Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
Mao ZeDong, Lecture, 1938
Today, the completely unbiased, not at all transphobic Telegraph reported that JK Rowling has said that the “Tories have been handed an open goal” by Labour, due to their support for the GRR. And as a result, the Tories will storm the next election with a hugely popular, transphobic, position.
But have they?
Hanging out on Twitter, it can sometimes feel as if the whole world is a transphobic shitstorm. The Tories, being their normal, kind, fact-driven, selves have jumped on the transphobic angle, just as they jumped on the homophobic angle back in the 1980’s as a way to distract their voters from their hideous record.
But today I discovered some interesting facts.
While researching Matt Osborne and William A. Ferguson’s new venture, a social media site based on the alt-right Gab, called gender heretics. I discovered they had left various API endpoints open.
Gab itself is based on Mastodon, the open-source platform that’s fast becoming an alternative to Twitter.
One of the endpoints, I had access to was the details about the instance. This included interesting information such as the contact email (which I believe is William A. Ferguson’s personal email address), file upload limits and monthly active users.
Of them, monthly active users are going to be the most interesting to us today.
It appears Gender Heretics itself has 100 active users.
Gender Heretics only started earlier this month, the domain was registered on the 9th of November and publically announced on the 11th. So maybe it’s a little unfair to look at their figures.
However, there is another transphobic, instance out there. One with a history, Spinster.
Spinster was founded in 2019, after a bunch of transphobes were kicked off of Twitter. In Oct 2020, about 18 months after they started, they claimed to have over 15,000 users. However, a look at their instance API tells a different story.
That’s right, according to their own stats, they have a whopping 788 active users.
I know what you’re thinking. Figures without any context are meaningless. Is 788 monthly users a lot? It could be? Well, by way of comparison, mastodon.social the original mastodon server has 239,139 monthly users.
newsie.social, an instance “for journalists, news-people, journalism educators and comms professionals.” has 14599.
And even other small instances have more active users.
Despite the fact they tell the world, everyone is about to be peeked, they in fact know they transphobia is extremely unpopular.
Alba found out the hard way that transphobia is deeply unpopular, and now, it appears the tories are about to make the same mistake.
So why are the Tories embracing transphobia? Is it that despite the most popular “Gender Critical” mastodon instance getting less than half the visits that a mastodon instance dedicated to kink gets, the whole world secretly agrees with them? Or, they have been hoodwinked? Go on drop a comment below and let me know what you think.
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