Can I just second that tumblr is the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to lgbt community. Tumblr is just, GOD absolutely dogshit for LGBT people. The only way you get away with being lgbt on tumblr is if youre a white gay man or lesbian, if youre literally anything else, people are gonna come start trying to police your identity, and even if you are just a simple white gay man/lesbian, being there dealing with that environment is still awful.
Sorry for jumping in and interrupting all of a sudden, I just saw people talking about it and wanted to vent
I was going to say you also have to be trans to be taken seriously on Tumblr, but then I remembered that terfs are an actual thing on that hellsite and that, actually, you're correct. But really, no matter your gender, you probably won't win on Tumblr. Terfs hate the trans kids. Tumblr's trans kids hate cis people. People from both sides seem to hate enbies, despite the fact that enbies
are trans. And at the end of the day, everyone gets anon death threats. It's
great.
That said, Tumblr's always struck me as weird, even when I was more heavily steeped in it. (Side point: Except for an ask blog I still run on that hellsite, I've fled to Twitter and the great outdoors, and let me tell you,
it's like a breath of fresh air compared to existing on Tumblr.) Like ... on the one hand, it's a social media site, so you'll have people doing whatever they can for attention and follower counts, including either parroting the vitriol of whatever communities they identify with. On the other, it's also a blogging platform, so it's understandable why people would spew things like "ugh, the cis/straights are at it again": because they, personally, are hella tired of the way they're treated offline and feel like their blog is a personal, private space on which they can vent (even if it really isn't). So in other words, the kids who spew poisonous stuff like that don't necessarily actually
believe that; they just don't get a chance to express that elsewhere.
However. Despite being queer af (although according to Tumblr, my romantic identity is a cry for attention while my sexual identity is just a preference and not a true sexuality), I actually think the way Tumblr goes about discussing gender and orientation is just as harmful as the heteronormative shenanigans you find offline or on Facebook. As in, put it this way: for a lot of kids, Tumblr is either their first or foremost (or both) exposure to the LGBT community, and these experiences come right as they're in their formative years. But the problem is that quite a few popular Tumblr posts focus on how ridiculous straight/cis/[insert identity here] people are (and that's just the
polite stuff on there—let's not even get into the flamewars, anon hate, constant bullying, idolization of various identities, etc), so kids end up being led to believe they're not going to be considered valid by people they respect if they don't identify in a very specific way. So, naturally, this affects what they look for in themselves or how they value themselves when they realize that one of their identities doesn't match what Tumblr values the most. (Maaaan, I still remember that one time a fourteen-year-old felt she had to put an apology in her bio because she was white. Not LGBT, but that should give you an idea of what Tumblr is like on the daily when a child has to apologize for her skin color.)
Or even more tl;dr, I do think it's important for kids to be exposed to LGBT concepts so that they can begin the whole process of questioning themselves and thus maybe come to a better understanding of who they are and what will make them happy. I just think that Tumblr is
not doing that and is, in the cases of quite a few popular bloggers, doing things that are just as bad as what straight people have been doing for ages. That and Tumblr almost implies that your entire self
must be what you identify as by overemphasizing the value of these labels, as Feymark pointed out.
Or Tumblr is a hellsite, basically what Feymark said, and I am not surprised but extremely sorry that that dumpster fire of a website left you uncertain, Picket.
/ranty mcranterson because seriously tumblr is the worst
