One Reason In The Pale Moonlight Lands So Well Is That The Show Plants The Seeds Early On For Garak Representing

I want to believe the Tumblr staff is overall LGBTQIA+ supportive.

Except xenobotanist got punished JUST YESTERDAY for posting 2 drawings of aliens with just a hint of genitalia, while there are still blogs operating that are completely full of sex videos. I'm not saying those should be blocked or punished either, but why would those stay active, while xeno got several pictures removed, including a picture of mica and a drawing of a plant? They are no longer allowed to even upload a pfp or banner! And we all know that once that happens, people start blocking you because they think you're a bot.

Is it because those are naked cis women for cis men to admire? While xeno reblogs a dozen trans-positive posts every day?

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

Trektober Day 2 - Monsters & Magic. I think Worf would enjoy D&D but be a bit of a nightmare player.

"You made me into a better person, and now here I am without you, feeling incomplete. But in completely unrelated news, you're always welcome to come spend time with me."

What Garak says at the end of ASIT vs what he means:

"I'm an unfinished man" - please come help finish me

"you would never judge me as harshly as I judge myself, you would never deny me opportunity of a second chance" - you saved me, any good I do is because of you

"I'm getting on with my life" - I wish you were here

"you're always welcome, doctor" - I love you I miss you I love you I love you I miss you I love you I trust you I miss you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you

while huge swathes of garak's heart are probably just like... the emotional equivalent of the aftermath of the chernobyl disaster. I think that right in the center of it there's a little julian bashir sitting at their usual table, and it's always the moment right before he glances up and breaks into a smile. and probably he's wearing a slutty little sexy halloween version of a doctor's uniform too but we don't have time to unpack that right now

It seems to be the general assumption that Julian's holoprogrammer friend Felix is around Julian's age and went to the academy with him but like. What if he wasn't. Felix is a dorky, balding, mustached middle-aged divorcee who’s married to his job and sees his kids every other weekend. Julian is his muse and also inspired him to follow his dream of becoming a horny adventure holoprogram designer after they met while Felix was teaching an Intro to Holotechnology course at the Academy

i finally started listening to alone together and realized i miss my boys so much [twitter]

ive reached s4 in my ds9 rewatch and i love that sisko is surprised later on when he finds out he intimidates worf bc its so obvious why. in his very first episode sisko comes to worf and has a brief conversation with him before precisely explaining to him how hes only running away from starfleet because he falsely associates the uniform with the grief he's experienced while wearing it, but abandoning it won't help him cope with his grief so why not stay and take up a job on ds9. and worf, having been here like 24 hours maybe less, standing there having had his whole internal conflict laid bare by a man he's really only just met, after seven years serving under captain picard who was very supportive but ultimately oblivious when it came to his officers personal problems, has no option but to surrender to Being Percieved and say thanks Sisko I'll consider it. and then he takes a job on ds9.

two episodes later he comes to sisko to admit to having fucked something up and sisko's like i already know. gossip moves faster than official reports here it's one of the unwritten rules of this station. you're probably finding it difficult to intuite those but that's okay, something tells me you're gonna fit in to this dysfunctional workplace full of freaks and exiles :) and Worf again having had his whole deal casually intuited and laid out before him is just like nodding politely while internally deciding never to fuck with sisko no matter what