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vulpeculaconstellation · 6 months ago

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Trans Academy : a measured response (cw for nsfw themes, intersexism, misogyny, transphobia, and probably more.)

This is a revisting of this post made in June of 2024 by @vulpeculaconstellation

For context, I am an intersex multigender plural person. I spent approximately two months in the Trans Academy discord server after semi-frequently spending time in the community's VRChat counterpart for a decent chunk of time. This post is being made to share my experience.

An Overview of Trans Academy Incorporated

For anyone unfamiliar with the Trans Academy and who they are/how they operate, here is what is written as their Mission:

"Trans Academy is a Non-Profit 501c3 committed to fostering a safe, inclusive, and educational virtual environment that empowers the transgender community and their allies. Our mission is centered around providing peer support, voice lessons, vocational skill training and networking, resources to navigate gender identity, and opportunities for meaningful connections. We aim to create a supportive space where members can engage in empowering conversations, access valuable resources, and celebrate the diversity of gender identities. Our focus is on uniting and championing every gender identity, ensuring a respectful and diverse setting that is conducive to learning and personal growth."

They're a charity that's based out of Las Vegas, Nevada, and formally received tax exemption status in the middle of 2023. Their 990-N lists VRChat's Head of Quality Assurance as their principal officer, meaning that VRChat itself, in some capacity, has full managerial oversight of Trans Academy as a non-profit.

Now, this isn't a bad thing by default. I think it's good that VRChat as a company has some presence and power within the Trans Academy organisation. It means that VRChat, on some level, has some awareness of how TA operates.

TA made approximately $21.6k USD in total revenue in the year of 2024. They make most of their money through direct donations via Tiltify campaigns, direct payments through PayPal, and donations received through Twitch during their livestreams. A majority of the income they receive is spent on paying the instructors they contract to teach things like voice training courses and so on.

They are a legitimate organisation that is recognised by the IRS, however the community and userbase that this organisation cultivates (and thus the moderation team that recruits new mods and "staff" members they recruit through it) does not reflect the values that this nonprofit proports to uphold.

The Discord Server

This community is available to users 13 years old and older. This is a good thing, because trans teens need a space to build community. However, the efforts that the discord staff members make in order to protect both minors and adults are very sub-par at best, and neglectful at worst.

Users will regularly flirt with one another - regardless of age - and uses phrases like "Good girl / good boy / good [noun]" as a way to affirm each other's gender identity and alleviate each other's dysphoria. This is very reckless and inappropriate, especially considering how hard they attempt to police the use of anatomical names of body parts that are integral to the conversation of trans people at times. The manner in which they call words like "vulva" and "penis" as "crude slang" is bizarre and unnecessary.

Discord users will just as equally trauma dump in channels that are not meant for that, even while other users are engaged in an entirely separate conversation, as a way to steer the attention to themselves. I understand needing an outlet, but spilling your guts out in the general channel of a server with more than 18,000 members is unproductive and inappropriate, and you would think that a server with as large of a staff team it is would make any effort to moderate and contribute to the community they represent. Instead, they hide in their staff-only chatrooms and avoid any responsibility to hold members accountable for their actions unless it might become a PR nightmare.

Which is why I'm writing this post.

Misogyny, Intersexism and Monogenderism

In my time at the Trans Academy, I've noticed an incredible amount of both fetishism and misogyny directed at women in the discord server, ironically from binary trans people more than anyone else - even trans women. Discord members would regularly idolise misogyny and sexism as a "transition goal" to achieve. They regularly would express the desire to be cat-called and sexually harassed because it would be "affirming their gender." As someone who is regularly victimised by sexism and misogyny on a regular basis, I find that to be a ridiculous thing for transfeminine people to say, especially in a space that is meant to build community and a space to learn about how they interact with gender. Listening to my peers espouse such disgusting rhetoric about how being a girl would make people like them more, while experiencing the exact opposite in my physical adult life, is gut-wrenching and infuriating to me.

I would also witness talk of people fighting over HRT with one another. Whenever a user such as myself would talk about their experiences with HRT, someone who hadn't gotten access to it would behave with such childish hostility that it almost seemed like people who have been able to take any step towards transitioning don't deserve to have that access if someone else doesn't. The discord server treats being trans as some sort of depression and poverty cult when it doesn't need to.

The amount of intersexism that is present in that discord server should not be ignored either. Education around intersex conditions is so limited in general, but you would hope that a community such as the Trans Academy would have a better understanding of the nature of being intersex and would provide educational resources for people who are unaware, which seems to be a majority of the server's userbase.

I can recall an incident in which a trans woman had said that trans women should be able to claim that they are intersex as a way to protect themselves from transphobia. They claim that relying on such a "disguise" harms no one, and that intersex people are at no risk of harm. This person had said that "lying to save lives is a moral duty," and that throwing intersex people under the bus causes no harm.

Perisex trans people in the Trans Academy would regularly express hostility towards intersex people, as if we were winning some weird competition of who could transition faster or who was further along in their transition compared to other people. It's like they think we were born trans, or lucky to have access to gender affirming care (even if it was without our consent) regardless of why we received it. In their minds, intersex people are "trans without transitioning," and they've manufactured a reason to be envious of intersex people and will regularly use us as talking points to prove that trans people should be taken seriously and respected.

The Trans Academy acknowledges the existence of nonbinary and multigender people.... only somewhat. Binary trans people would frequently assume that non-binary people were just binary trans people who haven't fully figured themselves out yet. As if being nonbinary was just another label for questioning and therefore not trans. While it's true that some binary trans people have also called themselves nonbinary prior to recognising that it doesn't fit them, it's not true for everyone.

I consider myself multigender including transfemme and transmasc. This is due to my intersex condition. However, users in the server would regularly police and invalidate my experiences with my gender due to how well they assume I "pass." I never divulged too much personal information about myself, thankfully, so they only operate under the assumption that I'm the type of trans person that people should try to become as they transition. While that's flattering, it comes from a place of distain, anger, and jealousy.

On the rare occasion that I would talk about being my history of being mistreated and fetishised by both cis and trans people, the overwhelming response I would get would be "I wish I had that problem." Their reasoning for this was that they assumed that transitioning would magically improve their social and dating life. While I can somewhat empathise with that struggle of feeling like no one would ever give you the the time of day, what I don't appreciate is my experiences being fetishised, objectified and sexually harassed on the basis of my gender and gender expression from trans people who, I'd thought, would be respectful and sympathetic to the struggles of another trans person. I suppose it was wrong of me to expect any sort of decency and respect in a discord server. We live and we learn!

Conclusion

I've been active in trans spaces for about 10 or so years now. Since then, I've watched queer and trans individuals fight for the respect that they deserve and achieve so much for our community while unfortunately being set back time and time again by people who don't want to bother putting in the work to treat us like normal and respectable human beings. The trans community has grown so much and it has become one of the most incredible spaces that I've had the pleasure of being apart of. It's a space that everyone deserves to feel welcome into regardless of the details of what makes you queer or what makes you trans. Being trans is something that should be celebrated at every turn because doing anything less is undermining the nature and the dignity that our community deserves.

The Trans Academy had such a bright and promising future. It did all the right things in its younger days and I'm glad that people have been able to find the comfort and validation they seek in that space.

However, my heart breaks for those who thought they were walking into their first safe haven only to be disrespected and ridiculed by the very people they were promised would support them.

The Trans Academy needs a serious wake-up call to the harm that they're perpetuating, and I pray that reform can be made to protect the future of the trans community in the way they promised they would.

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vulpeculaconstellation · 1 year ago

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Our experience in the Trans Academy discord

TW! | This post contains very heavy topics such as su*cide, self h*rm, threats, baiting, CSA and P*dophillia

The Trans Academy is a community on VRC in which it is labeled a safe space for Trans Individuals of the ages 13+, as a trans man we explored it as our first safe space when we first entered into VRC as it can be a bit of a questionable platform to be on especially when transphobic individuals run around the platform consistently. The TA was a safe space from that, or at least for awhile it was considered that for us. Though of course the TA instances had its moments of crashes coming into the public instances or simply trolling, there were a lot of flaws in the discord server and we as a system are going to talk about our experience. The TA was relatively fun, it was a great place to be and we in fact were in the TA for maybe a month or two. We met amazing people, and made great friends however despite the good things we experienced the negative experiences layered over it making it hard to find the TA enjoyable.

There where quiet a few cases and rather almost daily in which others would personally overshare, giving out personal things about them though always coming out in the form of venting. This led to many people expressing feelings of su*cide and selfh*rm especially in the general chat of the TA, leaving many people uncomfortable and uneasy. This made it difficult to talk in the TA as sometimes people would simply drop sensitive topics in the general chat especially when others are engaging in conversations with one another. Though naturally a good handful would also use this as a form of attention seeking and typically people would feed into their desire of attention which results in them repeating the behavior even more. There were multiple instances in where someone threatened to Off themselves if someone didn’t talk to them, where someone asks for su*cide letter ideas, where someone has openly stated they are going to off themselves which causes an entire chat to panic and had even caused systems in the server to split because of the stress. This also includes a case in which someone had made a joke about offing themselves and hurting themselves, leaving a lot of people uncomfortable and even communicating that they were uncomfortable- instead the individual making the joke double down and told others to cope and that they do not care, they would not try to reason with anyone what so ever and one of their friends had instead validated the behavior in saying the at it was a “coping mechanism”. When I had filed a ticket for a mod, the ticket was closed immediately with no real word being said in response to that ticket and the person who had made the sensitive joke is still allowed to talk in the server.

The amount of ableism we experienced in the TA was almost enough to make us leave, a lot of transfems were upset with systems as more and more started jointing into the server as many systems are bodily trans, and they were very upset about the idea of so many systems being present so much so to a rate where people had been actively putting “systems DNI” on their public profile and especially on their user name, then continuously alienating systems then continuing to villainize systems in the server and considering all systems to be shitty and horrible. This caused a lot of backlash from systems and even a good handful of singlets as they were extremely unhappy about the idea of villainizing systems, as systems were practically being shamed for existing in a server that they too should feel comfortable in. Even someone had defended the behavior of the villainization of systems, saying that they were valid for being uncomfortable and that people should stop harassing them for it. This thankfully did not happen again as the individuals who were expressing the ableism against systems simply left the server after multiple people had gotten on their case.

The thing that had really set in stone that the TA was not a comfortable space for us anymore was that of the littles in our system named Zelda or Zel for short had reached out to a mod. Zel had actually talked to a friend of ours, another trusted adult before hand cause they didn’t want to file a ticket because it had something to do with another staff member and Zel didn’t want them to see the ticket so one of our friends who we call Val had pointed out that the mod had something in their profile that wasn’t very - TA friendly nor appropriate for the server. They had “age player” on their profile which left us confused at first maybe thinning that they mixed up the term “age play” with “age regression” considering people mix the two together very often. The mod, in which we expected them to only be mixing the terms instead in that context that it was not a conversation that they could have in the TA, which made it clear that they were not mixing the two terms together and that this mod was proudly expressing their sexual desires on their profile in a server filled with minors. Admittedly we started to feel unsafe and uncomfortable in the TA after. Ageplay is a very concerning sexual ‘kink’, where someone will either regress to be younger or want to to be sexually involved with someone who’s regressed to a younger age, age play is essentially fetishizing the idea of P*dophillia - sexualizing the idea of an adult being with a minor although they are two consenting adults. This mod *did* remove it from their profile after Val pointed it out in the general chat which left quite a few people uneasy and uncomfortable with that mod as a whole. We had personally reached out to two different mods while Val had filed a ticket to address it, and when filing a ticket the response we had gotten through Val was this.

Tizzy (The creator of the server and the community as a whole) was defending the idea of ageplay. To which we responded, a bit harshly at first in a fit of emotional reaction. Val had asked if they could blur out my username and profile picture so they could share that with staff, that had the ticket open, to which I will share what I said here.

A little bit down the line Val had gotten a response to the ticket the only response we received was incredibly dismissive and very clearly came off in a way that they were not willing to address the situation properly.

As a result of that we had simply left the TA discord server as we continued to feel unbearably uncomfortable in a space that was meant to be safe for everyone including us. Though we did meet amazing people and do not get me wrong we did enjoy the small time we had there in the TA, unfortunately the bad had overrun the good things so I have instead resorted to publicly share our experience with the TA

#vrchat #VRC #transgender #trans academy #VRC TA #discord chat #discord server #kinda depressing #kinda a vent #system #did osdd #super long post

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