. However, being stealth meant that transphobia was something I often spoke about in past tense. Those conversations were important to me, but especially living in a predominately white area during the beginning of Black Lives Matter protests across the country, race quickly became a more important topic for me. So, I started creating more content about racism.
Pop Feminism was at an all-time high in the mid 2010s’ and I had a job at Everyday Feminism creating YouTube content that educated folks about the various things I embodied. This would get the attention of the “Anti-SJW” crowd, who would make a career out of responding to my content. Harassment has always been a complicated topic for me, as a person who started a YouTube channel as a suicidal teen. I’ve never known a time on the internet where I wasn’t mercilessly attacked for who I was and when you have been dealing with that for most of your life, it becomes easy for you to build thick skin around even some of the shittiest behavior. I don’t conflate criticism with harassment because it’s part of posting things online. However, what I started to recognize was that these Anti-SJWs were almost never criticizing arguments I actually made as much as they were criticizing the angry, Black woman avatar they made me out to be. Quite frequently, they would argue I was advocating for the opposite of the kind of society I was advocating for.
Being black and transgender has meant that my life has not been an easy one. I have spent most of it fighting to simply function and provide for myself and that’s hard in a society that not only doesn’t understand you but seems averse to you. I’d like to think that the content I create is about encouraging a more understanding and empathetic society where the experiences I’ve had because of who I am are less common. Because of what I’ve experienced, I don’t believe in supremacy of any kind, and I certainly don’t believe that justice would be the marginalized wielding the same power as the privileged to oppress them in an equivalent way. I’d like to exist in a society where our differences are celebrated instead of being used to justify oppression and mistreatment. People who were actively listening to how I voiced my world view, understood this to be my position, but Anti-SJWs would quite frequently twist my advocacy against white supremacy into an anti-white sentiment.
The most frustrating thing that would happen back then was that these Anti-SJW creators would take something I said, edit around it and make it sound like I was saying something terrible and indefensible. For example, I once made a research-based video about how the Irish were treated in America. The gist of what I said was that while the Irish were treated poorly, they were not under chattel slavery the way Black slaves in America were. I was incredibly careful in my wording because regardless of context, I see the act of owning and exploiting a human being as incredibly immoral, and I’ve always made that clear. One blogger took that video and twisted it into the message that I thought slavery was peachy-keen as long as the slaves were white. To this day, this video is one of their top videos. It didn’t matter that I never said that and would never say that; there was an audience thirsty for content attacking feminists and women of color. Then other bloggers would repeat the same exact misrepresentations of my ideas and the lie would get bigger and bigger and bigger. My channel was small back then so these creators, who were almost always white cis men, were able to establish and define my arguments to their much larger audiences, which of course meant that my channel would be overrun with comments demanding that I answer for my supposed anti-white racism. Most annoying of all, some of these creators wanted me to go onto their channels to have a live debate with them to defend the arguments I never made.
Debate is an interesting subject for me. I’ve always valued conversation over it; at least how I’ve seen it online. I’m an atheist, and I was very much part of the online atheist community in the 2010s’ during a time where debate dominated atheist conversation online. No one is more of an obnoxious debate bro than a self-proclaimed “militant atheist” in the 2010s’, I promise you. I listened to The Atheist Experience every week. I’d tune in to hear Matt Dillahunty and his co-hosts debate with theists about religion and I got a lot from those conversations because they were so focused on the ideas being shared, less so who was sharing them. I could be misremembering, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember there being much of a cult of personality around Matt, Tracie, Russell, or Jeff. They were normal people who dedicated (and are still dedicating) their weekends to a public access show where they discuss and debate ideas. I didn’t know very much about their lives or really who they were beyond the show and while I appreciated their argumentation, I did not adore them as these god-like figures. I was a fan of the show, not necessarily them. These conversations being had over the phone meant that aside from a few repeat callers, I didn’t really care about whoever was on the other side of the line. The format meant that the ideas were central to the conversation, and no one was really trying to enrich themselves financially from them. They had these conversations because they cared about advocating for Atheism, and most of all advocating for a separation of church and state.
Then something changed. I’m not exactly sure when, but these conversations slowly became about winning or “pwning” as we called it back then. Other figures emerged and capitalized on shifting social media trends and suddenly we had these online creators with fan bases and curated images. Most of these creators were white men who would have conversations with random Christians on live streams, similarly to The Atheist Experience, but with entertainment being the focus. What this meant was, at a certain point, people were tuning in less-so to hear arguments against theism, and more-so to listen to these Atheists absolutely obliterate their opponents with “facts and logic.” There was a certain degree of bravado in all these conversations, and they would often become repetitive and masturbatory. These figures would sit on a stream with a self-satisfied smirk on their faces and they’d argue against what was frequently, low hanging fruit. The conversations became repetitive and so many of these channels would branch out and quite a few of them became prominent Anti-SJW channels. Some of the very ones that made misrepresenting me their job.
For years, it seemed like I was their favorite person to pick on. I ignored most of it, but it still got to me that they were able to, so easily establish me as having ideas I simply did not have. I have very few pet peeves, but a big one is a confident belief in something untrue about me. I don’t really take issue with someone criticizing my actual ideas or positions, but so often, I felt like I was forced to address and clarify arguments I never made. For years, people called me a “Black Supremacist” because I once made a joke on twitter to a white nationalist about his fear of mixed-race children. People like Phil DeFranco would cover the story and spread this misrepresentation to, quite literally, millions of people who confidently believed I not only hated white people, but thought I was biologically superior to them. No one criticized the white nationalist sending me hate, just my response. There’s a side of the internet who believes that I think a man looking at me for too long is “rape” because I made a video about rape culture where I described a man stalking me on my way home and trying to invite himself into my apartment. Quite frequently, I found myself derailing the conversations I wanted to have to clarify that I didn’t hate white people or cis people or men. I couldn’t actually just talk about what I wanted to talk about, I had to obsessively worry about how anything I could say could be easily taken out of context and this became quite overwhelming. Perhaps that was the point.
I started to think maybe it was my approach. Back then, most of my videos were scripted and under 10 minutes. Sometimes when you’re trying to be concise, but comprehensive, you can sound declarative. I figured that maybe that’s why people thought I was such a dogmatic person. So, I invested in a teleprompter and started speaking more freely and less stoically. I wanted to be more personable and welcoming. I thought that would make it less likely that people would misrepresent me. In so many ways, that worked, and my channel grew quite a bit. However, I’d leave my relationship in 2017 and embark on a new journey to the city where I would try hard to find the person I lost in that relationship.
Now I was 27 years old living in the city for the first time in my life. I was overwhelmed, but this felt like the right path for me. I was finally in a more diverse area with the sorts of people I wanted to connect with and in many ways, I changed pretty drastically as a person. With that being the case, I felt like I needed to take a break from YouTube, so I didn’t upload a new video for an entire year. During that time, I really tried to reexamine what I was doing on YouTube and if I’m being honest, I became frustrated with the fact that I could devote so much time to researching and scripting videos, just to have some white man wave his hand over it, misrepresent it, and establish to the world what I “actually meant.” This pattern had a way of causing me to doubt myself to the point where I really started to question if my videos were as bad as people seemed to make them out to be. To this day, I watch some of these videos back and it’s crazy how concise, polite, calm, and non-confrontational they actually were in retrospect. I didn’t want to bend to the pressure to stop creating content, but I had to examine what would be healthy and stable for me. So, I figured if they couldn’t trust me to faithfully narrate history, maybe they’d trust me to faithfully narrate my own life. So, my work became more personal and less political. For the most part, this worked, and my channel grew pretty dramatically, but YouTube had changed quite a bit since I was gone.
In my absence, several left leaning creators had risen to prominence and as I was figuring out what I wanted to do when I returned to YouTube, their content was certainly inspiring to me. It seemed like being an Anti-SJW slowly went out of vogue, and left leaning content became more polished and entertaining. While I admired this content, it also stood out to me that many of these creators were essentially saying the same things I had said but being received in a vastly different way. All of these creators were white and had, at least on paper, more radical politics than I. They certainly received criticism, but I noticed how frequently that criticism was actually engaged in their ideas, not usually misrepresentations of them. There were certainly grifters who did that, but even when being criticized, they were often complimented. While I loved these creators, I felt compelled to make a video called “Why Is LeftTube So White,” and in that video I expressed my frustration for how differently our content was received. To be fair, my content was certainly different than theirs. What was technologically advanced in 2015, was certainly outdated in 2018. I have always been more experimental and lo-fi than these creators and I was still figuring out what I wanted to do. So, this wasn’t a conversation about how I wanted more subscribers or how I was personally disappointed in my own success. It was about how differently our content was received, even by the same exact people who used to misrepresent my work. It was bizarre seeing people who used to send their audiences to dogpile me applaud a white person saying the same things I said, but with bisexual lighting. In my video, I actually broke into tears because I was processing the very real impact this had on my mental health. I had just spent months researching for a video essay I was creating about the rebranding of white nationalism and those caustic ideas were still in my head. It made me upset that I couldn’t simply state that fascism was dangerous to me as a Black person and have people believe that to be true. It seemed like the only way I’d be heard is if I once again, changed my content and theatrically spoke about how fascism scared me. I resented the idea that I’d have to do that to be heard and in the back of my mind, I knew that still wouldn’t work.
Ironically, the fans of these creators would come to the comment section of that video and say that I was simply jealous of the success of these white creators. They overlooked what was said and assumed that my video was an attack against them. Many of them didn’t even actually listen to the video in full until the creators I spoke about asked their audiences to hear what I was saying. I resented the idea that I could, once again, devote all this time to clearly communicating my thoughts, but the only way they’d listen is if my work was first presented to them by a white person. It felt like whether it was misrepresenting me or hearing me out, viewers couldn’t process my work unless a white person framed it for them and that was extremely hard for me to handle. I could not believe that despite very clearly naming and stating my issues, that people still believed what I was complaining about was clout. What confused me about that accusation was I very much struggle with the idea that “clout” should be the goal of political conversations online. This feeling has made the phenomenon of the “leftist streamer” quite confusing to me.
At 31, I’m embarrassed to acknowledge that I finally identify with my parents who used to struggle with how rapidly technology changes. Streaming is something that feels so above my head and while I’ve tried to understand it for my own work, I still struggle with understanding the culture around it. Maybe it’s my camgirl past but staring at a person for hours on end or having them drone on in the background doesn’t really appeal to me. I enjoy streams when they’re structured, but I don’t really understand the parasocial nature of streaming culture. Perhaps because of this, I’ve been baffled by the trend of the so-called “dirtbag leftist” who doesn’t feel very functionally different than the Anti-SJW crowd that used to harass me. In fact, to my understanding, that’s their target audience.
Speaking of being young and hip, my first impression of the dirtbag left was that it’s an attempt to make all of this boring political stuff more entertaining and edgy. They say the naughty words I avoided during my pop feminist days and apparently these tactics appeal to people who were caught up in the so-called “alt right pipeline.” Readers might be shocked to hear this, but I am not a white person so I’ve often struggled to understand how a white kid could grow up and just accidently trip, do a racism and start advocating for an ethnostate, so this content has never really appealed to me, personally. That said, I was constantly told that their work was far more effective, and far more leftist than mine. As a person who obviously wants what I create to be helpful to others, I overlooked my initial reservations and tried to understand the tactics behind their approach. However, I predominately saw them through the lens of Twitter where I’d see them engage in racism, sexism, and transphobia in an apparent pursuit of leftist principles. I was told repeatedly that whatever I interpreted as bias was simply tactical. When I’d say this didn’t seem very left leaning, their audiences with brow beat me with a very Jordan Peterson-esc demand that I watch their 10 hour long live stream to understand the full context of why they were saying what they said. As a person who has been used to being misrepresented, I guess I understood that request to some degree; but time and time again, this brand of right wing appealing “leftist” content was not only unwelcoming to me, but incredibly antagonistic towards all of the discussions I had about race and gender. It seemed like being part of the “dirt bag left” was being dismissive of these issues and it was bizarre for me to observe that these particular people were being celebrated as further left than I was. It’s strange to me how their ideas can parallel conservatives, yet somehow be further left than me. This confused me quite a bit, but my altercation with Vaush, the most prominent “dirt bag leftist,” would help me understand exactly why I should have gone with my gut and ignored this altogether, instead of trying to understand the tactics.
When it came to Vaush and others like him, I had largely dismissed them as being “not for me.” If they help little racist white kids come to the left, I think that’s probably a good thing. However, Vaush would often trend on Twitter each time he’d get into some spat or say something dumb. Recently, he made a tweet where he said that JK Rowling could have remained a beloved author, but instead decided to derail her career to be transphobic. I agreed with that part. He then followed that tweet up with an “ironic” joke about how women should be more silent; not TERFs, not JK Rowling specifically, women. This tweet got a lot of attention; including from JK Rowling herself, who would go on to compare his tweet to the domestic violence she experienced from previous partners. Now, TERF discourse is mind numbingly cyclical, and entertaining it as reasonable, probably isn’t a good idea; but one thing I’ve observed from many “gender critical” cis women is they often seem to be functioning from a place of very real trauma. Trauma they have because of how men have abused or mistreated them. When I came back to YouTube, I decided to speak openly about my experience as a rape survivor. I had spoken around that topic on my channel for years, and I wanted to start having conversations about trauma because those conversations aren’t frequently had. As a survivor, I understand how trauma can frequently manifest in a way that isn’t rational where you may fear certain types of people because of what you’ve been through. I don’t really believe in sympathy for transphobes, but I do empathize with the fact that some of these people have experienced trauma and feel how they do for that reason. Perhaps because it’s a very personal thing for me, but when I saw this tweet, even though I understood he was making a joke, the misogyny bothered me. In theory, he’s saying something that was in defense of me, but I didn’t feel particularly helped by what was frankly, an unnecessary misogynistic joke. TERFs are often struggling to find examples of transgender women and their advocates being misogynistic, and it just seemed like a very obviously bad idea to be misogynistic while defending transgender women, especially because it seemed like it sabotaged the message of the tweet, and it wasn’t necessary. I believe he didn’t expect her to see it, but I’m still confused by why that matters. The post went viral and appeared in my feed and certainly made me think about the tactics of so-called transgender allies that may lean heavily into misogyny.
In recent years, I’ve come to regret the ways we spoke about allyship during the height of pop feminism in the 2010s’. I think it encouraged a very performative expression of support that focused on building a brand around your allyship instead of actually doing the work to truly unpack the impact of oppression and how the privileged benefit from it. A lot of people seemed to have gotten the impression that putting things in their bios or wearing t-shirts was enough, and most of these people truly only put on those performances for other privileged folks. I remember how jarring that was when I moved to Los Angeles and the “allies” in my various communities seemed to only ever surround themselves with other privileged people and never truly stood up for the marginalized in a way that would require they be a bit uncomfortable. For example, I remember when a venue in LA made it clear that they were going to specifically charge transgender women more for entry, as to discourage them from coming. I saw several of the people who’d post pro-trans stuff on their various social media pages, still go to that event, because they wanted to. An event I wasn’t welcomed, but they were. It’s clear to me that some people deeply resent the idea of allyship in practice, but support the idea of it in theory; at least that’s the impression I get. It seems like allyship has become this thing to be congratulated, not an expression of work you’ve done to understand what you’re supporting. I’ve seen these “allies” get defensive when someone expresses to them that what they’re doing isn’t very helpful. The conversation shifts immediately from trying to address the issues they’re claiming to be against, and it becomes all about them. It’s clear to me that people like Vaush really resent the idea of their advocacy being criticized in any way and it doesn’t help that by virtue of being a cis white man, he’s applauded and given a mountain of support and credit for just saying…literally anything. I’m supposed to be thankful that someone more privileged than I said something supportive of transgender people and If I criticize it, I’m a “wokescold.” Oh, and that’s another thing: the “dirtbag left” hates “wokeness,” which almost always refers to the various conversations marginalized people have about their experiences with oppression. To me, citing misogyny while defending transgender people draws attention to the lack of work, he’s done when it comes to truly understanding transphobia. Transphobia and misogyny are intrinsically tied. Transgender women are seen as shameful men who’ve lowered themselves to become something lesser than them, and trans men are seen as confused women who are incapable of understanding their own bodies, who must be led back to their rightful, delicate genders. Both of these thoughts cite misogyny. For that reason, I have always been suspicious of people who are misogynistic, but pro trans. However, that’s me. I wanted to ask other transgender women how they felt. So, I made a post asking transgender women how they felt about the situation.
The post was prefaced with a request to ignore who posted it, and reservations they may have about Vaush and focus on the tactic of using misogyny to defend transgender women. I presented the topic this way because, frankly, it didn’t matter to me that he was the one who made the post. I was focused on the tactics because I didn’t understand how someone could advocate against transphobia, yet be misogynistic, even in a joking context. Going against my gut, I wondered if I was simply out of touch, so I wanted to understand if other transgender women saw the post and appreciated it. The answers I got were interesting. Most transgender women said they didn’t appreciate it, but some said they didn’t mind it because JK Rowling was a terrible person. I understood that position, but it surprised me how many transgender women weren’t phased by misogyny. Very briefly I thought to myself that maybe these TERFs aren’t getting the impression that transgender women on twitter engage in misogyny from nowhere, but that was a narrow way of viewing it. I think because misogyny has impacted my life very drastically, I have a very different response to stuff like this. To me, the idea that we can weaponize isms against people we dislike really doesn’t seem productive. It seems like fighting against one problem while creating another. I understand it being said in a cathartic context (even if I still disagree), but I didn’t understand it in the context of advocacy for transgender women. I had a well-rounded conversation about his ideas, and it reached its natural conclusion. I mostly ignored twitter for the rest of the evening.
Then late at night, while I was waiting for my boyfriend to get off work, I got a direct message from Vaush. He was upset about my tweets. He believed that I had some sort of hate boner for him and really didn’t appreciate my public criticism of his tweets. Frankly, I was baffled because I didn’t understand why he’d care that I was having an objective conversation about his ideas, not him as a creator. My thread didn’t include personal attacks, nor did it encourage people to attack him. It was quite the opposite, but he wasn’t convinced. Once again what I said couldn’t be taken at face value, there was some unspoken sinister nature beneath my words. I tried to politely communicate that he isn’t a person who takes up space in my mind like that, but there’s really no way of saying that without sounding like a massive bitch. I don’t “hate” anyone online and sadly, often to my detriment, I tend to be a very forgiving person. However, I deeply resent the idea that I have to engage with all of these random lefty folks who make YouTube content. With that being my position, I could have ignored the messages, and I probably should have, but since I was bored, I entertained him a bit.
I respect that his fans probably think I owed him a private debate, but members of my audience know that I tend to have conversations like this to have objective conversations about people’s ideas, not really tear them down as individuals. For example, in the several videos I’ve made criticizing Arielle Scarcella’s content, I focus on her content and the ideas behind it, not her as a person. Socially, she’s also an absolutely miserable person that I’m not a fan of, but that really isn’t relevant to the conversations I’ve had about her ideas. Watch almost any video I’ve ever made criticizing other bloggers and you won’t find me being obsessed with tearing them down, personally. However, I think I might have truly underestimated his ego. I cannot think of any time in my 16 years of being on YouTube that I have gone into someone’s DMs to demand that they have a debate with me, and I certainly wouldn’t feel the need to do it in this context. I respect that he felt misrepresented, but it’s not like he didn’t know he was deliberately citing misogyny… that was the joke. I always find it to be quite strange when people throw rocks and then hide their hands. I fully acknowledged that he was joking, but that didn’t change the question for me. I didn’t think he was a true misogynist until he said misogynistic things to me privately.
I didn’t understand why the conversation needed to happen to begin with. Let’s say we went over everything, and he convinced me that his tweet wasn’t that bad; my question wasn’t how he felt about it. It was about how transgender women felt about people who use misogyny to advocate for transgender women. He was not the target audience of my post. Trans Women are JK Rowling’s main target, but I got the impression from this conversation that he resented the very idea of transgender women sharing their input about the efficacy of his advocacy. Once again, the fact that he was saying anything was apparently enough, and I should just appreciate it and stop complaining. At a certain point, he told me that he was a better advocate for the transgender community than I’ve ever been, which seemed like a needlessly arrogant thing for a cis man to say to a transgender woman who quite literally sacrificed stealth and subsequent safety to advocate for transgender people.
He contacted me with the purpose of winning an argument, nothing more and nothing less. I know that cis white men hate hearing things like this, but the rhetoric JK Rowling espouses does not directly impact them but very much does impact me. That’s why I had the conversation I did. Whether shit gets worse for transgender women or not, he will remain unaffected, and I cannot personally say the same. His degree of confidence and arrogance was unfathomably to me. He had a lot of audacity to say some of the things he said to me. It seemed like at every turn; he resented the idea of not being at the center of the conversation. At some point, he even tried to make the argument that invalidating his input, as a cis man, was like invalidating a transgender person who hadn’t physically transitioned…it was a mess. I could write a lot of posts dissecting the strange aspects of that conversation, but ultimately, I left it feeling really silly for actually believing that this was a person whose tactics I should consider. His arguments were weak, but I could see how a young white kid with little exposure to the outside world or access to intracommunity conversations could be convinced by them. However, in all reality, they did not actually measure up. As I disagreed, he’d say things to me like “I’m really concerned for you, “which of course sounded incredibly condescending and quite misogynistic. I’m not insane or unstable because I don’t agree with his ideas, but it seems like he’s convinced himself that only insane people could disagree with his logic. All this space taken up by someone who will never experience transphobia and misogyny the way I have throughout my life. And I’m supposed to be thankful to him.
The exchange left a poor taste in my mouth. I haven’t really been able to define this feeling, but there’s a type of interaction I’ve experienced when men will say some really messed up, often gaslight-y or manipulative stuff to you in private and you’re expected to just deal with it because calling it out often reflects poorly on you. I still could not really understand why he contacted me and why he spoke to me how he did. It did not really feel like a conversation as much as it felt like a set up. His messages were phrased as gotcha moments, and he was shitty to me throughout. After years of putting up with bullshit online and not addressing it publicly I felt like I should say something, so I made a thread detailing our interaction. I didn’t want to share the actual exchange, because I felt odd about sharing DMs, but when Vaush saw the thread, he would go on to deny that the conversation went how it did and rant about how obsessed I was with him. This is where my pet peeve got stuck on a loop because I am far from being obsessed with him but saying this about me so confidently and his audience believing it really did bother me. So, I decided to stand up for myself and I shared our DMs on Twitter. You can see all of our messages right here, for your own curiosity. When I posted the DMs, I posted it with the caption “The closest I’ve ever been to being obsessed with @Vaush is the few days we sexted. But I’m not going to share those messages, here are the relevant ones.”
I’m ashamed to admit it, but forever ago, Vaush and I sent some spicy messages back and forth. I still wasn’t remarkably familiar with his content, but back then I was in a certain headspace and for whatever reason I felt comfortable sexting him. I was still figuring my own shit out and adjusting to life in the city and I hadn’t really been single for a really long time, and I made a lot of mistakes with men in that phase of life. Back then, all a guy had to do was be a leftist with a beard and I was probably interested in him. I gave entirely too much credit to men giving themselves the leftist label. At this point in my life, I’ve dated enough annoying DSA dudes to no longer give men such credit. I honestly don’t even remember how it started or who initiated it, but it happened, and I knew that he knew that. Since our exchanges, I’ve heard, but still not deeply researched, that he does that sort of thing with a lot of women; trans women especially. I figured since he was running with the “obsessed” narrative, that would be the only piece of information he could point to that would back up his claim. I didn’t post about him constantly, I hadn’t seen many of his streams and when I looked at my view history, only 5 Vaush videos came up and each of them were about some drama he got into with another creator. I wasn’t “obsessed” with him, but again, my pet peeve got the best of me and here we are. Despite what some bloggers would have you believe; I did not share and would never share our sexts. If they leak, it’ll be because of him. I take revenge porn seriously as a person who’s experienced it several times through my very brief career as a sex worker. It’s not relevant to any of the conversations we had. In retrospect, I probably didn’t need to post that him and I had sexted, but it felt preemptive. While I can acknowledge it as unnecessary, I still have an awfully hard time feeling bad about it, especially because of where things went after this.
It was incredibly frustrating to me that Vaush, like every other white cis man before him, got to lead the conversation about who I was, what I believed and how I felt and his much larger audience, like many other audiences before, just uncritically ate it up. Being in that position really sucks, especially when you’re someone like me, who devotes so much time to very carefully detailing every way in which they feel about something. I hated the fact that I could write about the exchange, and he could just deny it, so I posted proof. In the same thread, I explained how I fell into sexting with him all of those years back. He took my comments about bearded leftist men and somehow concluded that I was specifically speaking about white men and would argue on his stream that I just really wanted his dick. He would speak about how Black women like myself, who stand up against white supremacy and advocate against their own oppression, truly deep down inside, have a fetish for white men. We apparently racially fetishize white men the way racist white men racially fetishize Black women. These comments really upset me because I have devoted a lot of time on my YouTube channel to speaking about how racial fetishism has harmed and alienated me, especially in the context of relationships. He twisted what I said and argued that I wanted to be sexually degraded by white men and to me, that was pretty repulsive. In response, I made a tweet about how “underwhelming” his penis was, because, between you and I, I really couldn’t remember what it looked like; just that it was forgettable to me. That seemed like a rather light comment in comparison. Like my previous comment, I can acknowledge that it probably didn’t need to be said, but I struggle to feel bad for saying a man who argued that I was obsessed with white dick, had an underwhelming penis. I just do.
I’ve been bullied and mistreated all my life. I have never known what it felt like to be protected beyond very few, often very conditional romantic partnerships. I think for that reason, I have these two fairly dramatic reactions to situations like this. My default position is to be patient and thoughtful, but there’s also a side of me that will go right for the throat if I want the conversation to end and end quickly. That’s what happened in this situation and it’s a side of me that most of you don’t see because it’s not a side I enjoy sharing. I cannot defend what I’ve said, but I will repeat that I do not feel bad for saying it and perhaps my long history of being harassed has made it hard for me to understand why these sorts of things bother other people so much. I understand how they would if we were any other two people, but I struggled to understand why it mattered in this case. From what I could tell, there was a completely different set of rules for him and I. He gets to be disrespectful and shitty and if I do it back, I’m the asshole. I guess I genuinely thought he could take it, but much like JK Rowling twisting his shitty, but rather harmless tweet into a conversation about domestic violence, he and many other bloggers would twist this altercation into a story of sexual abuse and harassment and milk it for weeks to come. What I didn’t understand at the time, that I now very much do, is this really seems to be what this kind of streaming culture is about.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but from what I’ve gathered; this type of streaming culture is all about sitting on twitch long enough before some sort of drama happens between a streamer, another streamer, or their chat. Like the Anti-SJWs of yesteryear, whenever some sort of drama pops off, those bloggers will talk about it and then other bloggers will talk about it and then other bloggers will talk about those bloggers talking about it on their blog where they make blogs about other people blogging about blogs. It’s a sort of parasitic relationship where the telephone game-esc nature of it all often leads to the story getting bigger and bigger and the degree of harm gets overstated and over dramatized until there is one very solid villain and another very solid hero. Just like I saw in the online atheist community, the actual politics behind the conversation do not matter as much as the cult of personality these bloggers create around these incidents. This shouldn’t have exactly surprised me since most of the times I saw Vaush trending on twitter, he was getting into some argument with another creator. He apparently hates leftist in-fighting, but from what I gather, he seems to rely on it for content. Makes you wonder how much content he’d have if he solely focused on addressing, pressing leftist issues and not his confrontations or even interactions with other creators.
The last conversation I had with Vaush before he recently reached out to me was when he was gearing up for a debate with someone who’d sent harassment my way back in the good ole Anti-SJW days. This person is, objectively, a grifter and I didn’t understand why he wanted to have a conversation with someone that was so unproductive and deliberately cruel. His YouTube channel was still relatively new, and I had given him a lot of validity in my mind because he labeled himself as a Leftist and some of his audience was part of mine and from what I heard, his content was enjoyable. I didn’t understand the decision to have this particular person on his channel because, in my view, there are other more productive conservatives he could speak to who don’t have a history of sending harassment at other people. We went back and forth about it and ultimately, the reason he gave for continuing with the debate was that this person had clout. He was trying to grow his audience and doing a debate with this person was a great way to do so. And he was right. That conversation led to him growing his audience quite a bit and I left the conversation with the impression that clout, not these conversations, were his actual focus. It turned me off, so I no longer spoke to him. It’s clear that we had vastly different priorities.
I know that there are people reading this post who are going to walk away with the conclusion that this post is yet again more evidence of my obsession with him. However, I’m not writing this because I’m obsessed, I’m not even particularly writing this to call him out. For me, there was a bigger lesson here and an ah-ha moment I think I’ve needed to have for a while. This incident woke me up in a very profound way.
Often, when you’re the only minority in a space, it becomes hard for you to advocate for yourself without doing it in a way that doesn’t isolate you from those around you. You internalize the obvious discomfort people have with you and what you know their assumptions of you are, and you want to try very hard to be, as I said, “one of the good ones.” If you care to be accepted in that space, you start making a habit of doubting yourself and you don’t want to immediately rush to judgement. This means when you hear or see bigoted stuff, you have a way of downplaying it or not immediately reacting to it. You’re aware that these people are terrified of being called a bigot and you don’t want to be one of “those” Black people that judges them and dismisses them. You intrinsically feel this emotion and you struggle to make boundaries for yourself because you want to be accepted. What this frequently means is tolerating what you absolutely shouldn’t for the exchange of belonging to a group of people who you know already look down on you because they put you under this pressure.
As a Black person who’s spent most of their life in non-black spaces, I’ve constantly tried to avoid being seen as a thug or an easily angered mammy. That very intense pressure not to step out of line to defend yourself, even when justified, has a way of pacifying you in situations where you should be able to draw boundaries for yourself. It’s like when I was living in a white suburb in Orange County and white women would walk up to me in the supermarket and put their dirty fingers in my hair without asking. In those situations, I must decide if I want to smile while they violate my personal space or have the natural reaction where I flinch and say, “fuck you, get your hands out of my hair.” If I did the same to a white woman and touched her hair without asking, she’d think I was a weirdo. Hell, she might even call the cops; but by virtue of my Blackness and how alien I am in those spaces, I’m expected to tolerate it and saying no would make me “uppity.” Suddenly then I’d become the rude one for not allowing her to touch my hair. Even though I was being violated, the conversation would shift towards managing their emotions and making sure they knew that I wasn’t upset or offended. Yes, these things would happen to me all the time when I lived deep in Trump country with my ex. It always bothered me, but I often struggled to say no. So usually, I wouldn’t pull back and say what I wanted to say. I would nod my head, allow them to violate my boundaries and go back to my shopping, because that was the safer response. I’ve learned that many white people react very negatively when you draw these sorts of boundaries. When you solidly say no, a lot of them cannot process it without hearing an accusation in the subtext. You can see that at several points in my interaction with Vaush
Like I said, when I first saw “dirt bag leftist” content, I was told by many people not to outright dismiss it. Like a white woman scraping my scalp because she felt entitled to my body, even though the bias was obvious, I was encouraged not to react naturally to it. If I’m being honest, I guess I became far too invested in proving to my audience that I wasn’t that angry Black woman avatar that so many people were saying I was. The fear of appearing that way made it so that I tolerated disrespect in a way I shouldn’t have, and I was slow to properly draw a boundary between myself and work that obviously antagonized me. What stood out to me in this conversation is that from this altercation to my YouTube career generally, I’ve tried my best not to be seen as “one of the bad ones,” but I still was. I cannot overstate the amount of work that’s gone into me carefully peeling over every word and how I said it and the tone in which it was said, and how that very process derailed a lot of my progress as a creator. I’ve wasted years of my life constructing my work around potential misunderstandings. I watered down my messages to placate to the egos of people who were barely listening to me to begin with. Perhaps it flattered them, but it left me feeling depleted. I guess I really didn’t want to accept that certain people were always going to see me a certain way because of who I am.
This may sound ironic because of the work I do, but I have, to some degree, always struggled with the idea that someone would simply dismiss me because of my race or gender. Maybe it’s all of those years I’ve spent being accepted conditionally because of how much I played into respectability politics, but it’s hard for me to understand how people could look at me and see me as an unfaithful narrator. I am not the kind of person who enjoys believing that I have certain limitations in life because of who I am. Though I speak so much about oppression, I suppose how I’ve moved through the world has let me very subconsciously feel as though what happens to other black or transgender people wouldn’t happen to me because of how I am. I feel a pit in my stomach acknowledging this, but I think acknowledging this thought in the back of my mind is central to unpacking it. I didn’t want to immediately believe that when someone disliked my content, it was because I’m Black and/or transgender, but after 16 years of being transformed into an angry black caricature by others, it’s very hard for me to deny that this is often the case. I have finally come to embrace that there isn’t a version of me, nor a way of phrasing my criticisms of oppression that will ever be universally embraced or faithfully understood. No matter how politely I phrase it, there are going to be people who read what I say with a subtext of anger and malice that simply does not exist within me. I’ve made the mistake of believing that was my fault, but it’s just a reflection of the system we live in. It was wrong for me to buy into this idea that I could shift white supremacist thought by simply adhering to a white supremacist outline of the sort of person I should be. I see that now. I must also accept that there are many people who see that I have a platform that sustains me who will believe that I do not deserve it because of who I am. So much of the bullshit I’ve gotten has had the subtext of “how dare she have what she does”. When Phill DeFranco made content about me being a supposed “Black Supremacist,” because YouTube has directly supported me a handful of times, they tried to get the attention of the CEO of the company to alert them that I do not deserve such support because of the beliefs they believe I have. I guess in the back of my mind, I would have assumed that bloggers like him wouldn’t so easily buy into these false narratives about me, but that assumption is based on the amount of credence I likely give these creators based on nothing more than how I’ve been socialized to see whiteness.
I think a lot of white creators do not intrinsically understand that a function of white supremacy is that most people will look at a white person and see them as a blank slate whose ideas stand on their own. Sure, if you’re alternative or visibly queer in some way, people will make assumptions of you, but not in the way they’ll make assumptions of me. As I said, I’ve heard things like “you’re so well-spoken” all throughout my life. I must speak well, dress respectably and phrase everything I say in a docile tone for a wider audience to be receptive to what I’m saying. What I’ve struggled with is that “mainstream” frequently means having to engage in that sort of respectability and what I’ve really struggled with is the reality of how much that doesn’t align with who I am. People who’ve followed me since I’ve moved to Los Angeles have seen me slowly but surely shift my online persona towards something that feels more genuine to me and that has been incredibly freeing. For me, this lesson was one of the last ones I’ve needed to come into myself as a creator. I’ve learned through my experiences that no matter how I present myself or how much I assimilate, there will always be people who immediately look at me and already believe their assumptions of me. I’ve wasted too much of my life believing that there was something I could do to shift that impression outside of being so docile that I don’t stand up for myself. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many of the situations where people have hyper focused on my less than polite words, have been instances where I’ve been standing up for myself. As a self-critical person, I can acknowledge my own isms in some of the things I’ve said and done and see them as negative and unhelpful. At the same time, I recognize how much more freedom white creators get to be rude in the face of disrespect.
Respectability politics very subtly teaches you that creating boundaries for yourself or even simply saying “fuck off” makes you “one of those people.” The more you meditate on it, the more you recognize that respectability politics are constructed to keep you in a position where you never quite get to accurately describe harm. Where you never get to be justifiably angry or frustrated by the things that harm you. It has a way of telling you to temper your pain and placate to people who are already struggling with the idea that you’re taking up space to begin with. When I broke down in my video about “Lefttube” being so white, that was the exact emotion that broke through. The frustration with the fact that I cannot simply just say that I am scared and be trusted. I must politely dance and show fancy graphics that explain the exact reasons why I deserve to be. I hadn’t processed that the very premise of having a conversation like that requires that I debase myself and put myself in a position where I am essentially begging for the privileged in my audience to hear me. It is inherently demeaning. When you play into that, it puts you into a perpetual position of frustration because these people were already barely listening to what you had to say, so when they still do not hear it, you feel exhausted by the labor you’ve wasted. That’s what was happening to me, and I still hadn’t let go of that toxic and untenantable cycle. I can confidently say that your average white creator is unaware that Black creators must do this all the time to get even a quarter of what they have. When I think of why so many of the black transgender women I’ve known on YouTube haven’t become more successful, it’s because they haven’t been doing this. Looking at my own platform, I can see more clearly that I probably have the following I do because I’ve entertained respectability politics through most of my career. However, what this situation taught me is that when it all comes down to it, that doesn’t work.
Vaush would later be receptive and welcoming to a transgender blogger who made the same exact argument I made in my original posts that upset him so much. Would it surprise you if I told you that she was white?
I feel incredibly stupid giving Vaush and his ilk any degree of my energy or consideration. I regret seeing these tactics as valid enough to understand. Had I listened to my intuition, I would have dismissed him the first time I saw the bigotry and moved forward. I would not have been curious about his tactics, and I wouldn’t have pondered his approach. I would have said “that seems racist/transphobic/misogynistic”, trusted my gut and simply moved forward. The upsetting question I’ve been asking myself is how much consideration would I have given him if he wasn’t a white man? Was trying to make sense of what was clearly so disagreeable to me a reflex that I had because he’s a white man? I think I’ve dismissed POC leftists for much less.
I can sit here and pontificate about how frequently he’s been able to get away with saying terrible things to people, but that would be repetitive. I already knew why, but I doubted my perception. My frustration was based in this idea that we were both equally considered for our ideas and arguments, but that was naïve. Now, I no longer doubt my own understanding. I clearly see the reasons he, and other bloggers like him get to be the sort of person they are, while I am given less leeway. This experience was frustrating, but I am so thankful for the clarity it’s brought me. I’ve learned to stop attempting to placate to the emotions of people who need to be convinced I’m not who they’ve already assumed I was. I thought I had grown out of that habit, but when I reflect on my experiences, I realize that this is still a subconscious part of the way I approach these conversations. it’s clear I still have unpacking to do. However, as our world becomes darker and the rights of transgender people are fought against so viciously, it does not serve me to neuter my arguments with pleasantries and a degree of consideration I am never given. I’m not going to feel bad for dismissing someone outright for engaging in behavior that is obviously antagonistic towards me. I am still a gray thinker and someone who doesn’t think linearly, but I will no longer allow those thoughts to be informed by a subconscious desire to be “one of the good ones.”
So you’re curious about kink and you’d like to connect with the larger “BDSM Community”, but don’t know where to start. Well, you’re in the right place. In this post, I will discuss what I did when attempting to enter into the BDSM community and some of the lessons I learned along the way.
I’m the sort of person who doesn’t have a “throw the baby out with the bath water” attitude so this post will be very honest about both the good and the bad aspects of the BDSM community. That said, I do think it’s important for me to preface my thoughts with the fact that I am speaking from the perspective of a person who participates mostly in the heterosexual Los Angeles BDSM scene. From what I’ve gathered, the BDSM community takes on different vibes in different areas so some of the things I say here, might not apply to where you are, but I tried to make it as universal as possible.
The Pros and Cons of the BDSM Community
A lot of people are turned off by the idea of joining a “BDSM Community”. Mostly because they imagine them as being overly involved, up their own ass and full of themselves. Unfortunately, that characterization isn’t necessarily incorrect, but I think the first thing to recognize when attempting to join the BDSM community is that there are often several. In Los Angeles, the vibe between one dungeon can be so vastly different from the vibe at another dungeon. Currently, we have three main Dungeons in the LA Area. Threshold, Sanctuary and 910 WeHo. Each of these dungeons feel very different and often you’ll only see certain people at certain dungeons. So it’s easy for these spaces to have a different feel and if you find yourself not connecting wit one community, you might find connection in another. There are also several smaller, more private networks of kinksters who practice BDSM within a “house” structure away from the public BDSM scene. This tends to be slightly more common in more suburban or small town areas. Quite a few people in the scene will ultimately leave the public BDSM scene for their small network of kinksters. Sometimes it’s formal, like a “house” and a lot of times it’s informal and casual, but communal.
Practicing BDSM doesn’t require that you participate within a community, but there are many reasons why exploring BDSM within the context of a community would be beneficial to you. Here are my personal pros and cons.
Pros
One of the main benefits of practicing BDSM within a community is that it generally means that you’re able to practice BDSM in a communal way. Curious kinksters will often go online to find the first person who’s willing to play with them and their excitement often prevents them from considering their own safety and health. I’m a submissive and I remember when I first came into the BDSM community, there were a lot of men who were eager to define what BDSM was for me. Quite often, their way of doing that required isolation away from people who could observe and criticize our dynamic. When you’re new, it’s very hard for you to know what is and isn’t safe and if anything, when you’re in that stage of your kink journey, it helps to get a second opinion.
In the early days of my BDSM exploration, I’d connect with men who wanted things from me that made me incredibly uncomfortable. When I’d tell them it made me uncomfortable, they’d say that if I were a real submissive, I’d do what they wanted. One dominant, for example, wanted me to be sexual with his other female submissive. Aside from the fact that I’m not attracted to women and barely knew either of them, he argued that if I were a “real submissive”, I’d simply agree. When you’re isolated from the community and you don’t have the framework for what a healthy dynamic looks like, things like this might initially sound reasonable to you, but being connected to a community means being able to have other people to ask questions about what is and isn’t okay.
One of the biggest benefits of being part of a BDSM community is that it connects you to a network of kinksters who are consciously and thoughtfully practicing BDSM. When you’re new, having that network can be incredibly valuable. You might want to jump into the scene very quickly, but you might be underestimating that there are people in the community get off on pushing the boundaries of new kinksters. These people are, quite often, abusive and are the kind of people who deeply resent the idea of their BDSM play being monitored. That would be a red flag. So having a community of people to ask “is this normal” or “is this okay” can be incredibly important when you’re first finding your footing.
When you’re new, chances are you won’t understand how to do BDSM play “safely”. Something like rope, for example, seems incredibly simple, but is actually quite dangerous. Probably one of the more dangerous things in BDSM. It’s very easy to hurt someone when you don’t know what you’re doing, but luckily, kinksters often love to teach classes. A lot of people who are in the scene, have been in the scene for decades and they very much enjoy sharing their knowledge. It might be helpful for you to take a hands-on approach when first learning about BDSM so if you’re privileged enough to live in an area that has hands-on classes, take advantage of them! Classes are also a great way to connect with new people who are also into the same things you’re into.
Another huge benefit is “public play”. In this context, I mean play at a dungeon in front of a room full of people. Most dungeons have what are called Dungeon Monitors, or “DMs” as they’re often called. Usually, these are experienced kinksters who are familiar with the rules of the Dungeons. A potential draw back of “public play” is that usually it limits the kind of play you can do. For example, all BDSM dungeons in LA forbid breath play at most of their events. A DM is the sort of person who will kick you out if they see you doing breath play since it violates the rules of the dungeon. They’re also the sort of person that would monitor a breath play scene if it was allowed. Because of the degree of risk involved in certain play, most dungeons will require that your scene be monitored by a DM while it’s going on. A DM will check in on the scene to make sure that everything is okay, and everything is understood. Playing at an event with a DM is a great way to play with partners whom you are still getting to know, who are still getting to know you.
“Vetting” is a huge bonus when joining a BDSM community. Most of these communities have history, and that allows you to figure out which players are safe or have a history of repeated violations. BDSM communities tend to be insular and generally speaking, the people within them are invested in maintaining them. So what that means is there are people who will work hard to ensure that abusers don’t find their way into certain spaces, but this also brings me to my list of Cons about the BDSM Community.
Cons
Speaking very bluntly, there are a lot of reasons why I would heavily discourage anyone from joining the BDSM community. Like most things, I cannot fully write off the good aspects, but the bad aspects have, in many ways, shifted my feelings about the BDSM Community. I always try to be honest, and would I’d feel dishonest presenting the pros without extensively covering the cons.
I would say my favorite time in the BDSM Community was when everything was new to me and I knew very little about the history of the space or the people within it. Especially when you’re a woman, and especially when you’re a submissive, you are very much embraced when you are new and people are often incredibly nice and welcoming to you. My first few years, I learned a lot and played with a lot of people and grew to understand so much more about myself. But my impression of the community has indeed shifted the longer i’m in it.
Here’s the thing: the BDSM community is not unlike a lot of spaces where people politicize, politic and ego quite frequently gets in the way of doing good work. When I first came into the BDSM community, I bottomed for a man for about a year. He was very eager to connect with me when we first met and enjoyed the fact that I was new. He spent a lot of time discouraging me from connecting with any dominant man who expressed a vague interest in me, often saying that these men had a history of abuse. I took his word for it because, after all, he was more established and experienced than I was, but it would take me a while to understand that some of those stories he told me weren’t true or were simply misunderstandings.
As you enter the BDSM community and try to find out who is and isn’t a good player, you will very quickly realize that sometimes people transform miscommunication into abuse. Sometimes minor infractions become massive once they’ve been processed through the telephone game-esc communication that often happens within BDSM circles. In the community, you’ll find a lot of people who believe that they have the one objective truth about how BDSM and consent should and shouldn’t be and you’ll discover that some people claim abuse because of their own personal philosophy, and not necessarily because someone is actually a dangerous person. Then once you start to cast doubt on that, you’ll learn that there are people who actually are abusive, but because of how they present themselves or maybe even the cult of personality they’ve cultivated, they will be presented to you as safe.
As mentioned earlier, quite often different dungeons and spaces have a different vibe and community. That’s great in one way, but because things are that way, it’s not terribly uncommon for abusers to move from one dungeon to the next and only get called out when one of the few cross over patrons brings it to the attention of the venue owners. And even then, the he-said she-said stuff nature of some of these conversations means that people have their biases and don’t often always believe every story of abuse. Unfortunately because I’ve observed how sometimes people transform small incidents into massive ones, I can understand why that’s often the response. But that said, one of the biggest things that turned me off from the BDSM community was just how many people I’ve heard abuse allegations about that are in positions of power. Of all of the stories I’ve heard, I cannot think of many of these abusers who are outright banned from all BDSM clubs in Los Angeles, and sometimes these people have enough money to throw their own events…
If you’re a marginalized minority of any sort, I would regret not warning you that while the BDSM community may seem slightly more progressive than most vanilla spaces, you might still run into the same issues, with a liberal facade. As a black trans woman, I’ve very frequently found that these spaces tend to be very white and that when an event says “pansexual”, what they really mean is straight.
I’m a straight, submissive woman so for the most part, the heterosexual BDSM scene doesn’t really alienate me at all, but it took me a while to realize that if you’re a person who identifies as queer, you really do have to seek out queer specific events. You might often see an event listed as “pansexual” and what they mean by that is that it is an event where everyone, regardless of sexuality is welcomed. However, what these events turn out to be more often than not, is heterosexual. What I mean by that is those events almost always end up being mostly dominant men and submissive women. In all of the years I’ve been to dungeons, I’ve only once seen two cis men play with each other once. On top of that quite frequently scenes between two cis women are often done for the male gaze. It’s very easy to walk away with the impression that this is what the BDSM community is, but what I’ve learned is that there is a completely separated world of queer BDSM that I am not personally tied to. Like most subcultures, it’s just a matter of finding the right people who can point you in the right direction. So if that’s important to you, make connecting with other queer folks one of your main priorities when joining the community.
The community has the same issue with race. At least out here, the BDSM community is very white. This means that as a person of color, you will quite frequently be in the position where you are seen as novel and you will likely be fetishized. I am constantly navigating around white people’s race play fetishism and how frequently dominance is projected onto me because I’m a black woman who isn’t self loathing and that can, indeed, become exhausting. There are usually several smaller groups within larger BDSM community dedicated to cultivating community among people of color in BDSM. It’s worth investigating organizations like A Tribe Called Kink, which are all about creating spaces for people of color in kink.
Additionally, while the BDSM community may indeed talk about how “safe” it is, very few things we do are truly, completely “safe”. Be very wary of anyone who says otherwise. We can find safer ways to do what we do, but most of these things have some degree of risk and this risk is constantly downplayed in the interest of making BDSM seem accessible to everyone. Personally, I am a very risk aware person, which is why this article is blatantly speaking about the negative aspects of the community. However, these are the issues I have mostly with the “public” scene, and it’s still very possible for you to build a BDSM community outside of that.
My biggest bit of advice for anyone joining the BDSM community or exploring BDSM privately is to GO SLOW and get to really know your play partners. The biggest mistake I see people doing is rushing into the scene, doing things they don’t understand and harming themselves, harming others ,or being harmed by others. You will not lose anything by entering into the community slowly with an acute awareness of the risks. There are too many people out there banking on you not quite knowing your own limitations; for that reason, long before you go to a dungeon, I’d tell you to go to a munch.
Finding Play Partners and Entering The Community
My first dungeon was a small, clean little club in an industrial area called DragonsGate. I had just gotten out of my monogamous, vanilla relationship and I was very eager to explore. I found the event online and decided to show up to the dungeon alone, without knowing anyone. Perhaps it’s because I’m a woman, but people were very friendly to me. I got a tour from the owner and it was truly a beautiful little dungeon. These were my first, conscious, informed steps into the BDSM community… but I was alone.
I remember standing awkwardly in the corner with my hand gripping the inside of my other arm. I was far less confident back then, so I definitely looked like a newbie. Back then, I was still figuring out if BDSM was for me. I’d been through a lot and I was trying to explore myself in a newer, more self sufficient place in my life. I hungered for community and friends whom I could speak openly with. I spoke to a few attendees that night and they told me that i should go to a “munch”.
What are Munches?
A Munch, or a Slosh, depending on where you are, is a casual meet up at a restaurant or a bar. The idea is that if you get a bunch of kinky people in the same place at the same time, there’s a high chance that they’ll make some sort of connection. I first started going to munches before I moved to Los Angeles, when I was living in the middle of nowhere, Orange County. We’d meet at a Fuddruckers and very informally string a bunch of tables together and talk; not just about BDSM, but our interests, what TV shows we were watching and what we did when we weren’t at the Dungeons. It was a really great way to meet new people and make new friends. You just eat, or drink and get to know the people around you. There’s no pressure to play and since we’re in public, there’s absolutely no BDSM. If you were talking to someone online about BDSM, a munch would be a great place to meet them in public, in a mutual space full of affirming people.
For me, munches, not the Dungeons, are the true soul of the BDSM community. I cannot overstate how valuable they were to me when I was desperately sorting through my own kinkiness and polyamory. I truly struggled with figuring out if BDSM was for me and I just needed to see that there were other kinksters out there. These days, you’re way more likely to run into me at a munch than a dungeon; and a lot of the people I know who no longer go to dungeons, still make sure to make it to every single munch.
You’ll find munches mostly on websites like Fetlife, or sometimes even websites like EventBrite. You might very well think that there aren’t any munches in your local area, but you much be surprised, as I was, to discover that they’ve been happening in your community for years. One of the best part of going to munches is that you’ll usually meet people who are connected to other gatherings and events and that will be a good way to figure out where exactly you should go to find information about other events. BDSM events become more hush-hush the smaller the communities are. Sometimes it’s just a matter of meeting the right people who can steer you in the right direction.
Munches tend to happen monthly and depending on where you are, there’s often a flow of new people each month. When I was living in Orange County, our munches felt like small family gatherings because it was, for the most part, the same small group of people. In the city, there’s a similar feeling, but there’s often a large flow of new people or sometimes out of state visitors. If you’re new in town or you’re the sort of person who struggles making friends, munches are a really great place to meet people. So many of the friends i’ve made at munches are life long friends. I even managed to find some people to help me move apartments from the various munches I’ve attended. And if you’ve ever helped someone move, you know that’s pretty deep.
I will probably never explicitly speak about this on here, but I do some community building in the Los Angeles area for the BDSM community and I currently organize one of the largest munches in the city. I started my munch because I felt there was a void in my particular part of the city and I was surprised when it became so popular. Some people reading through this post might not currently have munches or BDSM Dungeons or really even much of a BDSM community in their area. If you’re in that situation, my biggest advice to you is build it and the people will come. Starting your own munch is, in my opinion, the first thing to do when starting your own BDSM community, but that’s a subject for a future entry.
Until then, I hope what I’ve said here has been helpful in your quest of making an informed decision about whether or not you want to participate in the BDSM community.
A few days ago, a video where a man expresses unflinching attraction to transgender women went viral on social media and it’s causing a lot of debate and discussion about trans attraction and whether or not the man in the video is a “chaser”. The short street-interview style video starts with a cis man asking another cis man how much he’d have to be paid to “suck a cock”. The interviewee responds with a follow up question asking to clarify if the person with a penis is a cis man or a transgender woman. For him, when it comes to cis men, there’s no chance in hell it’d happen, but for transgender women; not only would he do it for free, but he “already has”. See the video below.
Conversations about trans attraction are very hard to have because the opinion people have of these relationships tends to lead to the social understanding of how they function. Most people discussing relationships between cis men and transgender women adhere to one narrow conclusion: transgender women are men and the men who sleep with them, gay. In fact, one of the tertiary conversations being had right now by gay gender critical folks is that this man is homophobic for not identifying himself as bisexual or gay. It is, however, important to note that this man never once identifies himself as heterosexual, that is simply assumed of him because he’s a cis man. That aside, quite frequently transgender women, like myself, are left to defend the sexualities of these men while they remain largely silent and closeted about their attraction to transgender women. Transgender women are often seen as unfaithful narrators of their own experiences, but I’m going to push against that in this article and have a discussion about trans attraction and chasers from the perspective of a transgender woman who absolutely has the ability to speak with authority about the men who have pursued her all throughout her trans life.
When you’re a transgender woman, you become acutely aware of the fact that attraction to you is often going to be politicized and if you’re, unfortunately, attracted solely to men, this often means navigating through the murky waters of trans attraction, a man’s heterosexuality, as well as the ways your sexual capital shifts through your transition. The impression I get is that most cis people have a very hard time comprehending why a person would ever be attracted to a transgender person; afterall, transgender people have been firmly established in our society as strange oddities that could never possibly be loved without some darker desire or intent, and cis bodies have been established all our lives as the only valid ones worthy of love. Because of this, a lot of people seem to conclude that the cis men who pursue transgender women are simply confused men who truly desire sex with cis men. When these men blatantly state their interest in a pre-op trans woman’s genitalia, it’s hard to argue against that point when so many of us have defined our sexuality not by gender, but by sex. The closest I’ll get to validating that understanding is acknowledging that most of the men who actively pursue transgender women are indeed attempting to figure something out about themselves. Transgender women are an oddity to most of these men and a very uncommon one. For that reason, most men who are interested in transgender women will likely never have the chance to sexually explore with one before determining if they are attracted to them beyond their sexual fantasies. As we all know, often fantasies don’t align with reality and many men will sit with undetermined feelings about their sexuality and their attractions until they’ve had certain experiences with transgender women. Often times, it’s their quest for sexual exploration and the path they tend to choose that gets some of these men labled “chasers”.
Back in the day, I used to mercilessly grill the men I was speaking to on dating apps about how exactly they discovered they were attracted to transgender women, and I would often get some variation of these two responses:
“One day I was flipping through a porno mag and I saw an ad for transsexuals in the back and it turned me on. So I started looking at trans porn, and started trying to connect with trans women online.”
Or
“I was at this club one night and I met this absolutely gorgeous woman. She took me back to her place and that’s when she told me that she was transgender. I was hesitant at first, and nothing happened, but she was really pretty so now I’m curious if it’s something I could be into.”
I obviously got more than these two responses, but these were the most common ones. Not to lean on a binary, but I often find that these two groups of men tend to clearly show a delineation between men who are chasers and men who aren’t. The first group of men tend to purely see transgender women through the lens of fetishism and pornography and they have a hard time comprehending otherwise. The second group quite often understands that transgender women are individuals first and their hesitation around pursuing transgender women is frequently related to not wanting to hurt a trans woman’s feelings. For me what helps differentiate these men is recognizing us as individuals.
For the most part, fetishism has always been easy for me to see because I am often fetishized for the exact opposite of what feels natural to me. Say you’re a man in that first group and you went online to seek out transgender porn. Black transgender women in porn are often presented as overly aggressive, dominant, well endowed with a fixation on “topping” white men. That has always been the complete opposite of who I am as a naturally submissive person, who, between you and I, couldn’t “top” even if they wanted to. When someone projects that image onto me, it’s easy to see that they are fetishizing me because it’s obvious that I could be literally any other black trans woman and they’d get the same experience. A lot of men who fetishize trans women have reacted very negatively to me telling them that, and it’s this that lets me know that they were only interested in their fantasy, not my reality. But for me, it’s that reaction that makes it clear that they are a fetishist, not their interest in my genitalia.
As I said earlier, society at large does indeed dismiss transgender women as men and the men who sleep with them as gay, but I know from my own personal experience that gay men have never been interested in me. I’m not sure all trans women can say that, but for me, I’ve always been overtly feminine and long before I accepted myself as a trans woman, people commonly saw me as a cis girl. So I don’t have any real history with gay men being attracted to me. I entered my legal adulthood well into my transition and while I’ve read a lot about queer dating, I have functioned pretty exclusively within a heterosexual context through my romantic life. Something I’ve thought about recently is how I move through the world as though it has already changed as opposed to embracing the narratives projected onto me before it does. Perhaps this is why I’ve been able to live a life where I am accepted as my gender everywhere I go; I’m not sure. But when it comes to this conversation, something that comes to mind is that we would not see transgender bodies, and by proxy the people who are attracted to them, as weird or fetishistic if we lived in a society that saw them as just as inherently valid as cis bodies. The idea of a man giving oral to a trans woman would seem normative in a society that viewed their relationship as a valid one. It’s pretty common for a partner to orally satisfy a partner and bring them to orgasm, but the image of a cis man giving a trans woman oral sex is politicized. Again, “Based Chaser” never said he was straight, but people on twitter are writing thread after thread about how much of a weirdo in denial he is all because he is a cis man who expressed an interest in a transgender woman’s genitalia publicly, without shame. I’m not going to pretend we aren’t often sex negative as a society, but I remember when people ridiculed DJ Kahled for not wanting to give oral sex to his wife. We accept these things are largely normative and not fetishes when we discuss cis people, but they transform into fetishism when one of the people is transgender. For me, this sends the message that there would be no possible way to love a transgender person’s body without fetish and that is, in my opinion, an incredibly questionable position that probably wouldn’t feel valid in a society that embraced transgender women’s bodies as valid. However, quite frequently it’s that specific interest in their body parts that, alone, leads trans women to conclude that they’re being fetishized.
“Chasers” are often found on transgender dating apps or commonly in places where transgender women are expected to be. To be completely blunt with you, these men often tend to be the sort of men who really struggle with cis women and they find transgender women easier to manipulate. For me a “chaser” isn’t simply a man who is interested in transgender women; it’s more so that they have an obsessive, methodical way of pursuing transgender women that satiates their fetish for transness. A lot of these men fetishize the steep power difference between trans women and cis, heterosexual men. Many transgender women on dating sites use them as a source of validation. For many especially younger, newly transitioning trans women, a straight man expressing interest in you is flattering and reinforcing of your gender. They say to themselves “how could he be attracted to me, as a straight man if I weren’t feminine and passable?”. These men are aware of the fact that trans women are so rarely flattered in their daily lives, so they approach trans women anticipating that they will be insecure enough to easily give them what they want with very little effort on their end. Men who are unimpressive to most cis women can very easily find an insecure, gorgeous transgender woman who wasn’t socialized to see her body as special enough not to be shared with every guy who says something nice to them. Some of these “chasers” become rather addicted to these sorts of exchanges and they are almost always done in secret.
It’s true that chasers fetishize transness, but when you’ve dealt with them, you understand that it tends to be a bit more than that. Many of these men fetishize the position transgender women are put in and they almost rely on it to entertain their particular fetish. Like most fetishes, this interest of theirs is one they do not share and, would never want to share, so these men don’t ever genuinely entertain the idea of taking a transgender woman out or publicly claiming that they have an interest in them (unless it’s tied to a financial or social gain, which is rare beyond the context of sex work). It’s been probably over 10 years since I’ve given my time or energy to men who move like this and the one thing that got them to really leave me alone was requiring that everyone I share my body with be confident enough to sit with me in public. When I was still entertaining chasers, I remember there being “relationships” I had that never left the four corners of a man’s apartment. Every time we’d see each other, he’d swear that it would be the time he’d take me out on a regular date, but that time would never come. Instead what would happen is they would flatter my fragile ego, I’d feel comfortable near them and he’d ultimately get to have sex with me while desperately hiding it from everyone. While I never intentionally entertained men like this, many of these men are married or partnered with cis women who frequently had no clue that their partners even had an interest in trans women. These men got off on the fact that they were secretly having sex with transgender women and no one knew anything about it. For some of these men this becomes almost an addiction. They’re having sex with an undesirable, and the fact that they’re sleeping with a dreg of society turns them on. It’s that thrill that becomes their fetish. The secrecy is part of the fetish most of the time. To be clear, this is quite different from people who are simply exploring and aren’t quite ready to “come out” yet about their attractions. Those people are trying to figure themselves out, while a chaser knows what he likes and tends to get off on the fact that no one knows what he’s doing, which is very different, but can feel the same. It’s for that reason that I don’t give my time or body to either type of man.
Like many people, I struggled with the idea that a person could ever love or truly be attracted to a transgender person without fetishizing them, but age and reflection have taught me that this is a position that embraces my otherness and the, often misgendering, narratives that are frequently projected onto me. As I said, these conversations are frustrating because so frequently transgender women are left to have them on their own, with zero input from the cis men who pursue us. If we are invested in a better social understanding of trans attraction, that’s going to require that some of these men step forward and express trans attraction in a confident, unflinching way. A way where you can tell that their attraction can never be used against them. In a way where it’s clear that when they say they’re attracted to women, that trans women are included in that description. The very premise of this video relies on this idea that there is something inherently repulsive about a cis man fallating a penis. The man asking anticipated the men he interviewed would be heterosexual; and would be so disgusted by the question that they’d either reject the premise entirely, or give a large number to show how straight they were. But here you had a guy whose reaction wasn’t to dismiss the idea, but to specify that he doesn’t have a cissexist view of bodies. His response is being criticized because it goes off of a heteronromative script. It’s the response of someone who, like me, has examined society’s often incorrect conclusions about transgender women and decided to instead embrace transgender women as women, regardless of whether or not people agree with him or disagree with him. And it’s that degree of confidence and how little he seems to care about what other’s have to say about his sexuality that, in my view, would make him a healthy partner for a transgender woman.
So is “Based Chaser” a chaser? Based on this video, I’d say probably not. I can’t imagine a chaser feeling this comfortable discussing his experience with trans women with the world. His particular experience with trans women does not, in my opinion, make him a chaser. He might not be for me, personally, but that doesn’t mean his expressed experience and desires are fetishistic or “chaser”-like. He’s doing what more men should be doing: claiming his interest in trans women without a sign of shame. While I feel like that’s asking for the bare minimum, it’s still uncommon enough for me to understand why many trans women are fawning over him. I look forward to the day where men can state that they’re interested in transgender women without anyone blinking an eye. Until then, I’ll be right here writing about the complexities of it all.
I was raised in a small suburb in Los Angeles County, an hour east of the city. When I tell people about the racial demographics of my hometown, they often respond with some version of “oh that’s interesting”; because my suburb consisted predominantly of Chinese and Korean immigrants. Once my family moved out of the neighborhood, shortly after I went to college, we were the last non-Chinese family on our block. My High School was slightly more diverse, but still predominantly Asian. It was different than most schools, apparently, because we didn’t really break off into racial groups as much as we broke off into groups with similar interests. If I were to put my High School friend group into a category, it would probably be “the creative kids who blog”. We all had one physical journal we’d pass around and draw in, and each of us eagerly awaited every new Myspace or Xanga post a person in our friend group would make. While we were diverse, we didn’t have any white people in our friend group. They were a decided minority at our school, and frankly the few white kids that were there, quite often transferred out. To my understanding, in the 80’s, when our neighborhood was established, there were more white people in the community, but it had since become more of a haven for, frankly, rich asian immigrants. I can only think of one white family on our street growing up and by the time my family left, they’d been gone for a very long time.
Unfortunately, I’m a theater kid and was all through Middle and High School. For whatever reason, theater, more than any activity I participated in, was heavily populated by white students. I was the only black kid most of my Thespian career and that was always a bitter sweet experience. On one hand, people had this way of assuming I was more musically inclined than I frankly was, and there were a handful of roles I immediately got when they called for a black actor. For example, when we went to DTASC, a High School theater competition, I got to play Gary Coleman in our rendition of Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist. I was a first tenor, after all, so I suppose it was perfect casting. On the other hand, there was something quite odd about doing a performance about race with my High School theater troupe, which was predominately white. Theater was where I started experiencing what Derald Wing Sue would describe as “microaggressions“; The everyday slights, indignities, put downs and insults that people of color, women, LGBT populations or those who are marginalized experiences in their day-to-day interactions with people.
If you’ve ever been the only black person in a mostly white theater group, you’ve probably heard the same old tired joke. You’re back stage, the lights are off and someone bumps into you purposefully and says “wow! I’m sorry! I couldn’t see you!! You disappeared in the dark!”. The joke of course being that you’re soooo dark skinned that when the lights were dimmed, you faded into the background. Sometimes this joke would be followed up with some comment about how you’ve transformed into the Cheshire Cat; your teeth floating in the middle of the air because they’re just so much brighter than the color of your skin. The N word was their favorite forbidden, yet entertaining word, especially with a hard “er”. When they’d use it, they were sure to tell me that it wasn’t racist, nor was it referring specifically to me. “Nigger” meant ignorant and apparently it was a term that could apply to everyone, regardless of race. I wasn’t ignorant though, I was one of the good ones. In this situation, if I said they were being racist, I would be immediately ostracized, which isn’t a teenager’s favorite experience. Their standard defense would be “it’s a joke” and I’d be laughed at for taking it seriously or describing it as hurtful. Acceptance among my peers was so important back then that I coveted the role of the “cool” black person. The black person who wasn’t so easily offended. The black person who didn’t get “triggered” by the n word or other negative things said about black people. So i took it in stride, internalized it and normalized the idea that standing up for myself probably wasn’t something I should do.
It wasn’t until I went away to college that I started existing in predominantly white spaces beyond singular elective activities. The habits I established for myself in High School would start to wear on me in College and I would struggle to really figure out why. College was a time of growth for me, but I was 17 my first year and still learning about the world. Valencia was decidedly white and still quite far from the city. We were the strange kids on the hill in a very conservative suburban town that was, frankly, unwelcoming to us. We tried not to let that get to us though. Desert raves were fairly common back then. Someone would drive out into the middle of the desert, bring a generator and a DJ table and we’d all go out into the darkness and party until the cops broke it up. These were the days of my youth I reflect fondly upon now. By then, I’d been through a lot, but I was still so wet behind the ears, innocent and naive.
One time, a group of students were protesting some politician a few towns over who was a known White Supremacist. I think that was the first time I had heard of an actual, White Supremacist running for public office in the modern era. I know that sounds naive in a country where we’ve got assholes like David Duke, but back then the idea was shocking and honestly scary to me. It was my first time really seeing that people like that still existed, and wanted to legislate against me in a very tangible way. Even though it felt so outside of what was happening at our school, I was scared.
One week, one of the DJs at our school decided to throw yet another desert rave. I wanted to go, but it was crunch time for us Character Animation students, as always. Besides, I couldn’t get a ride out there anyways. But when I heard how the party went the next morning, I was really happy I hadn’t gone. Apparently, a group of white supremacists showed up to the party and threatened people with crowbars and other weapons. They trashed some of the party and tried to get the kids at the event to go home. I remember how scared everyone who was there was, and it was yet another example of this whole racism thing being more tangible and current than I had previously understood. Growing up in my tiny little town, the idea of interacting with a white supremacist still seemed so foreign to me.
I grew up like a lot of kids in the 90’s with a “post-race” view of racism. We learned a version of racism that began and ended at acknowledging each other’s races. The way I’d learned about racism was that it happened forever ago, but wasn’t nearly as impactful now. I’d learned that these days, racism was pointing out that your friend was black, nothing more than that. I was sheltered, so of course this meant that, especially given my circumstance, it was easy for me to dismiss claims of racism. When I moved to Valencia, I had several experiences that felt like racism, but because of how I’d grown to accept microaggressions, actually calling out racism was hard; especially when I barely understood it. I’m adopted, but my parents are black and they made a pretty deliberate decision to raise me in a non-black suburb where I could go to a good school. My mother was a military brat who grew up around the world and ultimately graduated from Harvard. My father grew up in the projects of Boston and from what he tells me, his youth was rife with incidents of police brutality and racist incidents between the black and white projects in Boston. It’s clear that when my parents moved out of Boston and to Los Angeles that they wanted me to have what they didn’t. I can understand why they made that choice, but at the same time, I also see how that strategy meant that I was disconnected from the realities of racism and white supremacy. My closest connection to a larger black community was my extended family; most of whom reject me because I’m transgender. So I have indeed, through various phases of my life, not exactly preferred the company of other black people; because I didn’t prefer experiencing transphobia. However, this has allowed me to enter into my adult life with an embarrassing unawareness of the realities of racism. It didn’t help that the community I grew up in wasn’t really one where racism was ever discussed beyond the classroom. I can’t remember my asian friends ever speaking to me about their own experiences with racism, but then again, unlike me, they were functioning in a community composed of mostly other asian people. Like most small towns, it’s not terribly uncommon for the people who grow up there to never leave. Leaving my town opened my eyes to the realities of racism and going to college meant that I finally took history classes that were less about patriotism and more about telling the truth. The truth being that racism is indeed systemic. That even though legally, things like slavery and segregation are off the books, that these things very much still exist and are perpetuated in some very insidious ways. That is what systemic racism is; a collection of sometimes blatant, often plausibly deniable actions that exist to maintain the trappings of white supremacy in this country.
This became particularly relevant to me as conversations around police brutality became more common. As news articles about unarmed black people being murdered by police started coming across my feed, I saw many of the same white kids from my theater classes who discouraged me from calling out their racism, say absolutely disgusting things about people who looked like me. They would look for every reason to justify the police’s actions, even when completely indefensible. They’d take these conversations as a chance to vent their true feelings about black people all while still remaining connected to me, their token. And when I would say something, much like all of those times backstage, they’d simply repeat the mantra that I was different. But in these instances of police brutality, it didn’t matter how well educated or well spoken the black person was. In most of these situations, the police simply saw a black person and decided that they were in danger; so they killed them. Implicit biases like that can make it tempting to feed into the narrative of the exceptional negro who is so unlike the other blacks; but the very idea of living to counteract that narrative requires you to live life in a way where you constantly focus on avoiding the racist ideas projected onto you because you’re black. That mindset breeds self-hate and self-loathing and it’s a subtle way in which white people reinforce their supremacy over you by handing you a narrow script and punishing you for not properly delivering your lines. These conversations and the reactions some of my peers had to them made it perfectly clear to me that quite a few people were walking around with ignorance around race and racism.
Towards the end of college, I made a point of taking courses in school about race in America. I learned a lot of things that shocked and surprised me; like the construction of “whiteness”; something that sounds completely made up if you haven’t read beyond your High School history books. I learned about Takao Ozawa, a Japanese American who argued that his assimilation into American culture meant that he should be legally considered white. Being “legally considered white” is probably, again, confusing, but believe it or not, for some time in this country, the requirement for naturalization was that you be a “free white persons of good moral character”. This meant that if you wanted the right to, for example, own land and accumulate wealth and have upward mobility in this country, you had to be legally considered white and free. So Takao Ozawa challenged the United States to petition for his right to be legally defined as a white man, despite being Japanese. He would ultimately, predictably, fail and the case would conclude that “white” was technically a term used to describe “caucasians”. This case gave way to yet another similar case of a man named Bhagat Singh Thind, a man who was born in India, but immigrated to the United States who wanted to similarly argue that he should be legally considered white. Since he was technically from the Caucasus region, he was, by definition, caucasian, and this gave him more ground to stand on than Ozawa. Yet, his case was similarly rejected and his naturalization denied. The reasons? That people who immigrated from India could not properly assimilate into whiteness and thus be defined as white.
When you look at cases like this, you can very easily start to see the foundation of systemic racism. Asian men, who were already actively working, producing and functioning in this country were denied their right to naturalization and all of the various things that come with it all because they could not properly be defined as white men. When you look into these cases, you hear both of these men argue that they had, in many ways, been “one of the good ones’ ‘. Ozawa argued that his Christianity made him more palatable, and Thind highlighted his Aryan heritage and vowed not to mate with a dark skinned woman. These were things used to argue that they were closer to white than they were their own races; but this wasn’t without reason. Back then, being considered white meant being able to move through society with more freedom and access. There were tangible reasons to argue for a closer proximity to whiteness. And beneath my own acceptance of the racism my peers expressed towards me, was a similar desire for a proximity to whiteness that was socially rewarded. I had to have some of those conversations to see things more clearly and learn to stand up for myself and against the racism that harms me.
After graduating college, I started taking Youtube far more seriously and started producing videos with a lot of the information I learned about systemic racism. I wanted to spread the information because I felt many people were still ignorant about the realities of what race and racism has been in this country. I took all of the respectability I knew the privileged appreciated of me and put it into video projects where I very politely spoke about systemic racism in a way that I thought was accessible. I educated a lot of people, but the majority of people who saw this content rejected it outright, because I was the one delivering it. It might sound confusing, but I’ve learned that white people very often do not want to hear about racism from anyone other than other white people; which is one of the strange and paradoxical ways in which white supremacy materializes a lot of anti-racism work, but I’ll discuss that in depth in an upcoming entry.
For now, I’ll leave you with the acknowledgement that those kids from my theater class were never my friends. I was simply their “black friend” they could reference when they were being racist and I’m glad I stopped being flattered by that and started seeing it for what it was: simply racism, with more steps.
Blaque In The City 