I have SO many interactions but this is probably the biggest one so here goes… sorry for the long post.
Let me preface this with the fact my friend group growing up and even the friend group(s) I have during adult life are pretty diverse and accepting, as I imagine is the case with most people who don’t want to live their life in a far left/right echo chamber, but, this person is just the most
exceptional and now that I’ve accepted my fate and started posting here I think now is the right time to share.
I have this friend-of-a-friend who I follow on Tumblr and who also happens to be quite ‘Tumblr famous’ and has been since 2011. She went to high school with some of my friends and went onto college with a few others, so she was always in my orbit. Let’s call her P.
P's the type of person who is mostly famous for text posts but also runs a few sideblogs that are famous in their own right. She was never in the cliquey 2011-2013 Tumblr famous crowd who all got paid to promote each other and would make follower trains, fake promos etc - funnily enough, another girl I know was like that but that’s another story! She actually gained her following mostly due to genuine wit and humour, unlike a lot of the popular blogs. As far as I am aware, she has never made money off of Tumblr either through ad revenue or through e-begging.
As P has been subjected to shitty Tumblr life she has been a furry, SJW and trans-trender since around 2013. She used to go by its/its pronouns and then by they/them pronouns and then zee/zir and now she’s moved onto strictly he/him pronouns but is a ‘non binary girl and pansexual lesbianromatic’ something or other. She went by a variety of pseudonyms during her time on Tumblr, a lot of generic gender-neutral names like Leo (but not Leo, I just know this is like THE name for transtrenders). She also said she had autism and ADHD and whatever other mental illness was trendy at the time. She didn't have autism as far as I'm aware, I wouldn't know about ADHD, because she attended class like everyone else (schools here have great learning support so she would have spent at least a period doing something with support staff. etc even if she was 'highly functioning'). Of course, this was all on Tumblr and IRL P would go by she/her pronouns and her ‘dead name’.
I won’t go into the details of how we became to know each other beyond the realms of ‘friends of friends’ because the situation is itself quite strange and if she was lurking on here she would know exactly who I was. P happens to be one of the most turbulent people I’ve ever met, and I honestly blame it all down to Tumblr.
Before writing this post I had loads of examples of shit P had done IRL but now I’m typing it they’ve all gone away.
Here’s what I can think of from the top of my head:
- During high school, she was apparently very anti-vegan despite her shitty SJW status. One of our mutual friends was a vegan but very chill, he literally didn’t care what anyone else put in their bodies but P used to YELL at him about how being vegan was unhealthy and about how every vegan on Tumblr was awful. This would have been a good few years now, when there was still a lot of ‘problematic’ humour on Tumblr and when the ’spot the vegan’ game was well and truly in full swing. A couple of years later when veganism became quite trendy on Tumblr, P embraced veganism to the max and briefly came a total PETAwanker. This farce didn’t last long. IRL I was out with her and friends once when she was eating a dish with meat in it when I asked her when she stopped being vegan she said she got ‘too sick’. Around about that point, the vegan propaganda whittled away from her blog.
- My friends who went to college with her said she was obsessed with bringing LGBT discussions up into everything. I have too many examples of her lunacy at college to name. She apparently called a lecturer for a MATHS CLASS transphobic because the maths problem used ‘he/she’ instead of ‘they’.
- She’s weirdly jealous of our friend who we will call D. As far as I am aware, P and D have been friends since they were little kids and went to school together. I actually knew D before I met P (we met at a shitty youth centre when we were about 12, we both left our home area to go to the same University so I still have regular contact with D although me and him aren’t super close). D is a legit FTM transman. He went through a pretty shitty period before he transitioned where you could probably even call him a ‘lolcow’, he had Tumblr, used stupid pronouns, said his parents abused him, etc. But he was like…16? And it kinda died down after about a year when he finally came ‘out’ as trans IRL. During D’s lolcow phrase, P would get into petty arguments with him on Tumblr and rant about him for being ‘problematic’ IRL. Y’no essentially because P was somehow jealous of the fact one of her best friends was actually transgender and she was just a cis lesbian.
- One time I was meeting up with friends in Starbucks and P was there. P rarely came out unless it was BIG PLANS so seeing her there was odd. This was around the time Snapchat first got big and although we weren’t constantly on our phones we’d end up sending each other unflattering snapchats. Anyway, someone got a notification that a big celeb died and everyone went ‘oh thats sad’. P WHILST IN STARBUCKS instantly started writing a post about it and about how sad she was. It was honestly something else to see that. By the time I checked it a few hours later it had like 200 notes? Just for a shitty generic RIP?
- Obviously Tumblr has a fucked up idea of rape culture. A friends boyfriend apparently started talking to her and asked to switch numbers which I guess you could see as ‘oooh he’s flirting with her’ but this guy was just overly talkative and friendly. I used to chat to him on Facebook all the time. Anyway, P started talking about how his ‘cis white male privilege’ made him think he could fuck her. This obviously wasn’t the case but it caused a lot of Chinese whispers around the friend group because P had to be dramatic.