Okay, a whole bunch of people are asking me what happened with Ozy Frantz/Ozyreads/@_Ozymandias42, so here’s my best summation of events:
• @zhinxy tweeted that a lot of people are having problems with Ozy that they’re reluctant to talk about because they have a lot of mutual friends with Ozy and are worried about being dismissed/ostracized/forced to take “sides” against friends if they criticize zir.
• A bunch of other people (some of them friends or people whose writing I respect), after that, talked about a lot of problems they’ve had with zir writing.
• These include: that zie was playing Devil’s Advocate too much and in areas where we have enough devils already (defending Orson Scott Card, writing about “maybe patriarchy exists for a good reason”), and that zie was talking about issues affecting trans women when zie did not have the knowledge or experience to talk authoritatively about “tr*nny” or “what to do if you find your girlfriend has a penis.”
• One person stepped way over the line in saying that zie was genderqueer for attention or masculine privilege. (Thread on that is ongoing here.)
• I didn’t say anything for a couple days about this, because I like Ozy. I still do. I disagree with a lot of things zie’s said, but I also love a lot of things zie’s said. I also was pretty upset over the “genderqueer for attention” thing and didn’t want to even get involved with that. But I also didn’t want to ignore people bringing up real issues. Eventually I decided to just make a couple tweets about what I was getting out of the discussion, which is that as a somewhat sheltered masculine genderqueer person myself, I need to be mindful of not presenting myself as an expert on trans issues and especially not on trans women’s issues.
• The discussion continued on Twitter for a while, with people continuing to discuss problems they had with Ozy’s writing and with feeling uncomfortable criticizing zir.
• Ozy, as far as I know without saying anything to anyone online, deleted zir Twitter, Tumblr, and blog.
• AFAIK Ozy is with friends right now and is okay.
• I am sad and guilty about how everything went down. I like and respect people on both “sides” of this and I hate that there are “sides.”
• So that’s the story with Ozy right now, again, AFAIK.
