Howdy, folks!
Alright, let's talk about porn and porn accounts.
First and foremost, this is a
community, not a marketplace. We are not a bank. We are not a place of business. We are a
community.
Reddit is home to some of the largest refuges for trans folks on the Internet. This is
your space, and our job, as mods, is to keep it that way. We fight to keep you safe.
We have something here that can't be found elsewhere. We have a home that you can carry in your pocket and take with you, anywhere you go.
But our abilities to protect you start and end at the confines of this subreddit. At some point, you also have to protect yourselves.
To that end, we actively encourage folks to use
separate accounts to participate in our communities. Keep your community account
separate from your porn account.
We have a lot of good reasons for this policy, and you'll find the same policy across most of reddit's trans subs. Here's why:
1. Personal safety.
We've seen
exactly how easy it is to doxx people based on their digital spoor - the little snippets of information people post, the times they're active, the sites they visit - all of those things create metadata, which is as unique to you as your fingerprints.
This also makes it easy for a
motivated individual to track you down and find you. Whether that be a stalker, an obsessive fan, or a bigot who wants to wreck some trans person's life, the simplest way to protect yourself is to keep your porn stuff
separate from your main accounts.
They say nothing is ever deleted once it gets posted to the Internet, and that's
true, but you can make yourself
difficult to find and you can easily dump and purge your porn account if needed. That's not so easy when you're using your main account for everything.
But having all of
your information in one spot makes it
easy for someone malicious to hurt you.
We don't want y'all getting hurt.
2. It helps keep chasers and creeps out of our spaces.
It's no secret that all of the public trans subreddits that allow photos have a major problem with creeps, chasers, and fetishists. They prey on our minors, they send unsolicited dick pics to people, and they spam our boards with comments about how sexy people are or personals ads and posts about how they want to find a trans person to date.
We don't want any of that here.
And the easiest way to stop that sort of behavior is to stop it at the source. Don't track them into our spaces - don't cross contaminate our spaces with 'fans' and 'followers' from your porn accounts.
3. It helps prevent people from abusing our subreddit.
You've seen folks using their profiles to advertise their social media. They're the people who never seem to participate in our spaces
except when they're posting pictures of themselves. They encourage people to check their profile or DM them for more; they have links to OF and Instagram and their paid sites in their account bios and their social sites pinned to the top of their pages. They're the ones who link their wishlists and tell people they'll pose for pretty pictures if their fans buy them this outfit or that lingerie or that toy.
Go on Etsy and search for 'transgender reddit' and scroll down the results. You'll see people selling lists of subreddits to spam OF and self-promote. Poke around online and you'll find sites telling people how to use their profiles to get around posting rules and subreddit anti-spam filters.
These folks aren't here to be part of the community, they're here to abuse our traffic for their own personal profit.
We don't want that.
4. Representation matters. How we present ourselves is important.
Margaret Cho is an LGBT comedian. One of her most memorable bits is about the importance of representation and how she, as an Asian American woman, grew up expecting to play a hooker if she wanted to be an actress, because that's the only role she ever saw Asian American women on screen.
Dr. Martin Luther King once wrote Nichelle Nichols a letter,
praising her for her role as Lt. Uhura in Star Trek, how she was an inspiration for thousands of little girls across America. She had been about to quit
Star Trek in favor of a role on stage, in more traditional theatre, but King's letter convinced her to stay.
Even today, over half a century later, Uhura is seen as a role model and an inspiration.
When we allow chasers and fetishists into our spaces, we're telling them that behavior is acceptable. We're teaching them that's how we should be treated. We're showing the bigots and the transphobes of the world that we're just a fetish and we can be treated accordingly.
We don't want that.
5. It reduces spam and removes profit motive.
You are not your job. You are not your side hustle. You are not your genitals. You are not the body that the vagaries of birth bestowed you with. You are not the food you eat and you are not what you do to make a living.
When you're here, this is a
community. We want to see you for who
you are. We want your art, your writing, your music, your songs. We want to cheer alongside you when you triumph and we want to comfort you when you lose.
But you are not your job and this is not your workplace. When you come home, and you take off your shoes, your home is your refuge. This space is also a refuge - leave money out of our space. This is not a place for profit motive or personal enrichment at the expense of our community.
If you're here to make a quick buck and expand your social media presence, you can leave. If you're here to cater to fetishists and support their invasion of our spaces, you can leave.
This is a safe space for trans people. It is
not a place for those who would use us and abuse us for their own malicious purposes.
Here's some suggestions on how to keep your accounts separate:
- Use a separate browser. If your main account is on Chrome or Firefox, use a more secure browser for your porn account, like DuckDuckGo.
- Use a reddit app for one account and use your mobile browser for the other.
- Use a separate device for your other account. Tech is cheap these days - get a separate tablet or laptop with a webcam and use that for your porn stuff.
- Consider it like using a stage name to protect yourself; don't let either account match the other. If your porn account is 'happytransgurl41,' then don't make your SFW account 'SFWhappytransgurl41.' That completely defeats the purpose of having an alt account.
I'm
acutely aware this is often an unpopular policy. Whenever we have to make a post about this, there is always an argument in the comments.
These are large, public boards, with thousands of unique visitors every day. The very qualities that make us a strong community are the same qualities that chasers, creeps, transphobes, and trolls are seeking to exploit: we have
a lot of trans folks, right here in one spot.
We want to make it
harder for those people to abuse us. This is not a new policy; most of our major trans subs have been doing this for the past three years or more.
We have this policy because we
have to have this policy. We do this because it keeps
you safe.
