I have seen a post that got 15 upvotes that was advertising online sex and asking for people to DM them. I am confident that the moderators will remove it. However, I am disturbed that most of the comments replying to it believed nothing was wrong and actually requested to exchange DMs with this person.
A while ago I saw a post about someone in an online relationship with another person saying they meet over a kink discord server and a majority of the replies were encouraging them and this relationship instead of concern.
After this latest thing I can’t take it anymore. I should have reached my limit after the first thing and I can name several other red flags, but I realized only now that I was becoming accustomed to it.
If a significant portion of this community cannot practice basic cyber safety, especially around sex, then I think this is an unsafe place that creates an environment of encouragement around unsafe online sexual conduct.
This is supposed to be a transfem community and transfems are a minority group especially susceptible to sexual cyber abuse. Nobody here should tolerate the encouragement of unsafe online conduct or engage in it.
No please, these are all valuable perspectives that speak to a shared trans experience. It’s deeply unsettling to look at the current internet landscape and find that it seems even more threatening to young trans women than it was when I was young, and I think it’s understandable to want to avoid the dangers that reliably work their way into these communities.
Young trans women are understandably vulnerable to validation, and predators always seek out people like that. A major issue with online spaces is there is really no way of knowing that you are around other queer folks, and yeah, it isn’t like you don’t have to be wary of predatory queer people along with the usual suspects. Many victims of sexual violence also do not realize they’re traumatized until much later in life, especially when it was something that didn’t involve literal sexual assault from a stranger somewhere. Sexual violence prevention education is certainly more of a thing now than it was before, but of course, like most things, trans women are disproportionately affected by the persistent miseducation. It is extremely rare to see sexual violence prevention education programs address issues like the specificities of trans women’s experiences with isolation and internalized trans-misogyny.
I’m sorry you experienced that, and believe me, I understand the fear you’ve expressed here. It’s difficult to overstate just how prevalent these experiences are for trans women.
Oaky