#. once again reblogs off/under readmore bc this is really just for me to keep everything in one place

[addiehour]

personal thoughts on the staff post about the situation. under readmore + rbs turned off bc this is more for my archival than anything else

one thing that immediately stands out is the lack of clarification on the ban.

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension. [...] Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

so what was? if it wasn't the transition timeline (which was repeatedly removed due to 'violating community guidelines', including after appeals) or the threat (which tbf i didn't assume was, on its own, the reason for the ban-- matt always cited it as 'one example'), then like... what exactly was?

the same (second) quote also re-asserts something we already knew. yeah, no duh, the concept of a transition timeline is not against community guidelines (tho it's worth mentioning that jv, an ex-employee, did refer to it as though it was equivalent to a sex worker posting an ad for their onlyfans.)

See, I don't think trans accounts here gets banned more often than, let's say, sex workers accounts. Because for Matt / moderation policies, posting a pic of your body to show up how your transition is going to your friends is the same than posting a picture of your body to promote your onlyfans. The context, the intention, doesn't matter much to them, the action is what matters. And of course, for a lot of trans folks here, their body is a very important topic to talk about, to show, to be proud of … but people like Matt don't really understand (or care) about the difference between that kind of self-expression and posting a thirst trap.

ftr, the above was posted before jv had seen the post in question (afaik), so they couldn't have known it was shoulders-up, but like-- this is still a drastically incorrect way to frame things. & transmisogynistic! like, first of all, if trans accounts don't get banned more often than sex workers... so what? they're not all sex workers, and even if they are, as long as their accs don't break guidelines they shouldn't be banned AS OFTEN AS "sex workers" (unclear if jv means sex workers or accounts specifically used for sex work).

it's also ridiculous because people post ootds all the time. people send photos of themselves in clothing made by artists on tumblr all the time, saying 'thanks for the [clothing item] it looks great on me!' i have never seen any of these threatened w community labels. objectively speaking, a trans woman saying 'look how my body has changed' in a FULLY CLOTHED transition timeline is not calling more attention to her body than a cis woman saying 'look how good i look in these jeans.' &, again, even on accounts by (e.g.) cis lesbians made for thirsting over each other (/pos) i fail to see any action being taken against (again, clothed) posts like 'i hear you girls like butches in flannel' or w/e. this is just obviously not true. moderation is not viewing all posts displaying people's bodies equally. (& tbh i disagree that you can linearly describe transition timelines as 'calling attention to the user's body', but like, whatever atp.)

furthermore, txttletale explained:

she was banned because her account was under a unique amount of scrutiny and subject to a mass harassment campaign and yes, that scrutiny came from the controversy around her transition photos.

so idrgaf if staff tells us more than once that she wasn't specifically banned for transition photos. that's like, not even the issue here. she has at least once had her account mass reported for posts like that to the point that she had to email and get it back, but even if it's not specifically over those pics, 1) they're still a major factor 2) wtf was it then lol 3) WHY DID THEY GET TAKEN DOWN.

bc nobody has managed to correctly address thus far why they continued to be consistently removed even after the appeals were re-considered by tumblr staff. i've seen some people posit that it was bc of the harness, which like. 1) i have not seen these labels on historical pride photos featuring harnesses, nor should they be used in those instances 2) whoah maybe that should be in the guidelines then!

like i get why they don't want to get into the reasons behind everybody's bans but at the very least maybe clarify your rules so trans people can better plan their posts for their audience.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr.

...so there have been multiple transphobic moderation issues. awesome. others have pointed out that it's not clear based solely on this whether the contracted team is still on the job and what they can do (since this doesn't say they were fired or even removed from moderating, just that specifically their ability to apply labels was removed.) and the complaints of transmisogynistic application of community labels haven't disappeared, so this also seems like a failure to address the issue.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

also disappointing as a response. excuses the way the policy is written while also acknowledging it "falls short." if it falls short, it needs to be fixed, unless the right of terfs to post about how trans women are rapists supercedes the right of trans people to exist unharassed on this platform. as many have noticed, tumblr doesn't even have a policy against misgendering, which even twitter had at some point.

they proceed to say that going forward tumblr staff is doing xyz, which tbh i'm not even responding to here bc i doubt any of that is going to happen. the existence of the post itself verifies that what trans people at tumblr want has no bearing while matt is ceo.

...ok wait i lied.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

imo, even if there are literally thousands of tags to look through, staff needs to have someone sit down and look through all of them. this puts the burden on the community to report these things AGAIN, which is not long-term feasible or fair. just go through the tags you're blocking and figure out which are fair to block (i.e., "pro ana" "ts porn" etc.) and which aren't (not just tags like "tgirl" but "nsfw art" because nsfw art IS NOW ALLOWED LOL).

idk most of my own thoughts boil down to txttletale's tags:

it is not a very meaningful gesture but it is all that the people makign it are actually capable of so dunking on it seems lazy

it doesn't mean much and most if not all of it is stuff we already know but what else can trans staff do. i'm mostly bothered by the implication in the post that they CAN do anything when we know based on everything leading up to this and this post itself that this is not the case. ofc i think it's incredibly brave of trans staff to do ANYTHING, but still, this is capitalism & modern tech. my hopes are not particularly high.

other people additionally pointed out that this post fails to:

specify that the moderation issues primarily apply to TRANS WOMEN (not lgbtq people in general)

& specify whether there are trans women/transfems working @ tumblr (they consistently just say 'trans people' which like. alright 'trans people' are very often transmisogynistic. but it does seem tho that there are transfems there so probably just wording.)

address the numerous bans of other trans women since avery

& the previous 'unexplained' bans of black and palestinian bloggers

& the entire system for 'report sexual content' which, when spammed, explodes a blog on the spot with no explanation to its owner

& the fact that matt followed avery to twitter to list out her sideblogs

REINSTATE AVERY'S ACCOUNT. lol.

anyway. a few notable responses, as of 2/24/24.

mostly positive:

(one) (two) (three) (four) (five)

mostly critical:

(one) (two) (three) (four) (five) (six) (seven) (eight) (nine) (ten) (eleven) (twelve) (thirteen) (fourteen) (fifteen) (sixteen) (seventeen) (eighteen) (nineteen)

(jv's notes plus reddit corpospeak 'translation') (more of jv's notes) (staff member echo's response) (jv's update on matt's lack of response)

(ex-staff member lara's response)

meanwhile, matt has been silent, after politely declining an invite to pissvortex's live chat & having his wikipedia page changed to say he died feb 19 in a "car hammer explosion." truly incredible

#bentxt #. once again reblogs off/under readmore bc this is really just for me to keep everything in one place #. so. #tumblr

[ankhisms]

the always wonderful shelley @shanheling tagged me to do this thank u so much!! i think that everyone i wanted to tag has already been tagged to do this but if you feel like doing this feel free to consider urself tagged by me!! im putting this under a readmore bc its long and i ramble a lot

the piece i was tagged to explain my process on is this oc piece! unfortunately i have a habit of deleting my original clip studio file once ive finished my art and saved it as a new png file, so i dont have the file to show the sketch and different stages of this piece. but I still can go through my general process and talk about how i did that piece!

1. planning

honestly i think about the art that i want to do a lot, and in this last year or so ive thought about the art i want to do more than ive been able to actually create and finish that art that i want to do. for my planning i tend to do a lot of different thumbnail sketches for the art im thinking of

these are some examples of thumbnails, a lot of times ill do thumbnails just on pencil and paper and with some of these theyre done quickly with my fingers on my phone note function on a day where i was feeling too bad to get up and draw on paper but still wanted to get the thumbnail ideas down. two of these are for the same songxiao piece that i still havent finished and i have more thumbnails digitally on clip studio for the same piece, i do a lot more thumbnails when a piece isnt working the way i want it to and theres times where ill completely scratch a thumbnail or a sketch and start over in order to do more thumbnails because i dont feel happy with some aspect of it.

two of these are small gouche painting thumbnails for two pieces i did maybe a month or so ago, i did the thumbnails and then tried to expand on them digitally and im wanting to do more thumbnail paintings like this in the future because it was fun

for the piece of my oc trio it was based off a series of ask prompts i got for a few different outfit prompt memes i had reblogged, so i based their outfits on the ones in the meme. when im drawing figures i tend to try and get the movement down in the poses when im sketching, i do several rough sketches of the pose before beginning to start setting down lines (if im doing lineart at all because sometimes i dont like doing lineart and do a more lineless painting kind of style). i really try to get my art to convey some kind of emotion, in the oc piece i wanted it to feel fun and like youre seeing three best friends while theyre out on the town having a fun night

2. creating

this is the only real example i have of a piece in the middle of being filled in and created, this piece is one that im really not very happy with & have had lying around for a while and ill probably scrap it and try to come at it from a different perspective at some point. but anyway it still shows what i do, i lay down a kind of neutral gray color underneath my final sketch/lineart if im doing lineart in that piece and then i start picking out the colors that i want for the piece and kind of setting out a pallette for myself. i dont do this color pallette thing 100% of the time but i do it really often, especially if im working on a commission or a larger piece where i know theres going to be a lot of colors or if its a piece where im not sure exactly what color scheme i want so laying out the colors together helps me kind of decide what kind of scheme i want. i am sooooo picky about my colors in my art i am genuinely obsessed with colors in art and there are times where i really have to stop myself from working on something forever just constantly adding more colors or putting little tiny changes and gradients in the colors.

after ive got the colors i want down i tend to try and block out parts of the piece with the base color for that section, and then i start to paint with the colors that i want to go on top of that base color from there.

once im satisfied with the colors/shading/rendering and everything ill go back and look over things and will fix things that look off or sometimes completely redo segments if they dont look right to me. when i was younger and mainly doing digital art using my phone and my fingers i would use a lot of filters and overlays on top of my art once i was done, and honestly im glad to not be doing that anymore because i dont think it made my art look any better. i do color adjustments and sometimes will put on a color overlay or a layer to emphasize the shadows and the light in the piece, but i try to keep those layers to a minimum and like i said before i have a tendency to obsess over the colors and ill spend a good amount of time in the color adjustment tool of clip studio and then ill just decide "actually it looks fine as it is" so yeah!

3. posting

i feel like i dont have a lot to say here gbfm i mean i honestly have a lot of thoughts about the relationship between artists and social media and how social media changes our views on art including our own art and how we can feel like we constantly need to be posting new art and just become content machines churning out new stuff. but ill save that rant for another time. i used to be really concerned about how many notes my art would get when i was younger, and i dont at all blame anyone who still is very concerned about that bc it sucks when u work hard on something youve created and then you dont get a lot of recognition for it, but honestly within the last two years or so i feel like ive begun to have a lot healthier relationship with posting my art. i really just post my art on my art blog, reblog it to my main blog, and then thats that yknow! i do really appreciate any and all support people give me, it means the world to me, but for me having the mentality where i dont need to post all the art i make and i dont need to be posting every day or every week or every month even has been a lot healthier for me because then im not constantly asking myself why didnt this get notes is my art awful??? and yeah i just kind of post it and my brain goes okay were done with that art we gotta make more

ive honestly been struggling a lot with art thru the pandemic and if youre reading this and have been struggling with creating in any way recently or even before the pandemic, please know theres no shame in having trouble creating and it doesnt make you bad at whatever it is u create!

thank you for reading this, feel free to consider urself tagged by me again if u want to do this!! love u all

#showyourprocess #beep beep its a txt