hunt-the-queer.md

this article discusses kink, transmisogyny, "anti-pedophilia", and ABDL.

previously in wplace.md, i described wplace, an online /r/place-like pixel art placer played on a map of the globe. a friend of mine recently informed me that a transphobe had vandalized an ADBL pride flag local to their area.

for the uninformed, "ABDL" stands for "adult baby" / "diaper lover", and it's an umbrella term for people who like to pretend to be younger ages, engage in a cared/caretaker dynamic, or just wear diapers. i feel i can safely trust the vast majority of my readership to be normal about what other adults do with their bodies and their free time, though for the odd reader who has stumbled onto this page and who already feels compelled to vomit forth their personal discomfort as if it were serious political analysis worthy of terribly much consideration, i will tap the "what other people do is not your business" sign, and very politely remind that reader that if they don't want to wear a diaper, they don't have to.

slightly more in number than that reader are the ones that don't feel as though they should tell other people what to do -- of course not, they're good people, you see -- but they do feel that those kinds of things -- nothing ever specific, always "those things" -- should be kept in private. and they would never do anything as drastic as harass someone over it -- they're good people, you see -- but they do think that those people -- always "those people" -- should really exercise a little more discernment about what they choose to display in public. to those, i give an even more polite reminder that people have a right to exist out loud in public, wave flags, wear diapers, whatever the fuck they want to, and more importantly: a right to do so without being harassed. to those who have more to say about people being harassed than those doing the harassing, i will extend an invite to re-evaluate their moral compass.

and that, i hope, is enough window-dressing around the actual thing i am trying to write to the people i am actually writing to. any and all further "but-what-if-they-make-someone-uncomfortable"-type hand-wringing will be redirected to /dev/null.

okay! so the thing that actually spurned this is that the particulars of the vandalism forms a deeply rich text. the harasser in question had blacked out the flag and written "pedo trash" atop of it in red text. when the original flag-drawer protested with "the A stands for adult", the harasser changed the A to a B, and wrote "baeddel" over "adult" with the same red color. we're already in a deeply rich text!

we have all the time in the world, so why don't we start with the color choices? red text on black is supposed to come off as threatening -- bold and fashy, "keep out" signs smeared in blood on ash-blackened walls. unfortunately in the blocky pixelated look it comes off a little too honest as, well, baby's first op. they get a sticker for trying. but it does tip their hand: they very much want to appear threatening, and are trying to appoint themselves as a lynch-leader.

next, the word choices. "pedo" is a staple of the genre. it's the thing the straights need no evidence to believe: this group of freaks are actually abusing children. this move is the obvious first choice in the "hunt the queer" game, as it pulls in the support from the otherwise-apathetic and forces their opponents to pull support from a smaller pool. the tactic here is isolation; they're trying to cut off their targets from their support structures.

but "baeddel"... ough, this informs a lot. specifically, it means the harasser is deep into the transmisogyny side of the internet. it's a long story to get from a specific clique of trans women on tumblr in 2014 to here, but i'll cut to the chase: "baeddel", in this context, means "trans woman who i think speaks too much about transmisogyny". and more specifically, this is being invoked to describe a group of people the harasser "believes" are pedophiles! what's interesting is that it's a suboptimal move in the "hunt the queer" game, since it's a dogwhistle -- it doesn't mean anything to the straights. but segments of the transfem online (and the transmisogynists) will register the attack.

using dogwhistles doesn't really make sense in the lynchbuilding stage of "hunt the queer". once people tolerate the word "pedophile" being tossed around, you don't need obscure phrases like "baeddel". the goal of a dogwhistle is to signal support to like-minded peers and communicate openly about tactics and goals, without directly speaking about them. human nature is fundamentally kind, and directly explaining your intentions ("hunt the queer") tends to get you shunned and isolated. but if you're in a position to rally up a mob (usually spoken in some variant of "we have to get the pedophiles right now before they get us / our children"), you don't need the dogwhistles anymore. if there's anything to take from this, it's this: the dogwhistles typically come before the lynchbuilding.

so what then? what's the counterplay?

1. gather friends and organize.

i put out a call in the spaces i'm in to help restore the flag. it helped that i was in online queer groups that, for the most part, have a "kink and let kink, and furthermore take no shit" approach to sexuality and the human experience writ large. if you're a queer person i highly recommend you seek out these spaces as those people are going to be the ones to have your back when shit hits the fan.

in this particular instance, there were two vandals trying to work in tandem (or one, with an alternative account). myself plus the friend in question made equal numbers, so i recruited two more friends. add in the original creator of the flag, and that made five. over the course of the counter-vandalism, this number doubled as other people noticed and joined in on undoing the vandalism.

2. play the resources game.

in this particular instance, the means and the method of resistance were pretty obvious: we have more numbers and more pixels. the original flag was completely blocked over, so i whipped up a redesign and coordinated it with our group. the vandal(s), of course, tried to fight back, but a couple decisions made it impossible for them to.

writing out words "costs" more than making simple symbols, so my strategy was to pick a couple key pixels (the black safety pin, the horizontal nature of the stripes) and repeatedly restore them. furthermore, it took fewer pixels to render text unreadable than it did to erase completely, which proved more effective in the long run.

lastly, i made sure to wait until after the vandals struck to immediately reverse their damage. the game here is part practical (more time with the flag shown loud and proud) and part psychological: vandals are going to be a lot less interested in defacing the flag if it's going to get undone within the minute.

3. take up space.

the vandalism and restoration went on a back and forth for two days. in that time i was able to not only expand the flag but draw two characters in diapers, which deeply pissed off the vandals (at least if the now non-stop "pedo" and "baby sex" comments had anything to say about it). in the end, having their efforts be met with redoubling, expansion, and a written statement of community finally got them to back off, and the flag and art both stand now undisturbed. it's a tiny victory, but one i'll claim.

as i was cleaning up the vandal text, three things struck me. one, the vandals were pretty textbook sexual harassers. they took characters and symbols other people created, interpreted them as inherently sexual, and took it upon themselves to do the "right" thing and harass those people with sexualizing comments. it's not meaningfully different from men who do the same with women's bodies.

the second thing is that, like sexual harassers, they wanted their targets to be sexualized. nobody was forcing them to read pedophilic text into what is signposted as an adult community. the motive here is, like all sexual harassers, power: getting to dictate what is and is not sexual and predatory, and "punish" people according to their interpretation.

and the last thing was the virulent transmisogyny. accusations of being child predators get slung at queer people and communities all the time, but it's an accusation that really only seems to stick these days to trans women in particular, at least in the minds of straight people. not only did these vandal(s) know about this association, they deliberately tried to weaponize it.