Thread by @comrade_dcs, When life gives you lemons or, why I get mad every time [...]

When life gives you lemons or, why I get mad every time the Internet remembers Kelly Zahos exists

This might annoy a few people but I'm frankly done doing a little "I told you so" tweet every time and getting pms asking for context

CW for transphobia and, well, Kelly

It started Way back in the ancient times (February) @korviday and I think chudlogic? were dunking on arrille scar-however the fuck you spell it- and her "why I left the left" vid..YouTuber Kelly Zahos, (at the time basically offbrand cishet contrapoints) took issue with this

The video in question, for those of you blissfully unaware of its contents, condemned the "progressive left" for defending perceived absurdities like there being "93 genders" so Kelly defending it was a little odd, to say the least

Kelly proceeded to go on a rant that seemed to imply that she thought non binary identities were "neoliberal individualism"

Seeing as chud and Kelly were both part of a small leftist YouTube group thing I was in, I saw this and made a little "hey Kelly, don't wanna do like a pile on but this is not coming across well and looks a bit yikes" comment, expecting we could resolve things

BOY WAS I WRONG

IIRC I was immediately blocked and figured I might have just seemed a little abrasive or something (thinking it was a well meaning mistake) and posted in the discord channel of the aforementioned group that some things had happened and just to please listen to minorities

The moderators of that discord proceeded to contact both me and Kelly after they worked out that I was referring to her. As I understand it the mods tried to organise a situation in which I or one of the other trans people in the group could talk it through and reach a conclusion

As I understand it, Kelly screamed "thought police" and quit the group, mentioning in a later video that she had been "kicked out". Another person also quit the group believing that she had been unfairly attacked and the group ended up arguing a bit.

It should here be noted that all the mods in the group were cis men, there were only around three other non binary people in the group and other than myself on the occasions mentioned in this thread I don't know of any instances where trans people were talked to about this.

In my experience at least, incident was treated as wokescolding and cancel culture until proven transphobic, or, at least, that the moderators were more concerned with avoiding appearing too much like wokescolds than they were with looking out for their queer comrades.

As I mentioned before, trans people were talked over the top of. On at least one occasion, a newcomer to the group who was trans tried to contribute to the conversation only to be completely ignored.

By this time, an angry Kelly had got really stuck into making hot takes about trans people, meaning that by the time the initial issue had calmed down, we had to rehash it.

Again, there were issues with the cis (cissues? Sorry).
Every time something was pointed out as transphobic, it was demanded that I "prove" it was transphobic to a group of guys who had never, ever had to really understand what transphobia looked like

I was made to feel as if my issue with Kelly was in some way my fault, as if I was some kind of snowflake weirdo, the kind of person who makes the left look bad.

It was treated not as transphobia, not as bigotry, but as leftist infighting between the idpol left and the dirtbag left.
Since these guys had only experienced trans issues in political arguments, and not as an aspect of their own lives, it couldn't be anything else to them

And seeing as they had cut every other trans person out of the conversation, there was nobody else for whom it was anything other than pointless sectarianism. My concerns were treated as if I'd called her a revisionist or some shit.

I was treated as if my point was disruptive and annoying, I genuinely thought that I was going to be asked to leave the group so that Kelly her friend could come back.

When it was eventually settled and I had had to apologise for starting a fight mid way through explaining my main points, Zahos doubled down on her transphobia, a cis guy made a video calling her out and LOW AND BEHOLD It was suddenly fine to be mad at Kelly.

I realise that some people involved might read this and think that I'm being a little hard on the mods here. I don't think they were acting unpleasantly in a deliberate attempt to cause harm and I'm still friends with one of them. I don't think they're transphobes either

I do think that they as a group failed to listen to minorities as much as they should have and I'm still waiting on an apology from a few people, but I don't think they're bad people, they just really fucked up on this one.

But yeah, now Kelly gets brought up for being a terf by increasingly larger platformed people and is a full blown strasserist on twitter so I guess what I'm trying to say is

I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO

But yeah. Listen to minorities, even if that might slightly hurt your optics. If we only care about looking cool we don't care about anyone.

Damn this has been a long thread

Oh also before all this, I gave Kelly a shoutout on one of my videos as part of the YouTube group thing. I'd never talked to her at all. It will haunt me forever

AND ALSO Kelly was defending her transphobia on grounds of "rational Marxism" which was very funny because SHE ISN'T A FUCKING MARXIST she rants about the "pmc" and weird strasserist concepts which are totally against Marxism and dialectical materialism. She sucks on every level

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