On Terfs, Kindness, and What Free Speech Really Means

written on 12/06/2022

I remember distinctly that one day, I was browsing neocities, and I came across I thought was cool. Unfortunately, according to their profile, they had left neocities, the reasoning being as follows: neocities had sites by nazis up on their platform with no intention to remove them, something that they found unacceptable. Thus, they were leaving to find a platform where this was not the case.

Ever since then, that sentiment has been stuck in my mind, and has brought up questions in my mind over and over again. Is it really deplorable for a site that advertises itself as being free speech for everyone to allow sites by the alt right extreme, such as terfs, nazis, and racists?

In the day of modern social media, no matter where you go one dynamic seems to be pushed in all interactions: every person is categorized into set categories of good and evil, and at any time, people could decide you are one or the other. It's become commonplace to send death threats and "kill yourself" to people you disagree with, and to campaign for such people to be removed from the platform you frequent. I distinctly remember being thrown into this environment as a 14 year old on tumblr, and very quickly came to embrace it. After all, there's nothing wrong with hating people who do things you don't like, right?

However, as I've become an adult and started to push away from social media, I've come to believe the opposite. Free speech is important - and an important component of free speech is that everyone, regardless of how deplorable they are, will not have their opinion silenced.

An example that's most relevant to me is my interactions online with terfs, aka "trans exclusionary radical feminists", or radfems. I am transfeminine (a trans girl in polite conversation, I won't bore you with the details), and these are thus people who believe I am inherently a predator and deserve no space or safety in society, much less womanhood. I've had much experience with being sent disgusting anonymous messages from these people, usually making jabs at my relationship with my wife, commenting crudely on my genitals, or implying I don't deserve any sort of safe relationship in my life.

As a teenager, I was all for dealing with these people as aggressively and rudely as possible. I thought it was fun and even moral to make gross comments right back at them, tell them they should kill themselves in a variety of ways, and laugh at them publicly. In my mind, this was the right way to approach such people on the internet.

However, I no longer think this is the case.

I still despise this group pf people and think what they stand for is deplorable. However, when we make this kind of aggression and nastiness our central form of speech online, when we decide that anyone we disagree with is inherently evil and therefore deserving of as much hate and nastiness as possible, it takes away from our ability to think critically and have healthy relationships with others. It leads us into this mindset that we must always be on the lookout for people we can deem evil, and that said people should be silenced immediately.

This, in the end is unhealthy. It deprives us of our ability to view people as complex, and our ability to show the people we meet in everyday life with kindness.

At every point in my life, love and kindness have always been at the center of my viewpoint. Everyone I meet - no matter if they've been racist or ableist to me, or if they think my gender makes me a predator, or if they just hate me in general - I want to treat them with civility, kindness, and love. I want to understand people as people, and be someone that people feel they can talk to regardless of who they are.

I firmly believe that for the web to be a healthy place to be, this is the mindset we need to adopt. Hate is not radical, suicide baiting is not radical, suppressing voices that make us uncomfortable is not radical. What is radical is choosing to to be kind and to have love, regardless of who we're talking to, and to choose kindness and civility when we could choose to be aggressive and hateful.

There remaim terfs and nazis and bigots of all kinds on neocities. Regardless of whether or not they think people like me should be dead, I'm okay with that, and I think people who go out of their way to treat them nastily are in the wrong.

Free speech means everyone has a voice, including people we hate. And free speech to me means that I want to treat people the same way I would treat them if I saw them face to face on my everyday street: with love.