In early 2014, Michelle Goldberg wrote a piece for the Nation on “feminism’s toxic twitter wars”. At the time it prompted a great deal of “discourse”; now it seems rather quaint. As someone who’d been involved with feminist twitter for the previous two years, I was familiar with the themes it covered: intersectionality, white feminism, whether online “draggings” of “privileged” feminists were going too far, or whether those who “had a platform” needed to listen, learn and do better. Trans issues were mentioned, but were not a major focus.

To anyone who views a decade ago as “back when Twitter was nice” — a time before Elon Musk got his hands on it, or even before “the gender wars” became “so polarised” — I’d say you probably weren’t an online feminist. Or maybe you were, and you were better than me at not allowing this stuff to drive you insane. Back then, I was very determined to be on the side of the righteous and pure, and god, it was a nightmare. 

I’d witness “privileged feminists with platforms” — those who had a column, or a book, or a TV series — be subjected to regular pile-ons, thanks to the worst possible interpretation of some random tweet. Anyone who sought to defend them would be in the firing line, therefore I didn’t. Indeed, I sometimes added my own pious declaration of disapproval instead. You didn’t have to believe these women had done anything wrong — you could simply start a Twitter thread filled with platitudes about how we’re all unaware of our own privilege, before rounding it up with a tenuous “and that’s why Lena Dunham / Mary Beard / the girls behind Vagenda should try to do better, too!”. I could say the memory shames me now, but it shamed me back then, too. It’s not as though I wasn’t really aware of what I was doing. 

It grew more and more oppressive

I liked some aspects of Twitter, and met women who’ve since become offline friends, but that fear of losing status as one of the “good” people was incredibly oppressive. It grew more and more oppressive, the more I realised it wasn’t about being a good person at all. There was a clear overlap with concerns about status, with many insisting that in this new space, where anyone could talk to anyone else, ‘famous’ feminists were ignoring ordinary activists because the latter were more alert to the issues that mattered. There they were, chattering away in their own little clique! Sometimes this seemed true, but other times not. It’s easier to call someone bigoted or prejudiced than to admit that you want the spotlight to be on you instead. It’s not a new problem for feminism — in her piece, Goldberg references Jo Freeman’s 1976 article Trashing — but on early 2010s twitter, it had a particular bite. 

The Guardian’s Zoe Williams also wrote about this in 2013, in an article titled “are you too white, rich, able-bodied and straight to be a feminist?” That’s the same Zoe Williams who more recently asked “how X became so full of hatred” and suggested that “Musk [took] a thing we all loved and smash[ed] it”. But was Twitter ever really so great? I don’t think we should underestimate the degree to which some feminist voices were always viciously reined in, often in the name of “kindness” and “inclusion”, or the way in which personal ambition intersected with moral posturing, or even how many men got in on the act, hounding women more powerful than them for their “lack of intersectionality”. Deeply misogynistic, pornified threats of violence were already being given a free pass if you could dismiss the target’s distress as “tone policing” or “white women’s tears”. Williams’ earlier article is interesting, because while the first half approaches an acknowledgement of the problem, it then swerves away: “But then I heard Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch speak at a public meeting this week …” And it’s back to why the original subjects of the article simply need to check their privilege and do better. 

So many people self-identifying as good, so many invitations to follow the path of righteousness

Obviously there’s a lot that’s happened since those days. Following the results of the US election, there’s been a surge of X users moving over to Bluesky, exiting Elon Musk’s evil lair to be part of a nicer, kinder community. If I’m reminiscing now, it’s because so much about Bluesky — at least, the experience I’ve had so far — reminds me of those early days of feminist Twitter. So many people self-identifying as good, so many invitations to follow the path of righteousness, so much confidence that we, here, are better than the others! So much faith that your own cruelty can be of the kindest sort! I’d forgotten it all and can feel the pull all over again. A bit of me thinks “I could be righteous, too!”, although obviously, I can’t, what with having become a Known Terf. Already I have had my share of “nice” invitations to leave the “nice” space. Still, the atmosphere reminds me of the side I thought was mine, the moral confidence I used to pretend to have, the way in which I used to think if I knew the rules for staying out of trouble, doing or saying the things I actually believed could come later.

Since the so-called gender wars and “righteous” abuse of feminists really took off in the latter half of the 2010s, there has been a shift in the tensions between supposedly “privileged” voices and “ordinary” activists. Or rather, there’s been an option for anyone who identifies as progressive, including those with the most material and social advantages, to make common cause against “the transphobe” — a figure which blends together left-wing feminists and far-right conservatives into one easily denounceable package. The actor Alex Winter (bio: Trans Rights are Human Rights) announced his arrival on Bluesky with “It’s time to take solace and pride in what people disparagingly call a bubble. I don’t need to talk to the ‘other side’, to the hate-filled, the reactionary, the proudly low-info”. It’s possible to make such sweeping statements without being dismissed as an insufferable snob, or having to make any dramatic apologies for privilege. It’s more straightforward, I suppose. 

It’s not that I think we shouldn’t be able to interact only with those we choose. Given the past decade, though, it’s strange — and fills me with a kind of envy — to see people who seem to retain so much trust in their own side. While I’ve met some amazing people online (and hope to keep in touch with them in one place or another), so many of us have lost that broader trust, though it was never a healthy kind of trust to have to begin with. 

The things I am most ashamed of doing online come long before I was cast outside the circle of the virtuous — on the contrary, they came from my desire to remain within it. In the end, that just can’t be the thing that matters the most.