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Musk promoted an anti-transgender movie
Since last October, billionaire Elon Musk has owned Twitter, a social media site with 450 million users. He started June by pinning his quote retweet of an anti-transgender movie. He remarked, "Every parent should watch this." The movie is What Is A Woman?, by Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh. The Daily Wire invited everyone to stream the 95 minute movie for free. It is a propaganda piece that uses misinformation to oppose the existence of transgender people. Until then, the movie had been behind a paywall. Media Bias Fact Check describes the Daily Wire as a right-wing news and opinion site that has medium credibility. The civil rights nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch has called Walsh and his boss “peddlers of fear and disinformation about LGBTQ people” (Wilson, Nov 22, 2022). Musk has been known for his transphobia since before he bought Twitter (Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle, Dec 13 2022). NBC reported that the Daily Wire’s CEO and other anti-transgender influencers such as Robby Starbuck had demanded for Musk to make the site stop suppressing the movie for its hate speech. Musk complied. Walsh, who had released the movie in June last year, said “What a great way to ring in Pride Month.” (Tolentino and Ingram, NBC, June 2, 2023).
What is that movie, and why is it so harmful?
The movie’s title refers to how they spend the movie interviewing various people about what a woman is, with the goal to discredit the validity of transgender people. Matt Walsh and Justin Folk had a bad enough reputation that no transgender people or allies would willingly appear in their movie, so they tricked people into showing up. They founded a front group called the Gender Unity Project LLC, and used a registered agent to mask their connection to it. Their producer used a fake name when reaching out to people to interview. They advertised the movie and LLC to potential interviewees as being “about transgender and LGBTQIA+ communities, and the challenges they face in today’s culture” and that it would “[explore] the real lives of people in the LGBTQIA+ communities, and to shed some light on the topics of gender identity, and gender fluidity, in a way that will capture the attention of all Americans and be educational.” Transgender rights activist Eli Erlick discovered they were not who they seemed, and exposed them immediately.
The movie intentionally misrepresented and disparaged a variety of professionals and transgender individuals who Walsh misled into interviewing with him. He used deceptive editing and ambush interview tactics to make it look like the interviewees were either in complete agreement with his hateful perspective, or were contradicting themselves and didn’t make sense. He used the movie to push false claims about transgender people, including trying to connect transgender identity to sexual predation and implying that transgender individuals will regret transitioning or that transitioning is dangerous.
Far-right director Robby Starbuck plans to release a similar movie this summer, titled “It Takes a Village.” This will also be a hateful propaganda movie opposing the existence of transgender people. Starbuck, like Walsh, lied about the movie goals to potential interviewees. Erlick caught and exposed this trick even earlier than the last one. Starbuck’s team members misrepresented the project as “highlighting gender affirming care and the issues facing trans youth.” Erlick believes that Starbuck may have planned to arrest her should she have agreed to fly to Tennessee for the offered interview.
How did this movie misrepresent furries and therians?
A common illogical argument that bigots use to criticize LGBTQ people sounds something like this: “If we let women marry one another, then wouldn’t it be just as absurd if we let people marry animals? If someone can identify as a woman, wouldn’t it be just as absurd if someone identifies as an animal?” Walsh used that tactic in his picture book Johnny the Walrus. Walsh’s movie has segments about furries and therians, in an effort to say that saying you are a woman is as absurd as saying you are an animal.
In one segment in the movie, Walsh interviews Sara Stockton, a family therapist. She incorrectly tells him that furries have demanded litter boxes in schools. Reuters Fact Check has an article that debunks that part of the movie. It’s well-known to be an urban legend that has never happened in any school. Conservatives have circulated it for the past few years to satirize transgender students asking to use the restroom of their choice. An alterhuman community historian did a presentation about how the legend has developed (House of Chimeras, 2022). The legend is why a few of this year’s hundreds of anti-transgender bills in the US say they also oppose people who identify as animals. Those are Montana Senate Bill 544, North Dakota House Bill 1522, Oklahoma Senate Bill 943, and Indiana Statehouse Bill 380.
In the next segment, Walsh interviewed Naia Okami. Okami has frequently sought and accepted media publicity for the past decade, even with producers her peers advised her to avoid (Okami, Oct 18, 2022). Around the same time as when she interviewed with Walsh, she accepted interviews with two other far-right media known for their hostility toward openly transgender people such as herself: The Sun (Jan 23 2022) and Fox News (Feb 7 2022). In these three interviews, she described herself as a wolf otherkin and therian. When Walsh tried to get her to describe herself as transspecies, she “vehemently rejected” that, so Walsh didn’t use those parts of the interview in the movie (Okami, June 5, 2022). (Okami has never called herself transspecies, and had spoken against the word for years.) Instead, against her wishes, he referred to her as a “trans wolf,” a label that she never used and which makes her “want to vomit” (Okami, June 8, 2022). A few months after the movie came out, she announced that she no longer calls herself a therian. She said, “I will always be a wolf girl; but I am not nor do I want to be … a member of the alterhuman, therianthropy, or otherkin communities” (Okami, Oct 18, 2022).
Like many of the other interviewees, Okami has explained how she was interviewed under false pretenses by a producer who used an alias. She shared records of her correspondences with the producer. She was not aware that Walsh would be the one interviewing her. He asked “intentionally provocative and leading questions.” She was looking into taking legal action, because the movie used the appearances of herself and others without informed consent (Okami, May 21, 2022).
By the end of the day, Musk’s promotion of the free movie on Twitter had caused it to have more than 62 million views (Tolentino and Ingram, NBC, June 2, 2023). This may be how most people in the world first hear of anything like otherkin, therians, furries, or transspecies identity. This may contribute to more widespread attitudes that are misinformed about and hostile toward these groups.
Musk’s Twitter welcomes fascists while suppressing LGBT speech
Musk has a history of supporting antisemitic and fascist ideology and espousing anti-LGBT rhetoric. One of Musk’s first actions when he bought Twitter was to share an anti-gay conspiracy theory published by a right-wing news source about the October 2022 attack on Paul Delosi. Twitter under Musk rolled back content policy protections for the site’s transgender users. He has also been known to quote Nazis, has reinstated the Twitters accounts of multiple neo-Nazis who were previously banned for hate speech, and has transferred his Twitter CEO title to a former Trump appointee. On Transgender Day of Visibility, users noticed that Twitter’s algorithm flags tweets for sensitive content if they contain the words LGBT, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, trans, queer, gender identity, pronouns, or TERF. Meanwhile, it doesn’t flag the words gender critical (which is what many transphobes prefer to call themselves), Nazi, fascist, or fascism. The algorithm’s source code shows that it’s designed to suppress and hide tweets that contain external links, misspelled words (as happens when users to try to get around suppressed words), and all mention of Ukraine. If you wanted to stand your ground and use Twitter to speak up for good causes, that’s exactly what it makes sure nobody will hear.
Musk vows to criminalize transgender healthcare
Musk pushes his anti-transgender attitudes in more places than just in this platform he owns. He vowed that he will be “actively lobbying to criminalize” gender affirming care in individuals under the age of 18. He supports long-term imprisonment without parole for anyone who supports or assists in such care, including therapists (Thakker, New Republic, June 2, 2023). He can wield unmatched influence over politics because he is the world’s wealthiest person at more than $100 billion dollars (Toh, CNN, May 31, 2023).
What you can do
Leave Twitter and bring your friends. Musk, and the platform he has through Twitter, is a threat to our civil rights and our lives. Twitter is not a safe place to be, because it is increasingly being turned into a fascist platform. As long as you’re there, you’re handing money to fascists, even if you’re not paying a subscription (Solarbird, April 23, 2023). You can’t fight the normalization of fascism by continuing to contribute to a fascist space (Solarbird, Dec 7, 2022). If you work for free to be a content provider for Twitter, then you are supporting fascism. Remember a German proverb: “If one nazi sits at a table, and ten other people sit there talking with him, that’s a table with eleven nazis.” It will become harder to avoid sitting and talking with Nazis on Twitter, because Musk says he will get rid of the option to block users (Ngo, Washington Times, June 8, 2023). Many users have been migrating away from Twitter. We strongly advise that you do so as well, and help your friends migrate, too. You must, to protect your friends, and to quit supporting the normalization of fascism.
Follow relevant news, and sharpen your media literacy skills. Whenever a friend shares a news article with you, see what Media Bias Fact Check says about that news source, and see what Reuters Fact Check and Snopes have to say about its content. Avoid boosting or interacting with transphobes and nazis on social media by learning how to recognize their characteristic jargon and the “dog whistles” that they use to signal themselves to one another. See the Anti-Defamation League’s encyclopedia of hate group symbols. Here’s a list of dog whistles racists and nazis use, ones transphobes use, and more that transphobes use. We recommend following Solarbird’s Fascism Watch blog post series, where she has been keeping track of news about the rise of transphobia and fascism, with an eye on its rise on Twitter. If someone contacts you for interviews or media projects, your job is to research them and their previous work before you agree to anything. Document everything. If they turn out to be exploitative, spread the warning fast. Take some notes from how Erlick does it.
Donate to good causes and support marginalized peoples. Some reputable organizations that support LGBTQ people and their rights are The Trevor Project, GLAAD, Mermaids, Human Rights Campaign, and National Center for Transgender Equality, or other civil rights organizations, such as The American Civil Liberties Union. Be cautious about sound-alikes that impersonate good organizations, and use Charity Navigator to check their backgrounds. Boost and donate to your friends’ personal fundraisers for their health, legal expenses, and moving expenses. Donate to the social media platforms that you prefer, so they can afford to keep going. Support and mutual aid means more than just sending money to the right places. Listen to your friends who are LGBTQ or members of other marginalized groups. Educate yourself.
Mastodon is a better Twitter
What is Mastodon? From the perspective of a user, Mastodon looks and behaves very similarly to Twitter. If you’ve used TweetDeck or other front-ends for Twitter, then Mastodon’s layout will look familiar. Users can create short posts, use hashtags, boost other people’s posts, and follow one another… even if those other people are on different Mastodon servers. Each Mastodon server is independently run, and has its own rules and moderators. These servers communicate with one another via the Fediverse, an interconnected network of servers. This is similar to how you can use a Gmail account to send an email to someone on a Yahoo account: they’re on different servers, with their own rules and owners, but they can communicate with one another. This decentralization protects against the owners or users of a particular server being able to ruin the whole thing for everyone.
How do you sign up on Mastodon? Click on a server in the below list of ones that we recommend, and then click “create account.” If it says an invitation is required to create an account, ask a friend for one from that server, or try another server. Don’t get overwhelmed trying to choose the perfect server before you begin. After all, you can use it to talk to people on any other servers, if its moderators haven’t chosen to block those particular servers. If you join a server, and then you don’t like its rules or moderators after all, or if the culture there goes bad, then you can move to another server, automatically bringing your follow list with you. You can carry on your Mastodon experience without a pause and without getting stuck with moderators you distrust. We recommend these servers to our readers because they’re LGBTQ friendly, welcome various sorts of alterhumans, are opposed to hate speech, and are open to new users, though some require an invitation. They’re owned and maintained by ordinary hobbyists and volunteers who care, not corporations or evil billionaires. Later, consider chipping in a little money to support your favorite server, if they offer that option.
- https://awoo.space - This server “isn’t aimed at any specific audience, though there are a lot of queer furries here for some reason.”
- https://bark.lgbt - This server *is* aimed at queer furries.
- https://beach.city - Lightly themed around the cartoon Steven Universe.
- https://chitter.xyz - For furries.
- https://dragonscave.space - This dragon-themed server is especially for users who are visually impaired.
- https://equestria.social - For fans of My Little Pony. The moderators speak French as well as English. (By the way, you can find servers in whatever languages you want, which is great for immersion language learning.)
- https://meow.social - For furries.
- https://plural.cafe - For plural systems.
- https://plush.city
- https://tech.lgbt
- https://weirder.earth - Moderator team includes people who are POC, LGBTQ, and plural. Good track record at standing up to racism.
How do you make friends and find interesting blogs to follow on there? No algorithm plays matchmaker for you. We use hashtags, which is the only part of a post that shows up in a search. Usually people put hashtags that describe themselves and their interests in their #introduction post to help find others who share those interests.
How do you stay safe on there? Anyone with technical proficiency can create a Mastodon server and use it for good or bad. However, the Fediverse’s very design makes it easy for you to avoid the bad. Some Fediverse servers say they prohibit hate speech, but have been disappointing at enforcing that. Their moderators are overwhelmed, and unfamiliar with the needs of BIPOC, so racism goes unchecked. Those are widely-recognized problems with the servers mastodon.social and mastodon.online, so we don’t recommend joining those ones. Some Fediverse servers choose to allow hate speech, such as BlueSky. If you join a server that blocks problematic servers such as these, then those entire servers won’t be able to communicate with your server at all, period. Think of the story of the nazi bar: if a bartender lets in just one customer who wears nazi insignia but is polite, then that customer will come back with his nazi friends, everyone else will leave, and it will have become a nazi bar. A bartender who doesn’t want to accidentally find himself running a nazi bar has to prevent that from happening by kicking out even that one polite nazi. The Fediverse uses the nazi bar phenomenon against the nazis. Bigots and those who welcome them get isolated into their own space, and out of yours. By blocking entire servers because they have nazis there, your own server becomes something like Twitter without the nazis (Solarbird, Nov 6, 2022).
Mastodon has another safety feature: built-in content warnings. There is a widespread requirement to CW for content that is sexual, disturbing, or a spoiler. Followers will only see what’s beyond the CW if they click to open it. That’s good consent culture, and it makes Mastodon less stressful to scroll through than Twitter. In your settings, you can also filter out posts that use words that you don’t want to see at all.
Tumblr is great if you liked retweeting
What is Tumblr? Tumblr is a social media site that hosts 572 million blogs. It’s less similar to Twitter, but it does have a feature like retweeting, called reblogging. Even better, you can add tags to what you reblog, so you can categorize and later find things you’ve reblogged. That makes Tumblr an ideal platform for circulating fandom content, art, and memes.
How do you sign up on Tumblr? You can sign up on Twitter with just an email address, without sharing other personal information. Tumblr allows for users to have one primary blog, and as many side blogs as they want. You can customize the appearance of your blog using HTML and CSS. On desktop, install the browser extension xKit Rewritten and play with its settings to improve your experience of Tumblr.
How do you stay safe on Tumblr? You can curate your experience with blocking and filtering. Use tags to give content warnings, which others can use to filter your posts, and view them only if they consent to see that content. For that to work, don’t censor words. You can hide posts that use certain words, which helps you filter out posts from users who hate LGBTQ. Here’s a guide for how to do that. And another guide with screenshots for how to do that in the settings, and another guide. On desktop, install the third-party browser extension, Shinigami Eyes, which often helps warn you that a Tumblr account is known to express anti-transgender views.
How do you make friends and find interesting blogs on Tumblr? Tumblr tags are great for that. Use this web address, and replace the word “food” with some other key word for any topic that interests you: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/food?sort=recent It will show you the most recent posts that people have tagged with that word. The accounts you follow will often reblog from other users, and you can use those as leads to find other interesting blogs.
Discord has many ways to communicate
What is Discord? Discord is a combination of many forms of communication in one. It supports group chat rooms, private messaging, voice calls, video calls, and streams for both one-on-one direct messages and for groups. It isn’t similar to Twitter at all, but it’s fantastic for talking with friends and meeting new people. All Discord servers are all required to follow Discord’s Community Guidelines, which bans hate speech, harassment, and violent extremism. Many plural systems enjoy using a bot on Discord, PluralKit, which lets you create something like separate accounts for each of your system members, without having to sign in and out.
What servers might you join? Discord allows for the creation of servers based around specific interests and groups of people. Servers can be tight-knit private groups, or huge public groups, or anything in-between. Most servers have a specific theme or focus that they adhere to. There are some excellent servers about being alterhuman. Ask your friends for recommendations and invitations to these and other servers.
Dreamwidth.org is the best social blog site
What is Dreamwidth? Dreamwidth is a social blogging platform based off of code from Livejournal. If you used Livejournal long ago, Dreamwidth will feel like home. If you’ve only used Twitter or Tumblr, you can adapt to the differences soon enough, because it has an especially well made FAQ. (Here is a collection of more info about how to use Dreamwidth, written for people who are more accustomed to Tumblr.) Dreamwidth focuses on creating your own original content and interacting with other folks’ original content in personal blogs and in “communities,” which are group forum blogs. Dreamwidth’s design is ideal for long pieces of writing, serialized works, and conversation threads. Because of this, many blogs that are especially active on Dreamwidth today are those that focus on fan fiction, role play, personal diaries, and essays, but you can put nearly any kind of subject matter there.
How do you join Dreamwidth? On the front page of Dreamwidth.org, click “create free account.” (Paying a subscription to help support the site will give you a few perks, but a free account is just as functional as a paid one.) Make up a username. Tell your email address and birthdate, which you can keep private in your profile settings. You can customize the appearance of your blog. We strongly recommend you use Solarbird’s theme that makes your blog mobile-friendly.
How do you find friends and interesting blogs on Dreamwidth? You can discover more blogs that focus on things you like by adding a list of interests to your profile, searching for others who put those interests in their profiles too. You can look at the Latest Things (the newest posts and tags by all users). You can also use Dreamwidth to follow the news! Dreamwidth has a built-in RSS feed reader, so you can use it to subscribe to content from other sites. Many sites offer RSS feeds: major news sources, comics, subreddits, Tumblr blogs, AO3 tags, and more. YsabetWordsmith regularly features interesting active communities in her FollowFriday tag. For the alterhuman readers of our blog, we recommend joining these communities:
- Dreamwidth_therians: A members-only group for therians and otherkin.
- Fictionkind: A members-only group for fictionfolk to discuss their experiences based on prompts.
- Otherkin: A public group for otherkin.
- Otherkin_haven: A members-only group for otherkin.
- OtherkinNews (that’s us!): A volunteer-run blog for sharing news for otherkin, therianthropes, fictionfolk, plural systems, and all sorts of alterhumans.
- PluralArchives: Citations of plural and pluralish phenomena collected in one place.
- PluralStories: A searchable catalog of plural and pluralish stories.
- TheriThere: A comic about therianthropes and otherkin.
Forums make great community spaces
If you simply want a place to talk with friends about shared interests, consider web-based forums. Each forum has its own rules, moderation teams, and features. Search for forums that are built around your fandoms or other interests. We recommend these for alterhumans:
- Alt+H Forums: A quiet forum hosted by Alt+h, a nonhuman advocacy group. It is about alterhuman experiences as a whole.
- Draconity: A forum focused on dragons specifically. It had a site-wide update in 2022.
- Draconic: This forum for dragon otherkin has been running continuously since 1998.
- Nonhuman National Park: A forum focused on inclusion and intersectionality of nonhuman, alterhuman, and plural identities.
What do you do with your Twitter after you leave?
Some people choose to delete their Twitter account completely. This erases all their tweets and connections to other users. That means any conversation threads with this user will have pieces missing. That can interfere with other users’ archival efforts. Erasing your tracks that thoroughly can also make it difficult for your friends and followers to discover where you disappeared to and why.
If you don’t want to delete the account altogether, then sign into it once every 30 days, to prevent it from getting automatically deleted for inactivity. You don’t need to post anything: just sign in (Twitter, inactive account policy). Some people use a third-party tool to automatically delete all or most tweets. Removing content from the site is a good way to withdraw support from it. However, some users report that their deleted tweets come back later.
Should you leave your account public, or set it to “protected”? That status makes it so all your tweets, followers, and followed users can only be seen by users who you manually accept as your followers. Pros: this mostly prevents unwanted interactions or follows from random users, while leaving behind a signpost to let your friends know where you disappeared to and why. Cons: privating can interfere with others’ efforts to archive conversation threads just like if the account had been deleted. Archival tools can only pick up your tweets if they’re public.
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Appendix: A timeline of events related to this article
2022 January. The Gender Unity Project, LLC, invites transgender people and allies to interview in a movie. Meanwhile, Okami has interviews in The Sun, and UK breakfast TV show This Morning.
2022 February 7. Okami’s interview on Fox News. On the same day, Erlick publicly exposes that the Gender Unity Project is deceiving transgender people into interviewing with Walsh.
2022 March. Walsh publishes Johnny the Walrus, a picture book about a child being pressured to become a walrus, in parody of transgender children.
2022 May. Okami blogs a public statement about her involvement in What Is A Woman? with documentation of how they deceived her into showing up to it.
2022 June. Walsh releases What Is A Woman? Okami writes a detailed criticism of that movie.
2022 October. Okami announces that she no longer calls herself therian or otherkin. Musk buys Twitter and immediately posts an anti-gay conspiracy theory. He lays off thousands of employees, many crucial to the maintenance of the site software. He invites many users back to Twitter who had previously been banned for being nazis and white supremacists (Washington Post, Nov 11, 2022). Anticipating that Twitter will soon crash and/or become effectively a far-right site only, thousands of users leave or prepare to leave Twitter, filling their profiles and pinned tweets with links to where to find them on other social media sites.
2022 December. To discourage this, Twitter introduces an algorithm that prevents users from putting links to other social media sites in their profiles, and threatens to ban users for doing so.
2023 March and April. Users notice that Twitter’s algorithm suppresses tweets that contain external links, misspelled words, or mention of Ukraine. It suppresses LGBT related words, but not fascism related words. Twitter’s policy stops protecting transgender users against harassment. Even news agencies are quitting Twitter, such as NPR and PBS.
2023 May. To discourage this, Twitter starts banning accounts that have been inactive for a short amount of time.
2023 June. Musk quote-retweets and pins the Daily Wire’s free stream of What Is A Woman? The same day, he vows to lobby for the imprisonment of therapists who support transgender youth.
--About the writers: Alterhuman community historians and archivists House of Chimeras, Page Shepard, N. Noel Sol, and Orion Scribner collaborated on this article. Thanks to Solarbird for her Fascism Watch blog series, which helped us find news sources for much of what has been happening with Twitter.
