I Doomscrolled Tumblr Discourse for a Month. Here’s What I Learned

Ash Buick

Just from reading the title of this article, you might be wondering: “Tumblr? That’s still a thing?” And yes, dear reader, I am proud to announce that I am one of the over 130 million active Tumblr users. The cultural icon of the 2010s is still alive and kicking. Johnlock even made it into the top 100 ships of 2025 (if you know, you know). Even though I only joined the site in 2019, my status as a survivor of 5 November 2020 means I feel comfortable calling myself a Tumblr veteran. (Yes, I’ll stop with the references now.) 

You might also be asking: “Ash, why did you do this to yourself?” 

The simple answer is that I’d just had my wisdom teeth removed and had nothing better to do. The real answer is more complicated. 

Around September, I heard news that a prominent blog had been deleted from the platform. This was notable partly because the blog was run by a trans woman.

The blog’s name was isuggestforcefem.

At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to the news. It was well-known that trans women were sometimes banned from Tumblr for reasons that seemed to amount to little more than being openly trans. So I went on with my life.

Things got more interesting after my surgery.

One blog I followed started vague-posting about a group of trans men who, in their opinion, were behaving like “Men’s Rights Activists.” Around the same time, I began seeing unfamiliar acronyms appearing in posts and people’s bios: TMA and TME. 

In the background, a number of blogs clearly modelling themselves after isuggestforcefem started popping up—and the things they had to say were... really something.

Many of them argued that transgender men were not oppressed to the same extent as transgender women. Some even claimed that trans men possessed male privilege.

As a transmasc nonbinary person who likes to believe they’re a little less chronically online than these people, I found myself wondering: how do you end up with these opinions? 

And so I dove headfirst into the rabbit hole.

Immediately, there were some really clear parallels between whatever this was and the infamous “ace discourse” of the 2010s. The first similarity was the effort to remove a group—previously widely accepted—from the LGBTQ+ community. The second was the method: denying that this group experienced the same level of oppression as “the rest of us.” The third, and perhaps most egregious, was interpreting the group’s lack of visibility as evidence of privilege. 

During the ace discourse, ‘critics’ focused heavily on asexual people’s presumed inherent lack of sexual relationships, arguing that this made them “harder to clock as queer.” But flying under the radar is not the same thing as privilege. Much of society—including significant parts of the medical community—still treats asexuality as something broken or pathological, rather than simply another way of existing. 

Eventually the discourse cycle burned itself out. The vast majority of people agreed that asexual people were, in fact, queer, and that the whole debate had been a waste of time. The gays of Tumblr collectively held hands and agreed that we wouldn’t let anything this asinine become a big thing ever again. 

But of course, it happened again.

So… why?

While Tumblr has a large queer user base, only a relatively small number of people regularly post in queer-related tags. My own avoidance of searching those tags directly is reaffirmed whenever they trend: the preview images are often dominated by bots trying to lure users off-site. After a while the bots become part of the furniture. (That 130-million-active-users figure is probably a little optimistic.)

Their prevalence is partly a symptom of Tumblr’s inconsistent approach to “mature content.” No, they didn’t un-ban porn—but “female-presenting nipples” quietly returned in 2022. We take the small wins.

Instead of focusing on the bots, the platform often seems more interested in cracking down on trans people talking about being trans. In its current state, Tumblr can be an oddly hostile environment for its queer users. If you wanted to publish a nuanced essay about queer theory, Tumblr probably wouldn’t be your first choice. You’d start a Substack.

The result is a fairly insular group of people trying—often very hard—to say something profound. In other words, perfect conditions for an echo chamber.

As the space becomes more insular, subtler forms of bigotry can slip through unchallenged. Eventually you end up with situations where a generation of queer youth believes misogyny is acceptable, provided you clarify that it’s directed at white women.

Tumblr also has an old inside joke: it’s the “piss on the poor” website. The phrase comes from a famous misreading of a post from 2012 saying the average Tumblr user has piss-poor reading comprehension. Someone reblogged the post saying “how dare you say we piss on the poor” and thus, new slang was invented.

Tumblr’s also a really good place to observe bean soup theory in action: you might post about how much you like pancakes, and someone will appear in your replies accusing you of hating waffles. More broadly, it’s a sense of “what about me?”-ism, where people feel compelled to make every post they encounter directly or indirectly related to them. They can’t just quietly reblog something, they need to at minimum add some commentary in the tags. 

This tendency certainly distorts discourse—but it isn’t the whole story.

Until around 2021, Tumblr didn’t have a robust recommendation algorithm. Users mostly discovered content by following specific tags, or by following the right people. Even now, many still use the platform in this “traditional” way. The result is that if a large blog posts a slightly questionable take, it can reach thousands of readers—while hundreds of thoughtful responses languish unseen in a niche tag.

So what was it actually like to doomscroll the transandrophobia tag for a month?

To be frank, it was bleak.

As you might expect from a tag centered on bigotry, most posts involved people venting about the discrimination they’ve encountered. This usually meant screenshots of other posts, accompanied by a bit of commentary. There were also trolls and bad-faith arguments—but that’s simply the internet.

Still, the experience wasn’t entirely negative. I learned more about systemic discrimination against the intersex community and the ways their experiences are often overlooked—even in mainstream discussions of sex and gender within the trans community.

I also began noticing a broader pattern: attempts within online trans spaces to create new, more “woke” versions of the gender binary. AMAB and AFAB, terms originally used by intersex people to describe being forcibly slotted into the sex and gender binary, had been diluted into shorthand for “non-binary boy” and “non-binary girl.” Transmasc and transfem became synonyms for trans man and trans woman. 

This change in language makes it overall more difficult for queer people to talk about their experiences online. Some of these terms were specifically created so things wouldn’t get lost inside mainstream discourse. And now as they are folded back into the mainstream, people now have to look in more places to find the same things. Everybody loses.

In my view, though, the most troubling terms were TMA and TME, standing for transmisogyny-affected and transmisogyny-exempt. These categories lump cis women, cis men, and transmasculine people into the same group, with the curious caveat that if a cis person has been mistaken for a trans woman—they are now TMA. The framework therefore only has a few specific applications, and relies on a very narrow definition of transmisogyny as transfem-specific transphobia. Without that definition the whole structure begins to wobble.

With all this in mind, I looked back at my introduction to the discourse in a new light. The alleged groups of “trans men’s rights activists” were extremely small—if they existed at all. TME was often being used as a stand-in for trans men, effectively giving old TERF rhetoric a new coat of paint. Meanwhile, isuggestforcefem had been able to leverage Tumblr’s real mistreatment of trans women to win sympathy—even when she would have been cancelled for some of her takes under other circumstances.

Realising how much I’d initially missed felt strange.

But it reflects a broader problem on the internet: if something is easy to fact-check, most people won’t bother. Instead of looking directly at what was happening in the transandrophobia tag, users relied on second-hand accounts filtered through the biases of whoever was posting about it.

And thus, a game of telephone began. 

“Hey, isn’t it weird that so much transandrophobia goes unchallenged in transfem-centric tags?” became “transmasc vs transfem infighting.”

“We should have a term to talk about our group’s specific collective experiences” became “transandrobros and their victim complex.”

“Hey, it’s weird that ‘kill all men’ including trans men is considered a normal thing to say” became “the TMEs are minimising the struggles of trans women.”

Not only were the original conversations being distorted—they were being pushed toward increasingly extreme directions.

Who benefits from that? 

Tumblr, certainly. It can serve me plenty of ads while I scroll through my dashboard. But more broadly, politicians attempting to strip trans people of their rights benefit from a community too busy arguing with itself to organise protests or build solidarity.

The main thing I’ve learned from this month of doomscrolling is the importance of stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. 

When I was talking about this discourse with a friend—who is also trans—she seemed puzzled that it was happening at all. To her, the question “Does transandrophobia matter?” had an obvious answer: of course it does. Intersectionality tells us that different aspects of our identities shape how we experience discrimination. Having language to describe those differences is useful.

But transphobes, ultimately, don’t care what specific sub-type of trans we are, they hate us all the same. 

Which makes community infighting feel a little besides the point when we have bigger fish to fry.

Will I do something like this again? 

Absolutely. 

Do as I say, not as I do.

Put down your phone (which you’re hopefully doing right now) and go talk to some real people. You’ll have a much better time than arguing in a comment section, I promise.