Notices by The Fedilore Otter 🦦 (fedilore@mastodon.social), page 2

IFTAS are passing around a policy letter, arguing that ActivityPub and Bluesky are basically the same thing, so nobody on Fedi should ever criticize Bluesky.

🙄

I could point to the Antioch shooter, and weave some bullshit about Black people being dangerous and antisemitic.

That would obviously be dishonest, and intentionally racist.

He was a Black man radicalized by white-supremacist and Nazi content online.

He didn't become a murderer because he was Black. He became a murderer in spite of being Black.

He very clearly wasn't a Black nationalist, because his manifesto was full of very explicit anti-Black racism.

Mass shootings are overwhelmingly done by far-right cishet white men.

There's a whole network of Telegram channels, grooming these guys into terrorists.

There's rules. There's rituals. They keep score. They reference shooters who've come before them.

There are literally teams in place to provide editing and distribution help with their manifestos.

This is an explicitly racist, explicitly transphobic, funded, organized effort of actual Nazis.

It's obviously transphobic to blame the Minneapolis shooting on being a trans woman.

Just like it's obviously racist to blame the Antioch shooting on Blackness.

The Minneapolis shooter was radicalized by white-supremacist and Nazi content online.

She didn't become a murderer because she was trans. She became a murderer in spite of being trans.

Her manifesto was explicitly transphobic.

She detransitioned as a result of her radicalization.

I spend a lot of time keeping up with anti-fascist research.

For more than a decade, American fascist groups have been trying to promote a conspiracy theory (that never got too much traction) that mass shootings were caused by antidepressants.

It's not super complicated why.

Nazis are shooting up schools.

To direct attention away from guns and fascism, they decided to spread fear about a group of disabled people.

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/28/school-shooting-kennedy-antidepressants-claim

Other marginalized peoples trying to distract from the bigotry targeting them, by redirecting that hatred towards queer people, is also not new.

And while I get having sympathy towards people trying to do this sort of thing to take the targets off their own backs:

- It's not going to make the Nazis magically decide not to hate you.

- It is not justified, and we cannot allow people to justify it.

(Yes, these conspiracy theories are specifically about trans women.

Trans men don't exist in fascist conspiracy theories.

Necessarily, every trans man or detransitioner or cis person who makes a joke becomes a trans woman to anybody dumb enough to fall for a Nazi meme on Facebook.)

In 2023, that conspiracy theory suddenly flipped into a conspiracy theory that mass shootings are caused by trans women.

Suddenly it started getting a lot more traction.

Like, a lot more traction.

Period reminder that the "Nazi phase" thing is an intentionally transphobic myth.

Data is limited, but based on the data we do have it's pretty clear that queer people are among the most progressive demographics in the country.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls

People spreading that bullshit aren't confused.

This is well established propaganda, intentionally spread by people who want to cause harm to queer people.

Bigots have been calling queer people Nazis for literally as long as there have been Nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_Nazis_myth

I don't want to make things worse by adding visibility to queer drama that people might not have seen, but I do want to flag:

If you see people accusing a group of trans women of something, stop and think through what's happening.

The standard of evidence required for social attacks against trans women is incredibly low.

We should try to identify when that's happening and stop it.

“Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening.

It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales.”

https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/

The transfem instance being accused of all sorts of horrible things is one of the kindest and most responsibly managed instances on fedi.

The instances making these claims are also mostly queer people.

The accusations are seemingly pretty silly stuff, blown up into something huge, and presented without receipts.

Lefties do this. Other queer people do this. Other trans women do this.

One of the reasons that trans women are so socially vulnerable is because there's so much social pressure to believe false accusations made against trans women, or to round up small errors made by trans women into giant conflicts.

It's on you to be able to identify when this is happening, and do what you can to stop it.

There's nothing inherent about Black radical politics that causes transphobia, misogyny, or anti-Indigenous racism.

Kind of the opposite. When you adjust for age and intersecting oppression, you'd expect that radicals are going to be more likely to be allies on other issues.

But people sometimes fail to live up to their ideals and end up defending institutions of power where they're personally in a position to benefit from those systems.

Especially when there's trauma involved.

Ro's Black radical politics are something that I genuinely admire.

If Ro wasn't also a bigot and TBS wasn't causing explicitly transphobic harm, I would never talk about Ro or TBS.

This account would not exist.

My admiration for the political motivation behind TBS would win out, over all the other obvious and inherent flaws in the system.

Yes, a small number of genuine radical feminists decide to punch down and attack trans people.

Some radical feminists abandon their principles, when they're given the opportunity to oppress members of a more vulnerable class.

But this is obviously not a feature of radical feminism - it's a failure of the movement.

This is why I support radical feminism and radical movements for queer liberation.

Institution of power based on sex, gender, or sexuality are obviously unjust and radical movements are the ones who want to tear down those unjust power structures.

And that should be obvious!

Black radical politics aren't about hating people of other races.

That would be ridiculous.

It's a politics of autonomy and liberation for a historically oppressed class.

A Black-controlled blocklist for the purpose of Black safety on fedi is a fantastic idea that should, in principle, be supported by everybody.

Even if you're suspicious of blocklists generally.

Patriarchy is bad.

White supremacy is bad.

Christian supremacy is bad.

Heteronormativity is bad.

Cisnormativity is bad.

Corporate-oligarchy is bad.

Ablism is bad.

The gerontocracy is bad.

Monarchies are bad.

We should support the movements that want to tear down these unjust societal power structures.