Where are you speaking out?

‘Is Substack queer friendly?’ Was a question I saw earlier this week. I replied saying I hadn’t seen anything negative and then I paused. Just because I haven’t seen homophobic or transphobic content doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Was my ‘I don’t look for it/haven’t seen it’ attitude the right approach? Do platforms need to be inclusive for us to use them?

This has been going round in my brain this week and I’m not sure what the answer is but I think it is a good topic to discuss.

I totally get wanting to be in safe spaces. And not only that but spaces where you don’t have to do a lot of work educating others. I went to a queer-owned event for the first time in 20 years yesterday and it was great to be able to talk to people without any assumptions or explanations.

I was unapologetically out when I was younger and it did sometimes get me into bad situations. (For example, no matter how many times you shower, you can’t get rid of the feeling of having a pint of beer poured over your head because someone objected to who you were on the dance floor with.) Nowadays I am more reticent about talking about being queer. Can I be bothered to deal with twats if someone gives me flak?

But then, if I don’t talk about it, how does that help anyone? It just silences me.

Twitter (I can’t call it X, it’s too stupid) has become a bin fire but I can’t help thinking that if I delete my account, the alt-right has won, even though the algorithm is skewed so my posts won’t get seen.

As far as I know, Substack doesn’t censor what people post. According to an article from 2020, it prefers to allow a wide range of views.

On other platforms, algorithms deliberately repress some words so minority views are not heard. Coded language, like a modern version of Polari, is being used by some people to get around this but it’s frustrating that they aren’t able to talk openly about their experience and the issues that matter to them. And people who would benefit from hearing those voices, but don’t know the code, miss out on them.

I’d rather be able to write about what I want to say, in plain English, and have it up to me to drum up an audience for my work, not matter how hard a task that may be. No-one is putting an invisible barrier in front of my articles, unlike on social media.

Does that mean other people with views I disagree with get free reign? Well yes, but then there’s a Congresswoman in Georgia who believes the American government is controlling the weather and when we’re living in a world where it’s possible for elected politicians to spread nonsense like that, do we all pack up and go home?

One of the the topics we discussed at Reclaimed Means Business, the event I went to yesterday, was the importance of safe spaces, but also of getting our voice heard in other arenas. If we only speak up where it is perceived to be safe, others don’t get to meet us, hear our views, and include us because they don’t know about us, or they think we’re not interested in what they’re doing.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about AI and how incensed I was that LinkedIn wanted to mine our posts to train it. One of my values is individuality so a) I think our uniqueness is valuable, and b) I don’t get how scooping up all our fabulous ways of seeing the world around us and spewing it out as homogenised pap is benefiting us.

But then a friend pointed out that AI is already biased (I tried this experiment a few months ago) and that one of the issues is that it is male-dominated. While she didn’t agree with LinkedIn’s initial approach (they backed down in the UK but went ahead in other parts of the world) she said that we can’t expect AI to get better unless it reads women’s voices, among others.

While I still don’t like it, I can see that argument (I don’t agree with harvesting people’s work without consent). I also wonder if it will make it harder for AI to understand us if it gets more data from people from different backgrounds.

Humans aren’t binary, no matter how much some people want to pitch us against each other for clicks and dwell time. We’re diverse and complex – and I guess that makes things difficult for AI and politicians.

A point made today is that we all have different histories. My experience as a queer person growing up in the 90s, is different to someone who grew up in the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s, and British queer history is different to American queer history, or for those from different ethnic or religious backgrounds.

We need to be aware of that diversity within our community and be speaking about it outside the community because otherwise, how are we going to get more inclusive spaces?