Brainrot is killing the queer movement
What persuaded me to start this blog?
One day I was browsing Substack and came across literally one of the most biphobic posts I've ever read. Like I was shocked to read this post.
What was the event that triggered this? Certainly, it must have been something big, right? Actually, the author came across an annoying meme on Bluesky. And to be clear, I fully believe the author came across something dumb that a bi person posted on social media. The internet is where people tend to go to post dumb things after all.
But one dumb meme isn't something to build a worldview off of. Brain rot encourages us to pull a lot from a little. We've learned to turn "someone said something dumb once" into "this entire class of people believes something dumb because one of them said it".
Another time, I responded to a note talking about how leftists expect people to read 20 books upon joining the movement. I left a two-sentence comment saying something along the lines of "Yeah, and some people are neurodivergent or lower-class. Plus most of these books were written by dead white men."
The point of this was to say something along the lines of "We should make sure our approach to education includes people we've been missing. And why don't we decenter white voices and focus on more-contemporary works?"
Then internet Marxists1 found my message. To say they misinterpreted my comment uncharitably is an understatement. What they interpreted me to mean was "NEURODIVERGENT AND LOWER-CLASS PEOPLE ARE A LOST CAUSE! OH, AND STOP READING MARX BECAUSE HE WAS WHITE LOL". Which is something I absolutely did not mean.
People responded with paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs about how stupid a person I must be to say something so ridiculous. It was so ridiculous in fact that I never even said it! It boggles the mind about how much people are able to extract from two sentences.
Brain rot stems from the large web's way of sucking all the nuance out of everything. If you write something that takes longer than a minute to read, nobody is going to read it unless it really grabs their attention. But if you write something that's two sentences, people are going to treat it as if you wrote a novel.
Not everyone is hurt by brain rot equally.
Ask any trans woman you know. At the very moment you read this, I can guarantee you that somewhere on social media, the Problematic Trans Woman of the Day™ is being relentlessly berated because of something dumb she said.
But here's the thing: when a trans woman does seriously do something wrong, it makes it impossible to call her out. When any crime is automatically a serious offense, no crime is a serious offense.
We're too busy debating whether trans men can be lesbians to fight for the rights of trans men or lesbians. We're too busy cancelling trans women for getting their vaccination dates wrong2 to focus on fighting for the rights of all queer women.
Of course to be clear, in-group discrimination is nothing new. Cis, monosexual gays and lesbians have been excluding bisexuals and trans people for time immemorial. We've always had issues with racism and ableism.
But at least there was a time when discriminating against someone required confronting an actual person, a person with a name and a face and a body, a person who you may very well run into again. We don't discriminate against people anymore. We discriminate against usernames and profile pictures.
At one time getting insulted by hundreds of people required that a large group of people really hated you. Now every queer woman is two sentences away from being dog-piled.
The end result is a community that more or less nobody is really satisfied with. Infighting3 is a constant. We've never been more siloed. We've never been more under threat by fascists in power, yet we can't stop debating whether trans women are privileged due to our "representation".
So where do we go from here? That's probably more of a question for another post.