It’s no secret that I’ve never been the most active Facebook user. In fact, most of what gets posted to Facebook involving me is due to my partner who is quite active on the platform, but I have been on Facebook for a pretty long time now.

I remember when I started, it was around the same time I started college. A group of friends there encouraged me to sign up because they were all using it, after all, it was the thing to do. At the time, Facebook was the social media platform for college students; you needed an email address that ended in .edu just to set up an account. Mostly my friends and I just sent stickers to each other, and some of us played the games it offered.

As time went on my friends list grew. The platform opened up to a broader audience (read: everyone), and eventually business pages became a thing, No longer the quiet little social network of friends, Facebook had grown into a messy behemoth… dominated increasingly by advertisements, misinformation, and all the political noise I was brought up learning that polite people don’t speak about.

Still, I maintained a bit of a connection with it wishing friends and family happy birthdays and the like. I had even resolved, since coming out as trans, that as part of my broader objective to step out into the world more I would post more…

Then they changed their policies on hate speech in such a way as to make me feel demonstrably unwelcome:

[Under Insults deemed to be Hateful Conduct on the platform:]

Mental characteristics, including, but not limited to, allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words such as “weird”.

Not only does this clearly not offer any protection to LGBTQ+ people, this policy specifically goes out of it’s way to carve out an exception; it explicitly allows what would otherwise be deemed hate speech to be directed at us. For example: it is perfectly acceptable for people who disagree with us to call us mentally ill, but if we want to point out that they are similarly ill for their weird obsession with how we live, that would be going too far.

It’s clear where this all is coming from, and that their CEO is zucking up to the incoming president… so all that’s left to do as far as Facebook is concerned is to walk away.

If you want to follow me someplace I’ll be on BlueSky instead (though I don’t promise to post much): @bethie-yume.bsky.social