Not long before Parker Molloy publicly picked a fight with all of Bluesky she tried to pick a fight in my DMs.
We’re in a pressure cooker, and it shows.
Parker was angry at me for not backing her up in another fight she’d picked in a group chat the day before. I could have said it was bullshit. Instead, I chose to tell her that I cared about her, that I knew that she was struggling, and that while I wouldn’t be serving as her personal army in group chats, that didn’t mean I didn’t care.
What happened next, well, I’m not fully sure. It has something to do with an essay Parker wrote about her discomfort with people making jokes about right wing cisgender men using testosterone as “gender affirming care.” I don’t know precisely what happened next because Parker went offline, deleting (perhaps temporarily) her accounts. I am taking it as a given that she didn’t behave well.
A couple days later a Bluesky mutual posted When did you first notice Parker Molloy was acting way out of pocket? I didn’t answer, but I could have said I noticed she was struggling 3 or 4 days before. Or, I could have said that I’ve known how it looks when Parker is struggling for a few years, which is to say, not great.
We’re in a pressure cooker, and it shows.
Let me be clear that I’m not trying to tell anyone to feel differently about Parker, or about anyone else. I’m particularly not trying to tell Karen Attiah that she should have felt differently or done anything differently.
Criticizing Attiah would really be the opposite of what I’m trying to do, because what I’m trying to talk about is the feeling of seeing prominent minority voices whittled away, one by one.
There are far too few Black women’s voices in the mainstream, or even proximate to it. Attiah’s voice in particular was taken out by Jeff Bezos, during his attempts to shift the speech of Washington Post columnists to align with his personal views. She sued, and won, a process that took months.
So if I am saying in part that there are too few trans voices, I also mean that there are too few prominent voices for the incarcerated or the undocumented. I also mean that the cause of Palestinian human rights seems to mostly be represented by Americans these days, after many of the non-citizens who spoke out were rounded up.
Attiah was fired from the Post after Bluesky posts which shared the words of Charlie Kirk, implicitly criticizing him after his death by showing who he was.* Molloy has been slowly edged out of the media due to a combination of fewer opportunities for trans people and her difficulty coping with a world where open hatred of trans women grows more common, and also more virulent and uglier, as each day goes by.
I am not asking you, the person reading this and looking for a reason to be offended, to feel sorry for Parker. I feel sorry for her, but she behaved poorly, including to me. I didn’t deserve to be berated for no reason in DMs, and if I’d told her to go to hell I’d have been completely within my rights. Still, what I am noticing is that there were few enough trans voices as it was, and we’re not really adding many more. I am asking you to stop for a moment and just notice what’s happening as the pressure on prominent members of persecuted groups goes up and up. To notice that we’re playing a subtraction game.
This subtraction game is what it’s like to live in a time of backlash. Because, you see, whatever pipelines there once were that produced prominent trans writers have largely closed. Those of us who are still at it at all are mostly self-employed these days, having managed to parlay the mainstream attention and credibility we used to have into a modest bit of grassroots support. Many others, including some of the most successful, couldn’t see a living in speaking, writing, or reporting about transness anymore and quietly moved on.
When one of us falters, they’re not easily replaced. No pipeline, see. I am not telling you to do anything with that. I am just saying what I see.
I’d like to see new pipelines built. I’d like to see trans people mentored in writing and reporting on their experiences, and on the experiences of our community. I’d like it to be a more diverse pipeline than before, a more nurturing one, and for it to produce hundreds of budding talents. Enough so that if one person falters and behaves poorly under pressure, it’s a personal sadness but not something I feel keenly as a public loss.
Right now, though? We’re just playing a subtraction game. I’m not saying you have to do anything with that. I am just noting, for the record, that this is what I see.
CORRECTION NOTE: This story originally stated that Karen Attiah was fired for a column about Charlie Kirk. She was fired for Bluesky posts about him.
Thank you for posting this Evan. I support Parker on patreon, and I love her writing. Seeing all the fallout made me sad and worried for her. Still does. I’m not trying to make excuses for her actions towards you or anyone else. The fact that it could have been one of at least two fights about trans people happening simultaneously on Bsky speaks volumes about the current environment.
A tough column to write I’m sure, and a tough line to walk while doing it thank you for the courage and speaking out.
Reading about this particular fight makes me glad I’m avoiding social media right now. Agreed that being a marginalized person online, and open about one’s identity there, can strain one’s nerves to the limit.
Regarding alternate pipelines, attending the recent NLGJA conference game me some hope that folks are working to build independent, trans-affirming newsrooms. I know I for one do not have the energy or desire to constantly promote myself and beg for Patreon donations, so joining a collective (like COYOTE Media) is an appealing alternative.
There are plenty of people who would be writers, who have the background, who have the skills, and who are in these communities, but they’re terrified to be thrown to the wolves. I have been privately writing for years, have books full of ideas and stories, but have no desire to be thrown to the wolves. On one hand, being an intersex/trans writer means you’re subjected to the whims of the cis-white dominated mediasphere, with all of the transphobia and bigotry that entails. But on the other side, there’s a habit of the LGBTQIA+ community eating their own, viciously, in mobs. I’m not saying this is what happened to Parker, and I feel sorrow at the loss of her voice while disapproving of what she said, part of the pressure cooker is the fact that I have to state that so prominently in this post.
Should she be welcomed back into the community, if she chooses to come back? That comes down to how the community chooses to heal the wound or deal with the rupture. There will be many that don’t forgive her for using that slur, or those who don’t even rationalize the context, under pressure. There will be people angry at me for saying she might have had other things going on that led her to make that error in judgement. That’s exactly the point. Meanwhile, prominent right wing figures can literally go on trial for committing heinous acts against people and maintain their popularity. I would at least listen to her reasoning to understand the place she’s in. That will of course be twisted by disingenuous people to say I support her using the R-slur or that I think it’s a simple ‘oopsie’ we can gloss over. It’s not. What it does say is that sometimes, people do dumb shit because they have momentary lapses of reason under immense pressure…in the middle of a goddamned genocide.
Again, more qualifiers that I have to make with qualifiers attached. I’m not saying we need to forgive and forget every transgression that someone makes against a group, or forgive every slur or social grenade that’s been detonated over a pack of Bluesky content creators, but I am saying that our communities need to do more to support and engender solidarity BEFORE these things happen, before people have blowouts, before people do things they’ll regret. There needs to be a system to promote our own writers from within, a willingness not to overlook things that people do, but offer the chance for that person to take accountability for their actions. Without any kind of active pipeline to cultivate more writers in the LGBTQIA+ community, the only place to foster those aspiring talents is within the community itself, and through it. We can no longer rely on other media for that service because it’s all been coopted by the most evil and vile people who are bent on our destruction.