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.
