About this Substack situation
...I'm pausing my paid subscriptions so we're not supporting transphobes, etc.
If you have reached peak news/social media saturation and/or you have not been following media tweets, it appears that Substack is being disingenuous about its status as a publisher of transphobic and problematic content by saying that it’s a platform and not a publisher. (H/t to writers I love, including Jeanna Kadlec, who pointed me to Jude Doyle & Malinda Lo for more explicit, better explanations of the very suspicious and dangerous situation here.)
I’m a thankfully late adopter to the Substack universe, but because I have been blogging and publishing my work on the Internet since before Google was invented (circa 1998), I have been to a rodeo like this before. This is the rodeo where a platform draws you in with Thumbs Up and Red Notification Circles and Mood Studies, then forces you to watch traumatic police killings or exposes you to Russian hackers who steal elections and hand them to maniac dictators because they are just the platform, they are not Actual Racists/Impediments to Democracy.
I have been a journalist, writer, scholar, speaker and advocate for women, LGBTQ+ folks, trans individuals — specifically Black trans folks — for a 20+ year career and I’m not going to take money from you to give to people who have found a safe quarter when they have been deplatformed everywhere else.
So like a number of the writers I respect, I am pausing my publication for paid subscriptions. It means so much to me that some of you have validated my work with paid subscriptions and that you believe, as I do, that we should support what we love by offering writers money to create the work of their hearts. I feel fortunate that I am in a position to rely on other streams of income and writing opportunities (more on this soon!) beyond whatever gaming system Substack is using to determine worth and popularity, especially since I basically hate Facebook and I’m starting to hate this Substack shit, too.
I mean, I do like the idea, right? It’s important to have spaces that are built that acknowledge that our ideas and our writing is valuable enough for readers to spend money on; especially given the amount of money that platforms make on all of our “free” time and attention which they build these environments to steal from us. I have been giving “content” by way of free marketing and idea exchange away on the Internet for decades now, so it feels only fair that I begin to demand a reciprocal exchange for my contributions. But Substack is looking like it ain’t the spot, at least right now.
It’s possible that, depending on how Substack decides (if it decides) to rectify what appears to be the obscure and potentially lucrative (for those people) funding of far right and transphobic writers, I will return occasionally to point you in the direction of paid work or another newsletter. Mailchimp is not perfect, I understand, but that’s where I hang out monthly, so I’ll stick with that while Substack figures its situation out. Thank you for your patience while I try, as always, to do the right thing by my readers.